What Is Salesforce Customer 360 and How Does It Work?

In today’s competitive world, personalized experiences are vital to meeting customers’ expectations and fulfilling their requirements. A deeper understanding of customer’s behavior and preferences is not only a luxury but an important aspect for businesses aiming to distribute marketing products and services. In order to create a seamless customer journey, B2B & B2C companies require internal and external channel optimizations, where Salesforce Customer 360 helps to do the same. 

Customer 360 is considered to be a salesforce technology breadth—a unified, integrated CRM platform that brings customers & businesses together. It offers a 360-degree view of customer data depending on their previous interactions. 

In this article, you will learn about Salesforce Customer 360, how it works, and the benefits or features that help businesses build a positive reputation.

What is Salesforce Customer 360?

Salesforce Customer 360 is an integrated CRM platform that segregates users’ data and gathers a consolidated view of customer’s perceptions of businesses. It permits you to identify your users better & make data-driven decisions. 

Customer 360 enables different business enterprises to make good connections with data sources & other applications. It can be defined as a flexible platform that is used to meet the key essentials of companies in the context of their customers.  Organizations can access a centralised database of user info to build targeted campaigns, track campaigns’ effectiveness, evaluate sales opportunities, and gain effective insights.

Key Components Of Salesforce Customer 360

Salesforce Customer 360 provides a top-notch component that encourages organizations to make deeper connections with their customers. Let’s explore key components in brief:

1. Data Integration

Data integration simplifies key business activities. A team can gather customer data in one place to fulfil their demand and coordinate strategy for upcoming business meetings. These backend processes help improve productivity, create customer profiles, and enhance the personalized experience of the company.

2. Data Management

Data management is a process used to manage and define an organization’s critical data and offer a unified reference point. It involves creating a single and uniform master record for customers. This record involves the user’s relevant information, such as interaction history, demographic details, and purchase history. It improves existing data and quality by removing duplicate/obsolete records and gathering missing records.

3. Data Analytics

After accumulating and categorizing customer data per usage or demand, this component of Salesforce Customer 360 helps in deep analysis of the data for better decision-making. With this, businesses can easily improve their operations and personalize their offerings according to customer requirements.

Features of Salesforce Customer 360

In the following section, we will explain the key features of Salesforce Customer 360 in detail. This comprehensive platform offers a range of Salesforce tools and capabilities to help businesses consolidate customer data and drive meaningful interactions across all touchpoints.

1. Unification of Data and Consent Management

One of the biggest flexes that Salesforce 360 offers is to unify data and consent management. With this solution, firms can gather data and insight about customers to create a comprehensive profile of customers. Consent management helps manage the data of known or unknown customers through cookies for the first-party member. Once the consent of the framework is received, the firm allows access to this information to their various departments to instill better decision-making across the organization.

2. Upgraded Audience Segmentation

With an upgraded version of audience segmentation, businesses can now leverage data collection and management on a segmentation basis. Different departments at organizations can now use data on a specific gender, age, demographic area, customers’ purchasing habits, and much more. It makes it easier for different departments of the firms to design the strategies accordingly.

For example, the sales department will only approach the one who can be a potential customer of the firm. At the same time, the marketing team will use the right tool to reach the customer.

3. Personalized Customer Engagement

With Salesforce Customer 360, firms can easily use customers’ data to provide a personalized experience. Undoubtedly, personalized customer engagement helps close more deals by focusing on the particular problem or challenge the customers face and the solution they seek.

For example, if a customer segment shops only when the products are on discount, the sales team will notify them about the discount and encourage them to bring their carts to the billing counter.

4. Artificial Intelligence Optimization

With the application of artificial intelligence, it becomes easier for firms to understand consumer behavior to enhance their customer relationships in the future. For example, it analyzes the number of clicks on a particular ad or product bought in recent months, collects information from customer profiles, and uses all this insight to recommend products to the customer.

5. Follow-up Feature to Close More Deals

Many people fill their carts, but only some bring them to the billing counter. So, Salesforce has designed a new feature for this scenario. The new feature, equipped with the marketing cloud, offers several incentives, discounts, and attractive coupons to customers so that the abandoned cart can be brought to the execution phase.

6. Manage Data in Single-Click Interface

Data management used to be a time-consuming process for organizations, as they had to share all the data between the departments manually. The firm’s administrators were responsible for establishing the connection between clients’ data and Salesforce software. So, Salesforce 360 eliminates this challenge by implementing data sharing with a few clicks.

7. Provision of Universal Id

One of the best features that Salesforce Customer 360 offers is Universal ID. An ID is generated for every customer and circulated across all channels and websites. However, the ID is not represented by the customer’s name or email; instead, it is an anonymous identity. The relevant stakeholders can access relevant insight, such as past purchase history, preference of particular brands, shopping price range, etc. This insight helps the stakeholders communicate with consumers accordingly.

How Does Salesforce Customer 360 Work?

Salesforce Customer 360 empowers salespeople by keeping marketing, sales, commerce, and service information in one place. This results in converting more leads, prospects, sales, and pipelines.

Acting as a connector between Salesforce Customer 360 and other systems, Mulesoft seamlessly integrates data from varied sources, like legacy systems, CRMs, and ERPS, and stores it in one spot within Salesforce. This single view helps businesses with improved marketing campaigns, personalized customer experiences, and streamlined sales processes.

On the solution, a 360-degree view can be generated as a unique ID is provided to each customer, and their data is collected from different sources linked to it. Hence, whenever any customer purchases via one card and downloads it from another email, Customer 360 ties all to one GPID. Customer 360, using GPID, sends the correct data to the respective sources, ensuring data consistency.

As per the user’s role, each piece of information, tool, and relevant data is directly displayed on the user’s dashboard. Tableau, an analytic platform, helps to understand big data and visualize it to share instant reports across the company.

The built-in artificial intelligence (AI) engine, Einstein AI, strengthens Salesforce solutions that help identify inconsistencies in gathered data from various sources and suggest appropriate practices to fix them. Einstein offers data-driven products, insights, resources, further actions, and recommendations. This will help make the best decisions, and the team can perform tasks accurately.

Let’s take an example to understand how Customer 360 works:

Imagine a customer, Damon, interacting on social media with your brand and filling out the form for interested products. Now, the marketing team comes into action and tracks all interactions, entries, and content he visited. The marketing team will send promotional emails and WhatsApp messages and display ads on his social media for that product. Further, the demon’s entire information is shared with sales team so that they can interact with him to deliver personalized experience.

This leads to a seamless information transition between the sales and marketing teams that is possible with Salesforce Customer 360 implementation in business.

Benefits of Salesforce Customer 360

Salesforce Customer 360 is a powerful platform designed to help businesses manage and leverage customer data more effectively. Implementing Salesforce Customer 360 offers several benefits:

1. 360-Degree Customer View

Salesforce Customer 360 provides a comprehensive view of each customer by centralizing data from various sources, such as sales, marketing, service, and commerce. This unified view allows teams to understand customer behavior and preferences better.

2. Improved Customer Engagement

With a complete customer profile, sales, marketing, and customer service teams can personalize interactions and communication. This leads to more relevant and engaging customer experiences, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Streamlined Data Management

Customer 360 simplifies data integration and synchronization across different systems and departments. This reduces data silos and ensures that teams use accurate, up-to-date information.

4. Enhanced Sales and Marketing

Sales teams can use Customer 360 to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities more effectively. Marketing teams can create targeted campaigns based on customer insights, improving lead generation and conversion rates.

5. Efficient Customer Service

Customer service agents can access a customer’s entire history and preferences, enabling faster issue resolution and more personalized support. This leads to increased customer retention and reduced support costs.

6. Data Security and Compliance

Salesforce is known for its robust security and compliance features. Implementing Customer 360 helps ensure that customer data is protected and that your organization complies with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

7. Analytics and Reporting

Customer 360 offers robust analytics and reporting tools to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, trends, and performance metrics. This data-driven approach can guide strategic decision-making and help optimize business processes.

8. Scalability

Salesforce is a scalable platform, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. Customer 360 can grow with you as your organization grows, accommodating increased data volumes and user requirements.

9. Integration with Third-Party Apps

Salesforce offers a vast ecosystem of third-party integrations and apps through its AppExchange marketplace. This enables you to extend the functionality of Customer 360 and integrate it with other tools your business relies on.

10. Competitive Advantage

By leveraging Customer 360, your organization can gain a competitive advantage by offering superior customer experiences, making data-driven decisions, and staying agile in a rapidly changing business environment.

Salesforce Customer 360 Products Overview

Salesforce Customer 360 is the world’s most comprehensive CRM software, offering suites of products. Here is the list of all the products:

1. Sales Cloud

It is Salesforce’s flagship product, helping the sales team manage their customer relationships by enhancing productivity and closing extensive deals. With this, sales organizations can control the sales pipeline by implementing and developing repeatable sales processes.

2. Marketing Cloud

This is a marketing automation platform through which businesses can automate their marketing campaigns, including various features like lead management, social media integration, and email marketing.

3. Service Cloud

It is a customer service platform through which businesses can offer effective services to the customer, including features like case management, live chat and knowledge base. It uses customer data to resolve issues quickly, enhance customer satisfaction, and offer personalized support.

4. Commerce Cloud

This is an cloud-based e-commerce platform through which organizations can build & manage online stores, including features like catalog management, payment processing, and order management. With this, businesses can offer seamless shopping experiences to customers and drive more automation.

5. Tableau Analytics

Tableau Analytics is used to attain deeper insights into customer data & to make appropriate data-driven decisions. Tableau is considered to be a data visualization tool through which organizations can build interactive reports.

6. Mulesoft

Mulesoft is the #1 integration platform that connects data, devices, and applications across cloud computing environments. It is a Java-based platform that allows businesses to communicate with various platforms through its powerful integration solution. Mulesoft offers the Anypoint platform, provides integration and automation tools to speed up application development and delivery.

7. SalesforceIQ

It can be defined as a sales intelligence platform that supports the sales team to understand better customers’ behavior and their expectations, including features like opportunity tracking, contact management, and lead management.

8. Lightning Platforms

It is a component-based framework used to develop Salesforce mobile apps, with the aim to ease the development process for team members. It includes various features such as an experience builder to optimize speed, a design system with style guides, and advanced tools and extensions.

Salesforce Customer 360 Use Cases

Salesforce Customer 360 is a powerful platform that provides a 360-degree view of customer data. We have discussed various benefits and components and proved how it will work to set up your expectations.

Let’s have a look at how businesses get benefits of Salesforce Customer 360 implementation in businesses with their success stories:

1. Gucci

Product Used:

• Einstein AI
• Service Cloud
• Marketing Cloud
• Tableau 

Challenges: Gucci was looking to offer high-end personalized services to their customers. They have faced operational inefficiencies when they tried to fill beauty into one-of-a-kind, seamless customer experiences because of manual data silos & guest service.

Solutions: Gucci implemented Salesforce Customer 360 including Einstein AI that helps to generate “Guccified” conversation replies for client service centres globally. With this, advisors can assist their customers in constant brand voice, whether they want to restore vintage bags or make inclusive reservations at Osteria. This implementation changes the new team members’ learning curve as Gucci Voice helps them train quickly via AI-generated replies.

2. Texas Rangers

Product Used:

• Einstein 1 Platform
• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Tableau

Challenges: The Texas Rangers opened a new stadium where they needed to fill the seats & engage with fans to improve customer retention rates. The main obstacle is the operational inefficiencies and difficulty in growing revenue because the entire team was not able to access data at a single source.

Solutions: Salesforce Customer 360 implementation in Texas Rangers helped to remove data silos & generate a 360-degree view of estimated operations, which improved the data-driven decision capabilities. They used Sales Cloud to prioritize and route the company’s leads, which resulted in a 2,000+% revenue increment from interest’s form leads. It creates an ideal experience for more than 40,000 fans in a year.

Salesforce Customer 360 Pricing

Salesforce Customer 360 provides yearly pricing plans for all products, whereas sales & service cloud sets can be purchased separately. There are 4 editions offered by Commerce 360, which you can choose as per the budget and requirements. Let’s have a look at all the available plans:

1. Essential Edition: It is suitable for small-scale businesses where you must handle customer opportunities, leads, accounts, and contacts. This plan can be purchased monthly, but Salesforce asks interested users to contact them for a quote.  

2. Professional Edition: It improves team workflow and manages team members’ roles, email management pipelines and automates notifications. The only limitation with this edition is that there is no help center & no live service agent.

3. Enterprise Edition: With this edition, you can get access to different tools to evaluate score opportunities, split commissions & predict conversion rates. The only limitation is that it can be used by a single user.

4. Unlimited Edition: It is suitable for large-scale businesses with features like an analysis package, comprehensive reporting, access to experts, & on-demand problem-solving. 

Future Trends in Customer 360

Latest trends shaped Customer 360 future and offer the ability for organizations to understand the customers and their requirements. It includes a privacy & security focus, various technologies integration, AI & machine learning advancements, great collaboration, and focus on customer feedback. Let’s have a look at these trends:

1. Security & Privacy

The most important aspect for businesses is to secure customers’ data from cyber threats, which builds customer trust and protects organizations from legal threats/penalties. Customer 360 uses advanced technology like the Secure Socket Layer, server authentication, data encryption, and a unique user ID/password offered to each user, which hosts a secure server environment.

2. Advancement in AI/Machine Learning

AI/Machine learning is considered to be a key aspect of Customer 360 development that helps businesses of all sizes and improves data insights to make personalized customer experiences.

3. Various Technologies Integration

Customer 360 will integrate with several technologies such as data analytics platforms, CRM systems like HubSpot, Zoho, and marketing automation tools through which businesses can leverage user’s data across various platforms to enhance their experience efficiency.

4. Focus On Customer Feedback

Customer feedback plays a vital role in understanding their major issues through which businesses can focus on their concerns. Customer 360 uses Net Promoter Score to measure, improve, and manage customer satisfaction. Users also appreciate it when you ask them whether they are happy or not with services that create a strong relationship.

How Salesforce Consulting Company Helps in Customer 360?

A Salesforce consulting company can help businesses implement, customize, and optimize the Customer 360 platform. Hiring them offers various advantages – it helps to enhance customer engagement, streamlines sales processes and has the ability to obtain innovative solutions to address customer issues. Several Salesforce consulting companies are available, but choosing the best one to help you seamlessly implement Customer 360 can be quite challenging. By turning to Emizentech, a leading Salesforce Implementation Partner, you can save time and effort by having a team of certified Salesforce developers, years of relevant experience, and an engaging portfolio showcasing successfully running projects.

EmizenTech key Highlights:

• Salesforce Certification
• Competitive Pricing
• End-to-end Salesforce services
• Work on Proven methodologies
• Impressive Service portfolio
• Seamless Implementation

Wrapping Up

Without a doubt, Salesforce Customer 360 plays a vital role in advancing customer experiences. Its advanced features and benefits will accelerate business growth and client interactions.

Customer 360 seems to be a great choice for businesses to elevate unachievable levels of sales and productivity as it offers a wide range of business solutions like sales collaboration, lead management, opportunity management, and many more. Implement Salesforce Customer 360 in your business and attain the outcomes that you always wanted.

Salesforce products are advantageous to meet all business requirements. Hence, it is necessary to get perfect guidance with Salesforce services and products. When you need to implement the Salesforce Customer 360 in your business, you might need a Salesforce partner who understands and guides you for the same. For more information and to get a quote, contact us now!