New Salesforce CDP advances make customer interactions smarter, easier and faster

Last year, consumers faced massive financial uncertainty as the pandemic shut down businesses. Today, shops, hotels, bars and restaurants are opening back up, and many people are ready to spend.

As parts of the world begin to emerge from the pandemic, in fact, there is pent up consumer demand for experiences that weren’t possible over the last year. However, the most savvy companies realize that the digital experiences that were the lifeline for pandemic-era growth—like curbside shopping and direct-to-consumer websites—aren’t going away.

Nearly 70% of customers are expecting personalized, connected experiences, but global marketing leaders say unifying customer data sources in ways that provide a complete view of their customer and a single source of truth is one of their top challenges. Most companies have customer data spread across enterprise teams, devices and systems—so the task can seem impossible.

Make data smarter with Salesforce CDP

That’s why Salesforce built Salesforce CDP — an enterprise customer data platform that supercharges customer interactions everywhere. And today, Salesforce is announcing new CDP innovations to make customer data smarter, more connected, and easier to action upon in a trusted way.

Built on, Salesforce CDP helps companies unify customer data from any source—including sales, service, marketing, loyalty and commerce—and build a single source of truth that can be used for powerful marketing, advertising, personalization and analytics use cases that grow relationships and revenue.

Innovations introduced include:

• MuleSoft, enables marketers to securely connect to any external app and data source from anywhere, such as ERP, loyalty and point of sale systems, to build a comprehensive view of the customer. For example, marketers can create a connected digital experience for customers by unlocking data from AWS or Microsoft and integrating them with Salesforce CDP data for a true, 360 degree view of their customers.

• Enhanced Segmentation gives business users the ability to query data and build smarter audience segments with ease. The newly improved segment builder uses type-ahead functionality to suggest new attributes and lets users easily enhance, replicate, and share previous segments to deliver faster time to value.
• Tableau, the world’s leading analytics platform, incorporates unified profile IDs and calculated insights such as propensity to buy or churn for deeper exploration. Marketers can now understand who is engaging, on what channels, and what drives their interest by drilling down to levels like campaign, channel, content, offer, product and customer dimensions.
• Calculated Insights now further enrich unified profiles with metrics such as customer lifetime value and engagement scores. Brands can rank or segment customers into categories such as “loyal top spenders” or “newly lapsed customers” for smarter relationship building.
• Open Access: Salesforce CDP will enable customers to activate their segment data via AppExchange apps from participating ISV partners to create personalized experiences across web, mobile and connected TV ads. This will provide a safe way for customers to deliver and enrich their CDP data with high quality behavioral, intent, location information and more.

When the pandemic altered the way the world shops, eats, and engages with brands, companies turned to Salesforce to adapt, and are using CDP technology to succeed:

• Bank of Montreal: “Adapting quickly to the pace of change while continuing to deliver amazing customer experiences was the big motivator to accelerate our CDP thinking,” said David Kavanagh, Head of Marketing Technology at Bank of Montreal. “Leveraging first-party data was already a key ingredient to our personalization strategy, but adapting to multi-device identity resolution while activating more profile data isn’t easy. Our goal is to leverage Salesforce CDP to help us solve multiple issues with one solution and scale more rapidly to create frictionless, meaningful, omni-channel experiences.”
• Casey’s: “No one jumps into a CDP,” said Art Sebastian, Vice President of Digital Experience at Casey’s. “This pilot was a good step forward in our shift to becoming more relevant to our guests. What we built with Salesforce CDP is a tool that enables marketers to import data sets, create audience segments, and do data discovery. It just lets us move faster.”