Recent online studies show that the average organization maintains hundreds of software applications and SaaS tools which is a reflection of increasingly complex IT environments. Whether you are a technology leader, sales, service, or marketing professional, chances are you have interacted with several databases that housed relevant customer information.

So, my company has fragmented and siloed data, why does this matter to me and isn’t this just an expected operational cost? Those are the questions we’ll address in this post and how EpiGrowth can help your team build a better customer journey through Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) offering, also known as Data Cloud.

What are the hidden costs of maintaining status quo?

Revenue Loss – When sales, service, and marketing data is not unified, companies will miss cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, experience inconsistent interactions, lower conversion rates, poor sales forecasting, erode customer trust, and delay responsiveness on hot deals.

Security Risk – Fragmented data delays threat detection by making it more challenging to trace the attack’s source and results in inconsistent data handling regarding GDPR and compliance regulations

Lower ROI in marketing efforts – Without a full picture of customer engagement and orders, marketing campaigns, ad spend, and sales efforts risk becoming irrelevant.

Operational Inefficiency – Employees waste time each week searching for and reconciling data across multiple systems, duplicating data entry, and collaboration between teams in reduced.

How can Data 360 add value?

Unified Customer Profile – Data 360 can ingest, harmonize, and reconcile data from disparate sources into a single, actionable record by creating a standardized data model, leveraging matching and reconciliation rules.

Real-time actionable insights – Using streaming insights from various sources, Data 360 allows for personalized marketing triggered in near real-time.

Predictive Analytics – As the data model matures, companies can better identify future customer behavior, likelihood to purchase, and forecast inventory needs.

Scalability – CDPs are designed to handle increasing data volumes using horizontal scaling by adding more instances in parallel and improving performance.

Executive Dashboards – Leadership can more easily evaluate sales data across multiple systems and understand campaign attribution, which product lines are experiencing strong growth, and interact more deeply with performance metrics.

How do I prepare for implementing a CDP like Data 360?

It may be tempting to go straight to your account representative and purchase licenses after watching demos of what is possible. However, there are some key considerations in planning a data transformation project.

• Establish Clear Objectives: Identify a few impactful use cases, such as improved segmentation, empowering support agents with comprehensive customer history to provide faster resolution times, analyzing purchasing patterns to identify cross-sell opportunities, etc.
• Cleanse Data: Remove duplicates and standardize data as much as possible before combing multiple data sources. Poor data hygiene is one of the biggest barriers to a successful implementation and chronically underfunded efforts in businesses. Without this step, identity resolution will greatly increase in complexity.
• Map Data Model: Identify which fields are relevant to map to the unified profile/golden record in Data Cloud. Align field names/formatting across systems and resist the urge to migrate every field.
• Start Small: Begin with two data sources such as Salesforce CRM and an ERP system to test the setup in a sandbox, ingest data, and transformation without affecting production data.

What are some additional considerations for Data 360?

Consumption based pricing: Many CDPs have moved towards a usage-based model, which can bring some confusion in estimating an expected cost from events that are hard to quantify like volume of API calls and amount of data being processed. Some systems are still subscription based, but the reality is the software industry is rapidly moving in this direction.

User Adoption: Ensuring that users are trained to leverage unified profiles and how to interact with data afterwards is an important aspect of a data transformation project.

Final Thoughts

Data 360 is still a relatively new offering in the Salesforce ecosystem. While there are some projects that can be handled by a skilled in-house team, a Salesforce implementation partner is highly recommended to help navigate its complexity, ensure proper data modeling, and provide a positive ROI.

EpiGrowth has expertise in Data Cloud to help navigate data strategy, train team members during the implementation, and increase speed to value. The main selling point of unifying data points across disparate systems and creating a holistic customer profile is a worthwhile endeavor that will lead to improved operational efficiency, increased lead retention, more strategic marketing efforts, and a customer journey driven by data.