Elevating Customer Data Strategies with Salesforce Data Cloud

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), like Salesforce Data Cloud, have emerged as customer engagement game changers. However, many organizations hesitate to adopt CDPs because their existing workflows seem to address their needs, albeit in fragmented and less efficient ways. This article explores how Salesforce Data Cloud transforms marketing use cases, offering speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that legacy solutions cannot match.

Six Common Use Cases and Their Limitations in a Pre-CDP World

1.        Creating Unified Customer Profiles with MDM

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Many organizations rely on Master Data Management (MDM) systems to consolidate customer data across multiple sources. These systems use survivorship models that prioritize one source of data over others based on predefined rules. These predefined rules can be a source of contention between departments when determining whose data is better and gets to overwrite as the top or ‘best’ source.
• Limitation: MDM often struggles with real-time data integration and fails to account for contextual relevance. This leads to incomplete or outdated customer profiles.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Unified Profiles: Data Cloud ingests data from multiple systems and support both batch and near real-time capabilities, creating a comprehensive, dynamic customer profile.
• Context-Aware Data Unification: Unlike static survivorship models, Data Cloud pulls all data to the profile with updates based on data source reconciliation rules for the unified view while keeping the source specific values linked to the unified view.

Benefits:

• Faster and more accurate customer insights.
• Improved personalization by using the most up-to-date and contextually relevant information.
• Reduced reliance on rigid MDM frameworks.

2.        Activating with Contextually Relevant Data

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Marketing teams often rely on batch processes or manual integrations to push customer segments into activation platforms.
• Limitation: These processes are slow, and the data is often stale by the time it is used for engagement.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Seamless Data Activation: With built-in integrations across Salesforce platforms, Data Cloud enables seamless, batch and near real-time activation of marketing campaigns.
• 360-Degree Contextual Relevance: Data Cloud leverages enriched customer profiles to personalize messages across channels, ensuring that marketing is timely and relevant.

Benefits:

• Accelerated campaign execution.
• Higher engagement rates through timely, personalized messaging.
• Elimination of manual data syncing processes.

3.        Building Marketing Segments from a Data Warehouse

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Marketers often depend on IT or data engineering teams to extract and prepare segments from data warehouses.
• Limitation: Based on workload and ticket request queues this dependency creates bottlenecks, delaying campaign execution and reducing agility.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Self-Service Segmentation: Data Cloud empowers marketers with intuitive tools to build audience segments directly, using unified data without IT involvement.
• Both Batch and Real-Time Insights: Segments can be refined and updated in near real-time, ensuring agility in responding to market changes.

Benefits:

• Reduced reliance on technical teams, freeing up IT resources.
• Faster time-to-market for campaigns.
• Enhanced flexibility to experiment with and optimize segments.

4.        Managing Disparate Data Across Systems

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Marketing teams often download data from multiple systems, cross-referencing spreadsheets to create a consolidated view of customers.
• Limitation: This process is error-prone, time-intensive, and lacks scalability.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Unified Data Access: Data Cloud aggregates data from multiple systems into a centralized repository, eliminating the need for manual downloads and cross-referencing.
• Automated Workflows: Data pipelines are automated, providing marketers with ready-to-use, accurate data.

Benefits:

• Significantly reduced manual effort and errors.
• Scalability to handle large volumes of data.
• Enhanced data accuracy and consistency.

5.        Overcoming IT Backlogs for Data Requests

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Marketers often face long wait times for IT to process data queries or create reports.
• Limitation: Delays in accessing data impede campaign agility and reduce responsiveness.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Marketer-Driven Data Access: Data Cloud’s no-code/low-code tools allow marketing teams to access and analyze data directly.
• Analytics: Built-in dashboards and visualization tools provide actionable insights instantly.

Benefits:

• Faster access to actionable data.
• Increased agility for marketing teams.
• More productive IT teams freed from routine data requests.

6.        Consolidating Multiple CRM Instances for a 360-Degree View

Pre-CDP Approach:

• Clients with multiple CRM instances segmented by service lines often use a cloud-based data warehouse to aggregate data. A summary view is created and brought back into the CRM to achieve a 360-degree customer or account view.
• Limitation: This process is time-intensive, often lacks real-time updates, and introduces data latency and redundancy.  Additionally, there are often data matching challenges that require or involve an MDM system to resolve.

Salesforce Data Cloud Approach:

• Data Unification: Data Cloud consolidates data from multiple CRM instances into a unified, customer profile without requiring intermediate summaries or manual syncing.
• Integrated Workflows: The platform’s native integration with Salesforce applications ensures that data flows seamlessly between systems.

Benefits:

• True 360-degree views updated in near real-time.
• Elimination of data latency and manual aggregation steps.
• Streamlined workflows that reduce complexity and operational overhead.

Why Salesforce Data Cloud?

Salesforce Data Cloud elevates customer data management by addressing the inefficiencies and limitations of pre-CDP workflows. It provides:

• Speed: Batch and real-time data ingestion, segmentation, and activation.
• Scalability: Automated workflows that handle large datasets with ease.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Reduced reliance on manual processes and IT resources.

Conclusion

While pre-CDP solutions may seem adequate, they fall short in terms of scalability, speed, and personalization. Salesforce Data Cloud transforms customer data strategies, enabling organizations to deliver more relevant, timely, and cost-effective customer experiences. By moving beyond spreadsheets, static MDM systems, IT bottlenecks, and fragmented CRM workflows, businesses can consolidate disparate data sources into unified, actionable insights.

Whether it’s overcoming the limitations of MDM, accelerating campaign activation, empowering self-service segmentation, automating data unification, reducing IT backlogs, or consolidating multiple CRM instances into a 360-degree view, Salesforce Data Cloud empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their customer data to drive growth and engagement.

Have you started down the planning and assessment stages for CDP within your organization?