Complete Guide To Salesforce Data Cloud (Salesforce Genie)

Today, personalized customer experience is give more importance as it unlocks the door to increased brand loyalty by making customers feel more valued. For that, companies need to leverage the most out of customer data and insights accumulated from varied sources.

How to get this data? Well, it takes a lot of work to get actionable insights and data, as traditional data architectures are complex, time-consuming, and brittle to develop and maintain.

Here, Salesforce Data Cloud appears as a savior that can help us get over such challenges. What is Salesforce Data Cloud? This Salesforce product leverages the complete potential of customers’ real-time data and witnesses magical experiences seamlessly.

Let’s explore more about Salesforce Data Cloud, working, benefits, features, etc.

What is Salesforce Data Cloud (Salesforce Genie)- An Overview

On this business globe, where data is multiplied every 12 hours, Data Cloud enables enterprises to make data valuable from every channel, system, or data stream. The best and unique fact about Salesforce Data Cloud is that it automates all the parts of Salesforce Customer 360, making it intelligent. 

Companies can reap the benefits of the Salesforce data cloud and reach their customers wherever they are by harmonizing data (combining data from different sources and providing comparable and single data views). Post that, it divides the data per specific parameters, like behavior and preferences, that ahead helps in instantly creating a remarkable personalization level using real-time customer profiles, which spells magic in the environment. 

Emergence of Salesforce Data Cloud – The Story Behind

Let’s highlight the commencement of Salesforce Data Cloud. 

At Dreamforce 2022, a real-time version was debuted, namely ‘Genie.’ In 2023, the first release cropped up, including data from Customer 360 (the whole Salesforce ecosystem), and the product was retitled ‘Data Cloud for Marketing.’ It states formerly; Data Cloud was termed Salesforce Genie. 

A hyperscale customer data platform, Salesforce Data Cloud empowers the world’s #1 real-time CRM. 

Today powered by Tableau, Salesforce Data Cloud processes 100+ billion customer records daily, easing the organization to become a customer company that considers consumers’ feedback and acts accordingly.

Initially, Salesforce put in place a customer data platform (CDP), crafted chiefly to work with Marketing Cloud, which has always been the rapidly growing, organically-developed product with 500+ customers today. 

By accumulating current transactional databases and past data, CDP facilitates real-time processing of hyperscale data and harmonizes different data streams from varied sources, channels, and systems to craft a unified customer graph or customer profile for marketers. 

The customer profiles easily trigger action in varied parts of the Salesforce platform that personalize customer experiences based on real-time data. This leads to reduced costs, elevated customer satisfaction, and boosted productivity. 

Growing beyond marketing today, Data Cloud boosts the strength of the Salesforce hyperscale data platform across the whole of Customer 360. Salesforce has already linked Data Cloud, lake house architecture to all its clouds, Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce Cloud, Tableau, Mulesoft, Slack, and more than thirteen industry clouds. 

With a canonical metadata model, Data Cloud, Salesforce’s new data infrastructure maps every system holding data into one. This uncovers the data for the users, making it available for usage in all the apps developed on Salesforce. 

Moreover, Data Cloud diminishes capex and opex expenses that one needs to bear to maintain expensive data infrastructure manually. 

How Does Data Cloud Help Existing Salesforce Users? 

• Formerly Salesforce Genie, Data Cloud pushes ahead dynamic data in real-time that CDP united into a shared view into Customer 360. 
• Customer data from any touchpoints continuously gets updated at a faster pace. 
• It makes unified customer profile records visible and actionable across the complete suite of Salesforce products and every industry solution. 
• Businesses can develop custom apps using the Salesforce data cloud and fulfill customer expectations for apps that reflect real-time customer behavior. 

Salesforce Data Cloud supports sales, service, marketing, commerce, Mulesoft integration, Tableau data analytics platform, and more. 

Besides, the massive scale, real-time data, and unified customer profile facilitate:

• Automated workflows that can adapt instantly per new data;
• AI that upgrades results every millisecond; and
• An outstanding accuracy level in analytics. 

What are the Benefits of Salesforce Data Cloud?

Let’s get deeper and dig out the valuable facts about Salesforce Genie Customer Data Cloud:

1. Improved Data Management Capabilities

Salesforce Data Cloud strengthens the data management potential of enterprises by allowing them to cleanse, integrate, and deduplicate data. This results in reduced manual efforts of businesses, streamlined data processes and workflows, and enhanced data accuracy and quality. Now, organizations can save time and resources by letting their teams target strategic initiatives and higher-valued jobs. 

2. 360-Degree Customer Insights

The best part about Data Cloud is its caliber to provide united, comprehensive customer information facilitating companies to reap the advantage of the data-driven culture and make improved business decisions. 

3. Boost Personalization & Conversions

By availing enriched and well-categorized customer profiles holding their behavioral and other data, the Salesforce data cloud help businesses improvise their targeted marketing campaigns by providing personalized messages and recommendations. Consequently, the brands enjoy boosted customer engagement conversion rates, thereby elevating ROI. 

4. Scalability & Agility

With this Salesforce platform, businesses will find it easy to adopt and meet the tailoring market needs by offering scalability and agility. They become capable of handling large data volumes matching the steps of growing customer interactions. This way, companies can scale their business operations without compromise and attain optimal ROI. 

5. Predictive Analytics Supporting Dynamic Decision-Making

Leveraging the power of Salesforce Data Cloud, organizations get predictive analytics that they use to point out potential risks and upcoming opportunities, forecast trends, and help make dynamic decisions. By making the best of these insights, businesses can seamlessly optimize inventory, anticipate customer expectations, and act accordingly to drive maximum profit and boost ROI. 

Draw On The Features Of Data Cloud To Deliver A More Personalized Experience

1. Robust Automation

With automation, conversational intelligence, and the AI power of Salesforce Flow, Data Cloud can automatically generate workflows, which leads to better customer experiences. 

2. Intelligent Experiences

Unified customer profiles of Data Cloud let the users customize experiences automatically, exploiting the potency of Salesforce Einstein. 

3. Real-Time Data

Data Cloud collects real-time data from different customer touchpoints and creates a single view of data, well-categorized and classified into unique customer profiles separately. 

4. Trusted Infrastructure

With the growing business, Data Cloud also scales with the required privacy, security, and compliance with Hyperforce. 

How Does Salesforce Data Cloud Work?

Empowering the complete Customer 360, Salesforce Data Cloud facilitates the users to access real-time data across all the clouds. Also, they can unify customer data and act on insights with the power of AI and automation. 

The working of Data Cloud:

Step #1 – Connect – Take in Data from Every Touchpoint

In the beginning, Salesforce had to deal chiefly with transactional data. Though, with Data Cloud, Salesforce can take in almost infinite data volume in real-time from any device, app, or stream. Customer 360 can use data stored in this Salesforce product, which is visible and openly available. 

Step #2 – Harmonize – Unify Data Streams into Customer Profile Records

A set of data, known as a Customer Graph, is created by Salesforce, which harmonizes customer data from every data stream (that data cloud connects with connectors in Step #1) in a single customer profile. Regardless of the source of data and its label, you will find the entire data of individual customers in their specific profiles separately.

Step #3 – Engage – Makes Data (collected) to Work

Now, businesses can view the entire data (past and present) of customer interaction in one profile. The Data Cloud uses a lakehouse architecture (single data storage spot that eases data management and lets analysts apply BI, ML, and data analytics) that simplifies the categorization and classification of unstructured data into well-structured form. So, businesses that find it messy to deal with historical data would acknowledge Salesforce products as helpful for accessing relevant data quicker and making it work for them. 

Step #4 – Experience

With dynamic data unified in one spot, well-categorized, and classified under a particular customer profile, you no longer need to narrow your search to every customer record individually. With in-built privacy and compliance, Salesforce Data Cloud puts forth customer interactions as a person. This way, when receiving a call, the customer support team can proactively revert to customers without asking them repeatedly about their current issue, making them annoyed. 

How Data Cloud Powers Up Other Salesforce Products?

1. Sales Cloud

Data Cloud empowers Salesforce Sales Cloud with AI capabilities and automation that quickly closes deals and boosts productivity across every channel. It drives customer data from all the touchpoints and unifies it separately in individual customer profiles. 

2. Service Cloud

Businesses leverage 360-degree customer data from varied sources to provide personalized experiences and elevate conversions. The data incorporated in profiles provide customers’ interactions, behavior, purchase history, preferences, and comprehensive experience. This way, with Salesforce Service Cloud, organizations provide more efficient, personalized, and proactive customer support to their customers building robust customer relationships. 

3. Marketing Cloud

Post enhancing customer service experience by leveraging real-time customer data and next integrating Data Cloud with salesforce marketing cloud, organizations can reap the benefits of this dynamic customer data. They personalize their marketing campaigns and customer journey.

4. Commerce Cloud

Organizations integrate data cloud with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to conduct commerce per their business requirement from the discovery phase to successful delivery. The brands run offers and exclusive promotions by analyzing the customers’ personalized shopping experience data, purchase history, and preferences. This way, they drive customer engagement, bring a surge in sales, and ultimately raise revenue.  

5. App Cloud

By using data-driven insights, like customer preferences, past purchases, and real-time data from the data cloud, companies can build custom apps on the App Cloud to provide the expected customer experience and let every business factor run per the anticipations. 

6. Tableau

Tableau already holds the caliber to accumulate customer data from distinctive sources and visualize it on a user-friendly dashboard in an understandable format. Integrating it with the data cloud makes it more powerful to extract more valuable data, trends, patterns, and correlations and drive more actionable insights. 

7. Slack

Integrating Slack with the data cloud, the teams within organizations get access to the customer data accumulated from varied sources, systems, and touchpoints. This lets every company department, especially the sales and marketing team, make informed decisions quickly and run targeted marketing campaigns. The reduced switching between apps for data collection and analysis leads to boosted productivity. 

Also Read: How To Integrate Slack With Salesforce? Complete Guide

How Does Salesforce Data Cloud Keep Data Secure?

The chief target of Salesforce Data Cloud is to meet the industry’s privacy and data ethics demands via policy automation, top-class consent management, and much more. 

Collaborating with the Office of Ethical and Human Use of Technology, Data Cloud has been crafted following privacy and data ethics best practices since the start. Above all, the Salesforce Platform appends an extra layer of data policy management to Salesforce Data Cloud to keep customers’ data safe and attain regulatory compliance needs worldwide.  

Salesforce Data Cloud Pricing 

Well, data cloud pricing is consumption-based, which means it depends on the usage. You only need to pay for what you use. Including Data Services Credits and Segmentation & Activation Credits will cost you an amount. 

1. Pricing of Data Cloud For Marketing 

2. Additional Credits

3. Add-Ons (with extra functionality)

Industry-Specific Use Cases Of Salesforce Data Cloud

1. Healthcare

Integrating the Salesforce data cloud with various healthcare telematics systems helps:

• Evaluate a unified health score,
• Identify critical issues that obstruct better care, 
• Onboard efficient healthcare providers,
• Make the best use of aggregated insights from multiple channels to diminish the risk of churn,
• Improve clinical care and treatments,
• Improve clinical decisions’ accuracy,
• Provide actionable insights from doctor’s reports,
• Improves understanding of complicated diseases, like heart disease, cancer, and more, 
• Elevate personalized patient care,
• Detect life-threatening diseases, etc.

2. Finance

Integrating Salesforce data cloud with the finance industry analyze customer data and trading patterns to:

• Catch fraudulent trading,
• Manage risk,
• Maintain financial security,
• Apply predictive analytics,
• Run targeted marketing campaigns, etc.

3. Retail & Commerce

The integration of Salesforce data cloud with retail industry brands can:

• Read their customers’ shopping behavior and patterns,
• Predicts future purchases,
• Set Optimal prices via algorithms analyzing customer and geographic data and pricing flexibility, etc.

4. Manufacturing

When integrated with the manufacturing industry, the Salesforce data cloud help in the following:

• Timely products delivery,
• Improve efficiency and diminish costs,
• Predictive machine maintenance,
• Enhance human quality control,
• Predictive manufacturing volumes, 
• Provide process control to stop bad production

5. Energy and Utilities

By integrating Data Cloud with the energy and utility industry, companies can:

• Diminish costs,
• Reduce carbon emissions,
• Conduct energy management programs for end users,
• Offer amazing dynamic energy management opportunities,
• Lower environmental impact by driving refinery and distribution processes

6. Real Estate

Data cloud can bring a positive change and enhancement in this industry by:

• Applying predictive analytics, 
• Help in proper planning, management, and budgeting,
• Control cost overruns, 
• Narrow down profit margins,
• Offers new control and efficiencies,
• Track equipment performance
• Manage valuable assets,
• Permit real-time budget management

7. Transportation

In the transportation industry, integrating data cloud will result in varied required enhancements:

• Improved safety, 
• Reduced costs,
• Predictive analytics points out risky areas that may lead to accidents, 
• Determine the best routes,
• Engines and equipment monitoring, etc. 

8. Government

The integration of data cloud and government help the citizen in varied ways:

• Identify and avoid waste, 
• Make informed financial decisions, 
• Accumulate and analyze defense intelligence to enhance defense systems, 
• Explain data finding crafting maps and visualizations, 
• Build and communicate recommendations to non-techies of the government, etc. 

How Can Emizentech Assist You In the Salesforce Data Cloud?

Aiming for business expansion, enterprises need a 360-degree view of customers’ data that they can use to provide personalization to boost their engagement, which impacts sales and, thereby, ROI. 

Tech-savvies will witness no issue implementing Salesforce Data Cloud for their organization seamlessly. But what would non-techies do? They can choose to hire a Salesforce consulting company. Even business owners from a technical background may pick this option to stay dedicated towards other more valued jobs as it’s quite challenging to manage everything while running a business. 

Many organizations globally are picking Emizentech as their Salesforce consulting company to integrate custom Salesforce solutions. 

Key Highlights of Choosing Emizentech as a Salesforce Consulting Partner:

• Provide 360-degree customer view,
• Enhance personalized customer experiences,
• Diminish data silos,
• Craft smarter audience segments
• Boost data privacy and compliance, 
• Share data within the organization, etc. 

Get a free consultation from Emizentech today and reap the remarkable potential of Salesforce Data Cloud. 

Final Verdict

Across all industries, the unified customer profiles embedding real-time data will appear as an ultimate assistant in delivering more personalized customer experiences with Salesforce Data Cloud. The difference in milliseconds unexpectedly impacts the experiences. You must attain that to ensure your business is caught up. 

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