Data cloud for your business
Salesforce Data Cloud acts as the central nervous system for your entire Customer 360 strategy. By unifying previously siloed information into a single, real-time profile, it unlocks a new level of intelligence and responsiveness. This allows businesses to move from generic interactions to hyper-personalized experiences that anticipate customer needs and drive growth across every department.
Powering Hyper-Personalized Marketing Journeys
This is the most immediate use case for many businesses. By unifying data from your CRM, e-commerce platform, website analytics, and mobile apps, Data Cloud allows marketers to build incredibly precise audience segments. You can then trigger marketing journeys in real time based on customer behavior. For example, if a customer browses a specific product category on your website and then opens your mobile app, you can instantly send them a push notification with a relevant offer, creating a truly connected and timely experience that boosts conversion rates.
Equipping Service Agents with Proactive Insights
Imagine a service agent who can see a customer's entire history in real time. With Data Cloud, when a customer calls for support, the agent's console can display not only their past service tickets but also their recent purchases, marketing emails they've received, and even their activity on your website just moments before. This allows the agent to move beyond reactive problem-solving. They can anticipate questions, understand the full context of the issue, and identify opportunities—like offering a loyalty discount after a frustrating experience—turning a support call into a relationship-building moment.
Creating Smarter and More Focused Sales Cycles
For sales teams, Data Cloud provides a powerful tool to prioritize efforts and tailor outreach. It can unify customer engagement data to generate a "propensity to buy" score for each lead. A sales representative can start their day by focusing on prospects who have recently visited the pricing page, downloaded a whitepaper, and attended a webinar. This allows them to engage with the warmest leads first, armed with the full context of the prospect's interests, leading to more relevant conversations and a shorter sales cycle.
Unifying Customer Data to Eliminate Silos
At its core, Data Cloud solves the foundational business problem of fragmented data. It acts as the single source of truth that all other departments can plug into. This eliminates discrepancies and ensures that sales, service, and marketing are all working from the same, up-to-the-minute information. This operational efficiency reduces internal friction, improves data quality, and ensures that every decision-maker, from a marketing manager to a chief revenue officer, has a consistent and trustworthy view of the customer.
Fueling More Accurate and Actionable AI
Artificial intelligence, like Salesforce Einstein, is only as smart as the data it learns from. By feeding AI models with clean, unified, and real-time data from across your entire business, Data Cloud significantly enhances their accuracy and predictive power. This leads to more reliable sales forecasts, more relevant product recommendations, and more precise predictions about customer behavior, allowing you to leverage AI with greater confidence to automate processes and make strategic decisions.
Data cloud features
Salesforce Data Cloud serves as the foundational data platform for the entire Customer 360, enabling businesses to connect, harmonize, and activate customer data from any source in real time. Its features are designed to create a single source of truth that powers more intelligent and personalized interactions across all other Salesforce clouds.
Data Ingestion and Unification
At its core, Data Cloud is built to bring all of your customer data together. It provides built-in connectors for all Salesforce clouds (e.g., Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud) and offers flexible ingestion methods for any external source. This includes streaming data in real time from websites or mobile apps, as well as bulk data ingestion from data lakes like Snowflake or Amazon S3. This feature allows businesses to create a comprehensive view by combining all available customer information in one place.
Identity Resolution
This feature is crucial for creating a single, unified profile for each customer. Data Cloud uses intelligent, AI-powered matching rules to identify and merge customer records from different systems, even with conflicting or incomplete information. For example, it can determine that a lead from your website, a contact in your CRM, and a purchaser on your e-commerce site are all the same person. This "golden record" eliminates duplicates and provides a true 360-degree view of every individual.
Data Modeling and Harmonization
Once data is ingested, Data Cloud maps it to a single, canonical data model. This harmonizes disparate data into a standardized format, making it easy to understand and use across different applications. For instance, a "purchase date" from your e-commerce platform and a "sale date" from your point-of-sale system can both be mapped to a single "Order Date" field on the unified profile, ensuring consistency and clarity.
Segmentation and Analytics
With all your data unified, Data Cloud provides powerful, user-friendly tools to build precise audience segments. Marketers and business users can use a visual builder to filter and group customers based on any attribute, such as demographics, purchase history, and real-time engagement data. These segments can be used to create highly targeted campaigns and personalized experiences. The platform also allows for deep analytics and calculated insights, such as determining a customer's lifetime value or churn risk.
Data Activation
Data Cloud is designed to put your unified data into action across any channel. Segments and insights created in Data Cloud can be "activated" in real time across the entire Salesforce ecosystem. This means a newly created customer segment can be instantly available in Marketing Cloud for an email journey, in Sales Cloud to inform sales reps, or in Service Cloud to provide agents with the latest customer context. Activation can also be configured for external platforms, such as advertising networks.
Einstein AI Integration
Data Cloud is the fuel for Salesforce's Einstein AI. By providing clean, unified, and real-time data, it significantly enhances the power and accuracy of AI-driven insights. Einstein can leverage this comprehensive data to generate more accurate predictions, such as propensity to buy, and to power generative AI features like personalized email copy or summarizations of a customer's complete history. This integration ensures that your AI is operating on the most complete and trustworthy data available.
Data Cloud implementation
Implementing Salesforce Data Cloud is a foundational step towards becoming a truly customer-centric organization. It's a strategic data project that goes beyond a typical CRM setup. At ASC digital, we guide you through this complex process, focusing on building a robust, unified data foundation that unlocks the full potential of your Customer 360. Our methodology ensures your data is not only connected and clean but also actionable and ready to power smarter experiences across every department.
Presales
Our engagement begins with a strategic conversation focused on your core business objectives. We seek to understand your current data landscape, the systems where your customer data resides, and the primary challenges your teams face due to data silos. We work with you to identify a primary, high-impact use case—such as powering real-time marketing personalization or providing service agents with a complete customer view—that will anchor the implementation and deliver immediate, measurable value.
Discovery
This is the most critical phase of a Data Cloud implementation. It is an intensive deep dive into your data ecosystem. Through collaborative workshops with your business, IT, and compliance teams, we:
- Identify and map every source of customer data.
- Define the unified customer profile and the key attributes required.
- Establish the strategy and rules for identity resolution to merge duplicate records.
- Map your data governance, privacy, and consent management requirements. The result is a comprehensive data strategy and technical blueprint that will guide the entire project.
Build
With the data blueprint finalized, our certified specialists begin the technical construction of your Data Cloud environment. This phase involves:
- Configuring the data streams to ingest information from your various source systems.
- Mapping and harmonizing the incoming data to the single, canonical data model.
- Implementing the identity resolution rules to accurately unify customer profiles.
- Creating calculated insights to derive new metrics like customer lifetime value or engagement scores. This meticulous work transforms your raw, fragmented data into a clean, unified, and intelligent asset.
Testing
Testing Data Cloud is a process of rigorous data validation. Our quality assurance goes beyond simple feature checks to verify the integrity of the entire data flow. We validate that data from source systems is ingested correctly, that the identity resolution rules are accurately merging profiles without error, and that data transformations are happening as expected. We then test the activation process, ensuring a newly created segment populates correctly and is successfully delivered to its target platform, such as Marketing Cloud or Sales Cloud.
Delivery
The delivery phase is when your unified data becomes actionable. We deploy the finalized data model and enable the live data streams into your production environment. The crucial step in this phase is launching the first activation use case defined during presales, proving the end-to-end value of the platform. We provide comprehensive training to your data stewards, analysts, and marketers on how to leverage Data Cloud for segmentation, insight discovery, and activation, empowering them to become self-sufficient.
Hypercare
Our commitment to your data success continues after go-live. We provide a dedicated hypercare period to monitor the health of your data pipelines and the performance of the platform. Our team is on standby to help refine identity resolution rules as new data patterns emerge and to support your teams as they build and activate their first campaigns. This ensures a stable foundation, drives user adoption, and helps you quickly realize the transformative power of unified customer data.
What improvements do you need for your organization? Our team is here to offer expert advice. Book a call