Table of Contents
01
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The “Fragmented Customer”
Organizations are awash in customer data. Customer data sources are numerous and ever-growing, from website interactions and social media activity to purchase history and loyalty program information. Let’s say you have a real estate business – you will have customer data from various touchpoints, including website interactions, social media activity, purchase history, and property history.
However, this data often resides in silos scattered across disparate systems and formats. This creates a significant challenge: building a single, unified view of the customer. In this sense, learning how to unify customer data is key.
While daunting, achieving a unified customer view is no longer optional for businesses aiming to leverage data for business growth. A comprehensive understanding of customers is critical. It allows to personalize marketing campaigns, deliver tailored recommendations, and provide exceptional service – all factors that contribute directly to maximize results.
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Main Challenges of Scattered Customer Data
Operating in a siloed ecosystem creates significant roadblocks for businesses looking to leverage customer data effectively. This fragmented approach has a deep impact on data quality and introduces inefficiencies across the board, either from duplicate and/or inconsistent customer information, leading to inconsistent insights or from the lack of reliable data sources leading to inaccuracies and potentially compromising data security.
The ripple effect extends beyond customer insights, impacting the entire business – marketing operations, customer experience, and ultimately, business growth is compromised. Here is how:
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Wasted Resources: High marketing investments can be squandered without a unified view. Siloed data makes campaign optimization and budget allocation difficult, potentially leading to underwhelming results.
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Blurred Vision: CMOs struggle to justify marketing’s impact on the business when campaign performance reports are skewed by data inconsistencies. Unified data provides a clear picture of campaign effectiveness, allowing for data-driven decision making.
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Missed Opportunities: Gaps in recognizing customer patterns across data points can lead to missed marketing and sales opportunities. Understanding the complete customer journey allows for targeted engagement and personalized experiences that drive conversions.
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Fragmented Experience: Without a unified view, delivering a seamless customer experience becomes impossible. Unified data allows for consistent messaging and interactions across touchpoints, fostering customer loyalty and satisfaction.
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How to Unify Customer Data
As per the 8th Edition State of Marketing Report from Salesforce, “33% of respondents acknowledged that unifying data sources was a challenge”.
The challenge of fragmented customer data, trapped within marketing, sales, and service applications, was a major pain point. Salesforce Data Cloud was born from this need, offering a central hub to connect this siloed information.
But the power goes beyond those core functions. When combined with Mulesoft, Salesforce Data Cloud transforms itself into a powerhouse, capable of integrating data from any source.
Here is how it works:
- Connect: Whether you have your own data lake, data warehouse or want to connect to advertising platforms, Salesforce Data Cloud makes it possible to unify all customer data effortlessly, with pre-built connectors.
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Harmonize: With a comprehensive library of transformation functions, you can easily prepare, clean, and format your data to ensure consistency and accuracy across your systems. Salesforce Data Cloud has out-of-the-box data models you can explore as a jumpstart for your organization. Alternatively, you can extend these models or create entirely custom ones, ensuring your customer data perfectly aligns with your unique business goals.
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Unify: customer data often resembles a tangled web, with the same customer appearing under various names across different systems, which creates a challenge when consolidating customers data. Salesforce Data Cloud allows you to create a unified customer view by utilizing sophisticated matching algorithms, including exact match, probabilistic match, or a combination of key customer attributes. This process ensures that duplicate records are identified and merged accurately, providing a single, comprehensive profile for each customer.
- Activate: Salesforce Data Cloud user-friendly segmentation tools allow you to create targeted audiences based on individual, household, and account data. This granularity ensures your messaging resonates with the right people. You can leverage Einstein AI to build intelligent segments on-the-fly, uncovering hidden customer patterns and further optimizing your targeting. Once segments are defined, Data Cloud seamlessly activates them across all your direct and advertising channels, maximizing reach and impact.
- Analyze: Salesforce Data Cloud empowers you to define and analyze multi-dimensional metrics, such as Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), at the individual profile or audience level to drive insights and truly understand your customers’ behaviors and value. You can even use it with platforms like Tableau for further in-depth analysis. Alternatively, you can leverage Data Cloud’s querying and extraction capabilities to gather aggregated profile data. This data can then be integrated with any system, within or outside the Salesforce ecosystem, for even more in-depth analysis. This flexibility ensures you have the right tools to explore the full potential of your customer data.
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How Can we Help you Unlock the Power of Salesforce Data Cloud?
At Stellaxius, a Salesforce implementation boutique, we specialize in helping organizations leverage the power of Salesforce technology. If you have read this far, you are probably feeling overwhelmed by the vast amount of data in your organization. And, if you want to use modern analytics tools to gain actionable insights and transform your business, we are here to help.
Our team of certified experts will:
- Align & define vision and strategy: We will work with you to establish a clear vision for your Data Cloud implementation, ensuring alignment with your business goals, and define use cases that will maximize the value for your organization
- Assess your data landscape: We will assess your current business environment, including evaluating the state of your data, technology, and workforce
- Build your solution: With a deep understanding of your needs, we will design and implement a winning Data Cloud solution, addressing your specific challenges and creating new opportunities
- Run & Operate with confidence: We will help you define a clear operational strategy, while empowering your team to become self-sufficient, allowing you to maximize the ongoing value of your investment.
Partner with Stellaxius and turn your data cloud into a powerful driver for your business success! Contact us today.
