Salesforce bulks up CRM with customer data platform

Global customer relationship management (CRM) heavyweight Salesforce has unveiled a new customer data platform (CDP) along with the next generation of Customer 360.

The new platform services will help clients to unify disparate customer data throughout the company and help enterprises personalise engagements helped by a single view of the customer.

The new Customer 360 platform will help organisations go beyond traditional CDP practices with higher levels of consumer-scale data management and activation.

"Customers today will not settle for fragmented experiences, and companies recognise that creating a single view of the customer is imperative to earning their loyalty," said Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer, Salesforce. Taylor also said that the Customer 360 platform would help empower brands, unify data and personalise customer engagement at scale.

The most recent Salesforce Connected Customer report revealed that 78% of customers expected consistent interactions with companies, irrespective of the department they were conversing with. However, only 50% of companies tailored their engagement based on inputs from the past interactions of the customer.

Salesforce said that many enterprises are trying to unify data from legacy systems, disconnected channels, multi-channel attribution and other data sources. They also have the task of adhering to regulatory compliances while constantly innovating with new technologies such as voice and chatbots.

In this reality, delivering personalised and integrated engagement is difficult, and customers often pay the price, the release said.

Another example that Salesforce pointed out was how a retailer was unlikely to know that the customer who called for servicing a broken product was the same person who had just received a promotional email for the product.

To help with such issues, Salesforce said that the Customer 360 platform would help to create a unified customer ID and they can also connect to any app, data source or device on the cloud or on-premises, via integration platform MuleSoft.

Initially released in 2018, the upgrades to the Customer 360 platform will come with new features such as data unification and consent management, advanced audience segmentation, personalised engagement on multiple platforms, and optimisation based on artificial intelligence (AI) insights through Einstein AI of Salesforce.