Salesforce’s One-Stop Data Shop To Create A Unified Customer Profile

Salesforce has made good on its promise to bring marketers a more streamlined data solution, releasing its new customer data platform (CDP).

Salesforce – known for its customer relationship management (CRM) software – has been indicated its desire to branch out into CDP for some time, as a way for marketers to create a unified profile of each customer and take personalisation to the next level.

This new solution, which comes as an expansion to the company’s existing Customer 360 strategy, centralises consented data from any source to create a unified customer profile.

“Customers are demanding personalised and integrated engagements from the brands they consider and buy,” said Salesforce CEO Bob Stutz.

“Tolerance for channels that perform in a vacuum and companies with ad hoc memories is going away.”

It comes as Salesforce revealed enterprises now maintain an average of 39 disparate front-end systems to manage customer engagement, creating a “deluge of customer data that can’t be properly managed”.

So how will it work?

The platform will be partly powered by integration platform Mulesoft, which Salesforce acquired last year for $US6.5 billion.

The CDP firstly works by identifying who a person is through connecting different data sources.

A ‘unified ID’ connects and resolves customer data across various Salesforce apps.

Next, the platform will create a ‘360 degree’ map of the customer.

“Brands will be able to unify all of their customer data to create rich customer profiles,” Salesforce said in a statement.

“This includes known and unknown data such as cookies, customer first-party IDs and more.”

Salesforce’s consent management framework will allow companies to easily gain customer consent.

It also features ‘Advanced Audience Segmentation’ capabilities, that allows companies to identify specific groups of people to engage with in real-time based on demographics, engagement history and all other customer data available.

CDP is clearly all the rage in the marketing cloud world at the moment, with Adobe rolling out a beta version of its CDP housed within its Adobe Experience Manager earlier this week and Oracle bringing out its offering last year.

SAP is also believed to be working on its own CDP.

Salesforce’s platform will be piloted in September of this year.

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