We just couldn’t pass the opportunity to use our company name in the title, but, seriously, Salesforce Data Cloud is much more than a tool to unify data. It helps businesses break down data silos, gain a more comprehensive understanding of their customers, and enable the creation of more data-driven applications that deliver better customer experiences. If you’re in business, this is paramount!

Let’s break this down.

Accessing key data sources

Be it through data streams and connectors, or connecting unstructured data, built-in capabilities with zero-copy ability, streamlines the access to relevant data wherever it may be.

Representing data consistently

Data mapping to a common data model, and/or indexing and embedding unstructured data so it is searchable while laying down the foundations of generative AI use cases, are the ensuing key actions.

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‍Unifying data sources

Relevant customer information is typically spread out through several systems, with some information overlapping and some information being unique to a specific system. Bringing together this information to form a comprehensive view of the customer is also paramount. Identity resolution is a Data Cloud capability that helps connect the dots between these multiple records.

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Driving insights

All prior capabilities serve the purpose of getting valuable insights from the organization’s data. Salesforce Data Cloud capabilities help identify interests, buying habits, and online behavior, allowing the organization to make data-driven decisions for marketing, sales, operations, and customer service.

• Data graphs enable queries to respond in near-real time.

• Segmentation breaks down your data into useful segments to understand, target, and analyze your customers.

• Insights help analyze datasets for historical trends, and long and short-term customer behavior.

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Build AI models with a user-friendly interface and guided steps, or Bring Your Own Model with providers like Databricks, Amazon Sagemaker, Google Vertex AI, and OpenAI. This enables you to enrich your data with predictive insights and power generative AI capabilities with custom large language models (LLMs).

Take Action

A key capability of Data Cloud is its ability to put insights into the hands of customers, employees, and partners who need it to drive tangible business outcomes, and it can be done using different techniques depending on the technical and business context: data shares, APIs, data actions, activations, enrichments, automation or analytics.

Data shares, for example, provide easy access for third-party partners to use data in Data Cloud. Data Cloud objects are shared without replicating the data into a partner ecosystem.

Activation is the process that publishes a segment to activation platforms. It’s possible to publish your segments, include contact points, and add additional attributes to the activation targets. Activation targets can be file-based storage, ad services or marketing and B2C commerce clouds.

Analytics would be one more example in which Data Cloud allows you to use various tools and products to analyze your data with direct data connectors for Salesforce, CRM Analytics and Tableau. 

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Conclusion

Salesforce Data Cloud helps organizations unify and leverage their data across the whole technical landscape of the company and beyond, laying the foundations for building data-driven applications that unlock AI-powered insights and deliver new customer experiences with insights that were previously unattainable.

If you are interested in Salesforce Data Cloud and would like to know more, reach out to us. We’d be happy to hear from you.