Salesforce Customer 360 – Features, Benefits & Use Cases

Salesforce is a cloud-based software designing company that helps businesses integrate the various departments, stakeholders, and data to drive sales and close more deals. Since its establishment in 1999, the firm has come a long way, establishing a broad client base around the globe.

What Is Salesforce Customer 360?

Salesforce Customer 360 is one of the innovative solutions that the company has revealed in recent years. Unlike other software products, this one is not a single product but a complete suite of products. So far, different software has worked individually to collect and use the data to provide a seamless experience to a department. To make it more specific and easy to understand, Salesforce Customer 360 connects the sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT teams. This unified structure of data sharing allows the different teams to utilize the data according to their own use case and take further steps accordingly.

Key Features of Salesforce 360

The Above Few Lines Are Insufficient to Communicate the Capabilities and Competencies of Salesforce 360. So, Let’s Dive Into Some of The Features that Salesforce Has Come up With in Its 360 Version. 

1. Unification of Data and Consent Management 

One of the biggest flexes that Salesforce 360 offers, it helps in the unification of data and consent management. With this solution, firms can gather data and insight about customers to create a comprehensive profile of customers. Consent management helps manage the data of known or unknown customers in the form of cookies for the first party member. Once the consent of the framework is received, the firm allows access to this information to their various departments to instill better decision-making across the organization.

2. Upgraded Audience Segmentation 

With an upgraded version of audience segmentation, businesses can now leverage data collection and management on a segmentation basis. Different departments at organizations can now use the data of a specific gender, age, demographic area, customers with purchasing habits, and much more. It makes it easier for different departments of the firms to design the strategies accordingly.

For example, the sales department will only approach the one who can be a potential customer of the firm. At the same time, the marketing team will use the right tool to reach the customer. 

3. Personalized Customer Engagement 

With Salesforce Customer 360, firms can easily use customers’ data to provide a personalized experience. Undoubtedly, personalized customer engagement helps close more deals as it focuses on the particular problem or challenge the customers face and the kind of solution they seek.

For example, if a customer segment shops only when the products are on discount, the sales team will send them the notifications about the discount offers to bring their cart to the billing counter.

4. Artificial Intelligence Optimization 

With the application of artificial intelligence, it becomes easier for firms to understand consumer behavior to enhance their customer relationship in the future. For example, it analyzes the number of clicks on a particular ad, products bought in recent months, collects information from customer profiles, and uses all this insight to recommend products to the customer. 

5. Follow up Feature to Close More Deals

While many people fill their cart, very few bring it to the billing counter. So, Salesforce has designed a new feature for this scenario. The new feature equipped in the marketing cloud offers several incentives, discounts, and attractive coupons to the customers so that the abandoned cart can be brought to the execution phase. 

6. Manage Data in Single Click Interface 

Data management used to be a time-consuming process of organizations as they had to manually share all the data between the departments. The firm’s administrators were responsible for establishing the connection between clients’ data and the different software of Salesforce. So, Salesforce 360 eliminates this challenge completely by implementing data sharing in a few clicks. 

7. Provision of Universal Id

One of the best features that Salesforce Customer 360 offers is Universal ID. an ID is generated for every customer circulated across all the channels and websites. However, the ID is not represented by the name or email of the customer; rather, it is an anonymous identity. The relevant stakeholders can access the relevant insight like the past purchase history, preference of particular brands, shopping price range, etc. This insight helps the stakeholder to communicate with consumers accordingly. 

Architecture Of Salesforce Customer 360

Use Cases of Salesforce 360

The Complete Suite of Salesforce 360 offers a range of use cases for different firm departments. The suite is designed for organizations of small size to large size. So, the functionality of solutions is also designed accordingly.

1. Sales and Marketing 

Business is all about supply and demand. So, there is no sense in shooting in the dark by making blind guesses about customers’ needs. If you are marketing and selling the things the customer needs, you have already increased the chances of successful deals multiple times. So, Salesforce 360 brings the knowledge about your customer on your screen so you can approach customers in a more efficient way. 

2. Personalization 

In this competitive landscape, it is all about how connected you make your customer feel to the organization. Having critical information about your customer and their purchasing habits helps the organization provide a personalized customer experience. For example, if a customer has searched for the price of a particular smartphone model, showcasing the smartphone ad will make them feel more connected with the firm. 

3. Customer Support

Experts at the organization carry the technical knowledge but your customers don’t. So, there might be scenarios where customers cannot describe a particular problem or issue. But it should not stop you from solving the problem. Here, Salesforce 360 helps the support team track, share, and record the data across several systems to provide a better solution to customers.  

4. Speedy Innovation

To sustain in the market, you must deliver the solution before anyone else delivers it. That’s the only way to become a leader. Salesforce 360 lowers the time and elevates the speed for customer data management. So, the decision-making process at the organization enhances, resulting in quicker solution delivery.  

Benefits of Salesforce 360

Having read the above section, you might already have an idea about the benefits it provides to the stakeholders. However, just for a better understanding, let’s go through them one-by-one:

• Artificial intelligence equipped with the solution helps provide a personalized experience to the customer 
• It helps to gain insight into customers and their interest
• Approaching the customers according to their preferences and needs has more chances of conversion
• All the data about customers is shared seamlessly with different departments  
• Data about customers is saved on a secure platform with data anonymization. 
• Enhanced connectivity between departments increases the operational speed 
• Mark an upward curve in collaboration between the departments 
• Instill automation, enablement, and analytics in the business. 
• The solution suite is designed for all sizes of firms
• Firms can easily customize the suits according to their needs 

Implementing the Salesforce 360 in Six Steps 

Having gained all the knowledge about salesforce 360 and its significance in upgrading the firm’s operational process, the question that arises here is, how can we implement salesforce 360 in the organization. So, let’s talk about the whole process in six steps-

1. Identify Sources of Customer Information 

In the process of Salesforce 360 implementation, the first thing you need to do is identify the sources of customer information that needs to be connected. You can start by taking the inventory of current sources your company stores their data. The focus of this step is to ensure the accessibility of all data sources. 

Analysis of the following departments needs to be ensured-

• Shipping
• Marketing 
• Sales
• Customer Service
• Fulfillment 
• Accounting

2. Perform Data Hygiene 

You would not want the low-quality and tangled data to mess up with the new solution. So, perform data hygiene to improve its quality and prevent duplicate data. Different departments at your organization are saving the data on their own. So, standardizing data formatting of the details like email, name, phone numbers, and addresses will help create more accurate records of customers.

3. Integration of Data

Preparation has been done, and it’s time to start working with Salesforce 360. Connect all the existing salesforce apps to Customer 360 to create what the hub that the company calls a single source of truth. It brings whole insights like privacy management, background information, customer identities, and marketing journeys to the central location.

4. Generate a Global Id for Customers 

Get a 360-degree view of your customer by generating a global ID for all of them. This global ID will provide a big-picture view of customers to your sales, marketing, operations, service, and commerce department. The process will help you instill the data-driven culture in your organization’s culture. 

5. Make Experience More Personalized 

Make your customers feel even more connected to you by providing them with a personalized experience. Use the data you bought on the single dashboard to communicate them according to their preference. Sell them the product they need the most, communicate to them when they are planning to buy, offer the discount that might attract them, and offer them additional products according to their core purchase. 

6. Protect Customer Data 

The solution works on cross-cloud technology initiatives, including storing, updating, and transferring customer data. So, Salesforce offers Customer 360 Privacy Center that provides your business with all the necessary tools that help you secure all the data you carry about your customers. Moreover, it even assists you in managing or transferring the information quickly, cleansing the system by storing unused data in other places as well as implementing custom features to meet the data privacy laws. 

Salesforce Customer 360 Pricing 

Salesforce Customer 360 Is Meant for The Complete Range of Small Firms to Large Ones. So, Using the Subscription Model, the Firm Has Ensured that The Plans Are Affordable for All. The Most Basic Version of The Solution Is Priced at $25 per Month per User, Which Is Billed Annually. Simultaneously, the Advanced Edition I.E. Platform Plus, Is Priced at $100 per Month per User, Which Is Also Billed Annually. 

The platform offers “Add-ons” features that allow the users to upgrade their solution. Add-ons are subject to certain charges implemented by Salesforce that increase the overall cost of the platform. 

Conclusion 

Interpreting in a nutshell, Salesforce Customer 360 provides the experience of a robust solution that multiplies the internal operational process of the organization. By connecting the different software and so departments, the solution helps organizations to adopt a more centralized approach. With this, before approaching the customers, they know enough about the customer to take the right step. Hence, the solution plays a significant role in closing deals by providing a personalized experience to customers. 

Emizentech is a leading Salesforce consulting company with experience of optimizing business processes with Salesforce CRM. So, if you need professional assistance with a Salesforce project then get in touch with us.