Part of Salesforce Customer 360, the Customer Data Platform allows organizations to easily build a unified view of their customers for delivering personalized engagement across sales, marketing, commerce, and service. Customer 360 will go beyond the capabilities of traditional CDP and extend the potential of customer relationship management with consumer-scale activation and management.

Today, customers are not ready to settle for fragmented experiences and it is for this and many more reasons that organizations are now realizing the significance of creating a unified and holistic view of the customer to win their loyalty. Using Customer 360, Salesforce users can now easily personalize customer engagement and unify data at scale.

Customers Were Tired Of Lack Or Absence Of Personalization

According to a recently-concluded Salesforce Connected Customer report, 78 percent of customers in today’s tech-savvy world expect consistent and engaging interactions with an organization, irrespective of the department they are dealing with. It was also revealed by the report that only 50 percent of organizations paid heed to tailor their engagement based on the past interactions of their customers.

The biggest problem for organizations today is that they have to deal with endless piles of customer data. To add to that, they are expected to find innovative and better ways for unifying data from legacy systems, multi-channel attribution, disconnected channels, and other avenues. On top of this, organizations have to stay compliant to regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stay on top of the game by adapting to new channels such as chatbots. All in all, organizations have limited or complicated options to deliver integrated and personalized engagement and it is the customer that often ends up paying the price for it.

Integrated Customer Engagement Gets Delivered With The Next Generation Of Customer 360

Customer 360, a cross-cloud technology initiative was introduced by Salesforce at Dreamforce 2018 to make B2C Commerce, Marketing, and Service products work better together. By extending the potential of Customer 360 with Mulesoft, organizations were better placed than ever to connect any data source, device, or app across any on-premise and cloud. With the recently-introduced advancements to Customer 360, organizations would find it easier to bridge fragmented data of customers across the whole organization and deliver integrated customer engagement at scale.

The next generation of Customer 360 will help organizations in countless ways, including but not limited to:

Advanced Audience Segmentation: Organizations will be able to identify certain groups of people to actively engage within in real-time basis (through segmentation capabilities) based on engagement history, demographics, and all other available customer data. For instance, a brick-and-mortar retail store can quickly build an audience of female shoppers who have an interest in running shoes based on a combination of their internet browsing habits and activities across marketing email interactions and more.

Data Unification and Consent Management: Organizations will be able to streamline and unify all of their critical customer data for creating rich consumer profiles. This will include known as well as unknown data like customer first-party IDs, cookies, and more. Organizations, with the consent management framework facilitated by Salesforce, can now easily gain the consent of their consumers across a wide range of platforms.

Optimization Based on Einstein Insights: Organizations through Artificial Intelligence can now easily analyze and interpret how, when, and how to engage with their target audience for improving business performance and driving customer loyalty. Now, brands can leverage Artificial Intelligence as the profiles of customers are updated on a continuous basis based on their behaviors. Whether it’s the customer clicking on an advertisement or buying a product, or opening an email or browsing an eCommerce catalog – every single piece of this information gets collected and ready to be utilized for driving the most relevant channel recommendation or product mix with a predefined purpose of optimizing channel engagement and customer satisfaction.

Personalized Engagement Everywhere: Obviously, there is more than one way to skin a cat when organizations are fully aware of what segment of audience they would like to reach. After all, it becomes easier for them to activate customer data across commerce, service, marketing, and beyond. This means that organizations don’t have to skip a beat across a wide range of channels (email, social, web, mobile, and more) that are all integrated for delivering continuous experiences with the brand.