Many enterprises at the moment battle with information silos and unreliable insights, which result in a cloudy view of the client journey. When information lives in disparate locations, it makes it onerous to behave on — particularly within the age of synthetic intelligence (AI). Just a few years in the past, that described Salesforce, too.
As a big international group with various clients and quite a few acquisitions below our belt, we had a significant drawback with information saved throughout many various techniques. When some information was lacking from experiences as a result of it was saved individually, we weren’t actually in a position to see the complete buyer journey. We had been performing on ineffective information, resulting in inconsistent buyer experiences.
So we determined to not simply discuss the discuss when it got here to unifying buyer information — we needed to stroll the stroll.
4 years in the past, we began utilizing Knowledge Cloud internally as Buyer Zero to ship a unified view of our buyer’s journey. We constructed a unified information basis with Knowledge Cloud, utilizing that to energy deep integration with apps (Buyer 360) and brokers (Agentforce). Right here’s what we realized once we turned to Knowledge Cloud to interrupt down our information silos, in addition to a take a look at high-impact use circumstances.
Grow to be a Datablazer at the moment
Speed up your profession progress by becoming a member of the Datablazer Neighborhood, the place you possibly can acquire the abilities you want, join with fellow innovators, and be the primary to find out about Salesforce product information.
Right this moment, Knowledge Cloud is central to our success, because it’s deeply built-in into the Salesforce platform. It unifies our buyer and enterprise information to make it actionable throughout our apps, in our flows and with Agentforce so we are able to ship extra customized experiences at scale. This has turn out to be much more crucial with the elevated use of AI brokers, which want clear, organized information to be efficient.
The outcomes have been wonderful. Through the use of Knowledge Cloud to unify our information, we gained a whole view of our leads. This diminished the quantity of customized lead-routing code by 90%, lessening the burden on our gross sales employees to prioritize leads manually. We discovered that solely 40% of our leads had been really sales-ready, which allowed our gross sales reps to give attention to the highest-potential prospects. This all led to a 62% improve in common contract worth from these leads.
Knowledge Cloud automation straight led to a 5% lower in help tickets (roughly 27,000 circumstances). This got here regardless of a 2% improve in website visitors, and allowed our human service representatives to give attention to extra complicated, empathetic interactions.
What we’ll cowl
Implementing Knowledge Cloud and constructing the Reality Profile
Gaining a unified view of our buyer journey was less complicated once we began in 1999. However over time, as we amassed increasingly more information, from increasingly more locations, getting that single supply of fact grew to become a lot tougher.
Our fragmented information wasn’t only a back-end drawback. It led to unreliable insights, disconnected buyer experiences, and slower inner processes for our groups. One thing as basic as making certain account information matched up throughout techniques to ship the proper invoices globally grew to become complicated.
We confronted the basic drawback — the left hand wasn’t speaking to the suitable hand as a result of crucial buyer information wasn’t related. We realized we needed to handle this information problem head-on.
In response, we constructed Knowledge Cloud so we might simply unify and activate all our information, and designed it to enrich the techniques we already had in place. It bridges information silos and harmonizes info from information lakes, warehouses, enterprise purposes, and helps all codecs structured (like from a spreadsheet or CSV file) and unstructured (like from an e mail or PDF).
With Knowledge Cloud, we got down to do precisely what we advise our clients: construct a single supply of fact for understanding their complete journey with Salesforce. We name this the Reality Profile – a 360-degree view, which exhibits a whole story of our buyer’s relationship with us.
The Reality Profile consists of gross sales staff interactions, e mail opens, web site exercise, advert engagements, and crucially, how individuals use our merchandise – producing trillions of information occasions and lots of of petabytes day by day, residing in our information lakes like Amazon and Snowflake. We’re not shifting that large quantity of information; we’re connecting to it, extracting the related items, and constructing unified views.
This permits us to do issues like make extra clever predictions. We will now higher predict alternative closure, product wants, occasion attendance, help wants, and digital engagement. We will even anticipate our clients’ probably engagement patterns throughout our digital channels.
Our Knowledge Cloud implementation unified a large quantity of beforehand siloed information – lots of of hundreds of thousands of buyer profiles from all our techniques – right into a single, complete view. Now we’re in a position to act on that information extra effectively than ever earlier than, and we had been AI agent-ready earlier than AI brokers had been widespread.
We’ve been on our information journey for some time now and we’ve realized rather a lot. So I wish to share three main classes we realized from utilizing Knowledge Cloud internally that helped us get that unified view.
(Again to high)
1. Deal with information like a product
The primary key perception is to deal with your information and the processes round it like a product. We’ve got devoted information product managers who give attention to figuring out the place information can create essentially the most worth, aligning that understanding with enterprise wants, and prioritizing accordingly.
For instance, one of many earliest and most impactful issues we did was mix web site information with our buyer information. This straightforward connection powered new alerts in Slack — the collaboration platform the place our gross sales reps already spend most of their time — giving us invaluable real-time insights into what clients had been earlier than our groups even spoke to them, and permitting for smarter follow-up.
(Again to high)
2. Begin small, and give attention to high-impact use circumstances
Second, as an alternative of attempting to make sweeping modifications in a single day with Knowledge Cloud, we began on particular use circumstances with the best worth.
License renewals had been the primary issues we used Knowledge Cloud to assist with. Beforehand, clients needed to contact a salesman so as to add extra licenses. That’s not an excellent buyer expertise. We began utilizing backend system information to automate this course of, and make it extra seamless for our clients.
The end result? An automatic notification despatched to clients nearing their restrict, permitting them to buy extra with a easy click on. This small, focused automation generated over $20 million in income final yr alone. These early wins constructed momentum and helped us scale.
(Again to high)
3. Prioritize information high quality over amount
Compiling as a lot information as you possibly can appears like an excellent thought at first — but when all that information lives in separate techniques, it’s not going to do you a lot good. That’s what we name being information wealthy, however insights poor.
Concentrate on high quality over amount with regards to information. We realized that essentially the most important worth usually lies inside a centered subset. As a substitute of attempting to ingest lots of of information and fields, we focused on the highest 10 to twenty most precious information factors: which pages are they visiting? The place are they coming from? Who’re they? What merchandise have they considered in demos?
This centered method delivers essentially the most impactful insights shortly. You don’t want to incorporate every thing upfront; prioritize essentially the most helpful information to construct momentum and drive early success.
(Again to high)
Our inner Knowledge Cloud use circumstances
Knowledge Cloud unlocks the complete worth of your enterprise information and powers your Buyer 360 apps and Agentforce, whereas additionally amplifying your present information lake or warehouse investments to activate real-time insights and clever motion.
It’s designed to enrich your present information lakes and warehouses by unifying siloed buyer and enterprise information to make it actionable throughout our apps, in our flows and with Agentforce so you possibly can ship extra customized experiences at scale.
Listed below are a couple of methods we’ve used Knowledge Cloud to get nearer to our clients:
- Salesforce.com web site agent: We’ve added Agentforce to our homepage, permitting guests to get fast solutions to questions on our firm and merchandise. Since all of that information is unified in Knowledge Cloud, it’s simple for the web site agent to offer a related, customized response. We’ve seen a 36% year-over-year improve in influenced lead quantity, and a 40% discount in time spent on lead qualification.
- Paid media activation: With the info unified in Knowledge Cloud, we are able to activate it for paid media with companions like LinkedIn and Google. Once we use Knowledge Cloud to focus on this information, we’re seeing twice the clickthrough price on our advertisements and a 5X return on each greenback we spend. Not solely that, we are able to match 75% of our first-party information with LinkedIn clients, serving to us discover extra leads like our most precious clients.
- Clever e mail advertising at scale: We ship virtually 1 billion emails per yr by way of Advertising and marketing Cloud, in over 200 nations all over the world, promoting 55 merchandise in 12 completely different languages. With Knowledge Cloud, we give our entrepreneurs lots of of focusing on attributes. Whether or not we’re connecting with a CIO in Jap Europe, or somebody in Las Vegas interested by Agentforce, Knowledge Cloud helps us energy these journeys with messaging tailor-made to the precise buyer.
You possibly can dig deeper into extra Knowledge Cloud use circumstances on this video:
(Again to high)
How Knowledge Cloud helps us within the age of digital labor
AI brokers want clear, unified information with a purpose to present efficient insights. You would possibly’ve heard the time period “rubbish in, rubbish out” with regards to AI. The outputs AI brokers produce are solely pretty much as good as the info they draw from.
Having buyer information in a single place has solely helped us as AI brokers turn out to be extra distinguished. This unified information powers Agentforce — the agentic layer of our deeply unified platform. We’ve even been in a position to implement Agentforce for customer-facing actions. On our Salesforce Assist website, an AI agent has already powered over 850,000 thousand service conversations, with a decision price of 85%.
Our AI brokers want to know every thing from our product portfolio to the that means of buyer segments and even the roles inside our firm. Knowledge Cloud is now unifying this inner information alongside buyer information, for Agentforce.
Very similar to how Knowledge Cloud allowed us to unify our information and acquire a whole view of the client journey, it’s now serving to us tackle the problem of turning into an AI chief — powering higher, extra impactful enterprise outcomes.
(Again to high)
Are you prepared for Dreamforce?
At Dreamforce, you’ll uncover how AI brokers, real-time information, and CRM create a digital labor drive that scales with you. Be part of us October 14-16 in San Francisco, or watch on Salesforce+.
