Let us again discuss the different challenges faced by modern CDP tools and how Salesforce Data Cloud solves them.
Challenge 1: Inability to Scale
Solution: Salesforce Data Cloud is based on the Hyperforce platform. Hyperforce is a public cloud infrastructure as a service offering from Salesforce. It is highly scalable and suited for big enterprises. As Salesforce Data Cloud is based on the platform, it can scale to billions and trillions of records each day. So companies can focus on growing their user base, letting Salesforce take care of scalability. According to a Salesforce press release dated December 8, 2022, “Data Cloud Customer Data Cloud now processes more than 100 billion customer records on average daily across the entire Salesforce Customer 360, enabling every company to use data and become a customer company.” (Source-https://investor.salesforce.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2022/Salesforce-Data-Cloud-Customer-Data-Cloud-Now-Powered-by-Tableau-Processes-More-Than-100-Billion-Customer-Records-on-Average-Daily-Making-It-Easy-for-Every-Company-to-Become-a-Customer-Company/default.aspx)
Challenge 2: Not User-friendly
Solution: One of the major complaints with CDPs is that they are not user-friendly. If marketer needs to go to the data engineer every time they need to create a new audience segment, then it defeats the purpose of speed to market. Salesforce Data Cloud is intuitive and easy to use. Salesforce’s philosophy of clicks, not code, makes it the perfect tool for end users. Marketers and business users do not need to depend on the technical team for their work. With many drag-and-drop tools, users can perform analysis, create segments, model data, and do much more without the need to learn to code.
Challenge 3: Difficult to get data in real-time
Solution: Getting data in real-time from different sources is one of the major challenges. As we have already discussed, one of the USPs of Salesforce Data Cloud is that it can get data in real-time from different customer touchpoints, thus hyper-charging the personalized customer experience. It enables all your teams: across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more-to alter the customer experience in real-time based on the customer’s actions.
Figure 3.3: Salesforce Data Cloud powers the customer 360 (source- https://www.salesforce.com/products/Data-Cloud/overview/?d=cta-body-promo-4&_gl=1*1x6do25*_ga*MTQ5NjIyOTA5My4xNjI3MTE0MTk5*_ga_3VHBZ2DJWP*MTY4MTMwOTU3NS41MC4wLjE2ODEzMDk1NzUuMC4wLjA.)
Challenge 4: Difficult to demonstrate quickly the value to the business
Solution: Implementing a CDP for your business is a challenging task. There are more stories of failures than successes. Demonstrating value to the business is crucial, where budget is always a concern for businesses. If the project team is not able to demonstrate to the management that the investment is worth it, it can kill the project. Salesforce Data Cloud aims to solve the problem by being easier to implement than most CDPs. It claims to reduce the time to market significantly compared to other competing vendors and, hence, provide value to the business. On top of it, the ease of use means business users will be happy to use and provide positive feedback to management regarding the tool.
Data Cloud addition to the Salesforce ecosystem
To achieve the vision of a real-time 360-degree view of the customers, Salesforce Data Cloud plays a crucial role. Although the different Salesforce products shared the same or similar data model and had a lot of synergies between them, there was one missing link. The missing link was the ability to bring the data from different Salesforce products into a single repository. Customer 360 aimed to solve that. But companies do not keep all their business information in Salesforce alone. They have different systems to store different information. A company can use SAP for ERP solutions, Adobe for marketing, and Salesforce for CRM and Commerce. It was necessary to bring data from different systems into a single platform. Apart from these systems, data on the client side, like event streaming data, product analytics data, and so on also needed to be part of the holistic customer view. Thus the idea of Salesforce CDP was born. Salesforce Data Cloud made Salesforce CDP in real-time. Salesforce Data Cloud was the missing link in connecting all the customer data points. It helps to achieve the vision of Customer 360.
Figure 3.4: Salesforce Data Cloud connecting all the different Salesforce platforms
In the preceding diagram, the rabbit is the mascot for Salesforce Data Cloud, connecting all of the Salesforce products. So, it does not matter whether you are using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Industry solutions, Slack, Salesforce platform, and so on. All your systems are interconnected through Data Cloud.