Salesforce Customer 360 is a technology that aims to help businesses enhance the customer experience by utilizing a complete view of every consumer. It is designed to provide businesses with a centralized, 360-degree view of each customer, which enables them to make more informed decisions and improve customer engagement.

What is Salesforce Customer 360?

A suite of tools and capabilities offered by Salesforce, Salesforce Customer 360 allows businesses to connect and centralize customer data from various departments such as marketing, sales, and service. It provides a comprehensive view of the customer, helping businesses make more informed decisions and improve customer engagement. 

The goal of Customer 360 is to gain a holistic view of the customer, which can help companies to better understand their customers and tailor their products, services, and marketing efforts to meet their needs. This can be achieved by using a variety of tools and technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, business intelligence (BI) platforms, and machine learning (ML) algorithms.

A 360-Degree Customer Experience

Salesforce Customer 360 allows businesses to access a centralized database of customer information, which can be used to segment audiences, create more targeted campaigns, track the effectiveness of campaigns, and identify sales opportunities. It also comes with built-in AI and analytics capabilities such as Einstein, which can be used to gain insights into customer data, make predictions about customer behavior and preferences, and create more targeted campaigns. 

Salesforce Customer 360 is a flexible platform that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a company and its industry.

How different departments can benefit from shared customer insight and the right tools (clouds):

Marketing Cloud

By having access to a centralized customer database, marketing teams can segment their audience and create more targeted campaigns. They can also track the effectiveness of their campaigns and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Sales Cloud

Arm your sales organization with the tools and data it needs to develop and implement a precise, repeatable sales process, so sales reps spend less time doing data entry and more time thoughtfully connecting with customers.

Service Cloud

Service teams can use customer data to provide personalized support, resolve issues more quickly, and improve overall customer satisfaction. They can also use the data to identify potential service issues and address them proactively.

Commerce Cloud

Build simple, seamless digital commerce experiences that help grow revenue, exceed customers’ expectations, and connect commerce to the rest of your business.

Analytics (Tableau/Einstein)

Analytics tools such as Tableau and Einstein can be used in conjunction with Salesforce Customer 360 to gain deeper insights into customer data and make data-driven decisions. Tableau is a data visualization tool that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports to gain insights into customer data. Einstein is a set of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools that can be used to analyze customer data and make predictions about customer behavior and preferences.

Yes, Salesforce Customer 360 is a flexible platform that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a company and its industry. Some of the ways it can be customized include:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics: Salesforce Customer 360 comes with built-in AI and analytics capabilities, such as Einstein, which can be used to gain insights into customer data. These capabilities can be customized to meet the specific needs of a company, such as identifying sales opportunities, predicting customer behavior, and creating more targeted campaigns. 
• Integration: Salesforce Customer 360 can be integrated with other systems, such as marketing automation platforms, e-commerce platforms, and financial systems. This allows businesses to have a more holistic view of the customer and make more informed decisions. 
• Training: Salesforce provides various training options for companies to help their employees learn how to use the platform effectively. This includes online resources, instructor-led training, and certification programs.

By tailoring the capabilities of Salesforce Customer 360 to meet the specific needs of a company and its industry, it can help businesses improve performance, increase customer satisfaction, and drive growth.

Here are the top features of Salesforce Customer 360:

Customer 360 includes tools for managing customer data, such as customer profiles, contact information, and interactions. These tools enable businesses to maintain a single, up-to-date view of the customer, and they support data integration with other systems and channels. Companies may easily gather client data from many sources in a streamlined manner with the use of this CRM solution.

Customer 360 Truth

Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is a set of capabilities that allow companies to connect and govern customer data and identity across Salesforce. It allows companies to have a single view of each customer’s behavior and transactional data, all from one trusted source. This can help companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers, improve customer engagement and make more informed decisions.

Some of the key capabilities of Salesforce Customer 360 Truth include:

• Data governance: It allows companies to manage and govern customer data across the organization, ensuring that data is accurate, complete, and compliant with regulations. 
• Identity resolution: It allows companies to resolve customer identity across different systems and channels, creating a single view of the customer. 
• Customer 360 view: This allows companies to observe each customer’s behavior and transactional data in a single view, all from one trusted source. 
• AI-powered insights: Salesforce Customer 360 Truth comes with built-in AI and analytics capabilities, such as Einstein, which can be used to gain insights into customer data, make predictions about customer behavior and preferences, and create more targeted campaigns. 
• Data quality: It allows companies to improve data quality across the organization, ensuring that data is accurate, complete, and consistent. 
• Data integration: It allows companies to integrate customer data from different sources, creating a single view of the customer across the organization.

Customer 360 Identity

Salesforce Identity is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) service that allows companies to improve engagement with partners and customers by creating a universal profile for customers. It allows businesses to build a reliable customer identity by assigning a unique ID to each person, which ties multiple records of that person across different systems. 

Some of the key features of Salesforce Identity include:

• Single Sign-On (SSO): It allows customers and partners to use a single set of login credentials to access multiple systems, improving the user experience and reducing friction. 
• Federated Identity: It allows companies to integrate with external identity providers, such as Google or Microsoft, to authenticate users and provide secure access to applications. Identity Verification: Allows organizations to verify the identity of customers and partners using various methods, such as email verification, phone verification, and multi-factor authentication. 
• Role-based Access Control (RBAC): It allows companies to control access to resources and applications based on user roles and permissions, ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive information. 
• Compliance: Salesforce Identity provides various compliance features, such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, to ensure that customer data is handled in a compliant manner. 
• API-based integration: Salesforce Identity provides APIs that allow companies to integrate with other systems and applications, allowing for a seamless experience for the customer.

Customer 360 Data Manager

The Customer 360 Data Manager is responsible for managing and maintaining a comprehensive view of a company’s customer data. This includes collecting, integrating, and analyzing data from various sources such as CRM systems, marketing platforms, and social media.

Customer 360 Audiences

In addition to creating custom audience segments, Customer 360 Audiences provides valuable insights into customer sentiment and opinion through features such as retail and sales tracking, as well as review monitoring. Retail tracking allows companies to see where their products are being sold, how they are performing, and where they can improve. Sales tracking allows companies to monitor the performance of their sales team and identify areas for improvement. Review monitoring gives companies the ability to track customer reviews and sentiment across different platforms, such as social media, e-commerce sites, and review websites. This information can be used to improve the customer experience, address customer complaints, and make data-driven decisions to drive business growth.

Customer 360 Privacy Center

The Salesforce Customer 360 Privacy Center is a feature that allows companies to manage and comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. It provides a centralized location where companies can manage customer data requests, such as data deletion and data export requests, as well as view customer data consent and preference settings. The Privacy Center also enables organizations to set up data retention policies and provides tools to help identify and remove sensitive data. Additionally, it also allows organizations to create and manage data protection rules based on their own business needs. With the Customer 360 Privacy Center, companies can ensure that they are handling customer data in a compliant and transparent manner, which helps to build trust with customers and protects the company’s reputation.

Customer 360 Data Analytics

Provides a platform that allows you to consolidate client data from multiple sources, forming an umbrella of information of your customers’ information. Also helps you analyze trends and build products that fit certain customer expectations and make informed decisions about what their needs are.

Customer insights

Salesforce’s Customer 360 includes a variety of tools for gaining insights into customer behavior and preferences. These tools allow businesses to segment customers based on demographics, behavior, and other characteristics, and analyze customer data to gain insights into customer needs and preferences. By understanding customer segments, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with specific groups of customers. 

Additionally, the Customer 360 platform allows businesses to track customer interactions, transactions, and engagement with marketing campaigns, which can help identify patterns and trends in customer behavior. This information can be used to optimize marketing and sales efforts and improve the overall customer experience. 

Furthermore, Customer 360 also has advanced analytics capabilities that allow businesses to understand customer behavior and make data-driven decisions. This can be done by creating custom reports, dashboards, and visualizations to gain insights into customer data, as well as by using machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends in customer data.

Customer journey mapping

Customer 360 includes tools for mapping the customer journey across different channels and touchpoints. These tools enable businesses to visualize the customer experience, identify pain points and opportunities, and optimize the customer journey. Companies can identify and categorize their consumers using Customer 360 based on demographics, engagement patterns, and other relevant data. 

It will support businesses in developing and implementing tailored marketing plans. This can help businesses improve the customer experience and drive better results.

Personalization

Customer 360 includes tools for personalizing the customer experience across various channels. These tools enable businesses to deliver personalized content, offers, and recommendations to customers based on their behavior and preferences. This can help businesses. With the aid of Customer 360, it is simple for organizations to use the data for marketing, sales, and customer service once they have identified their target market.

Simple Optimization (Einstein AI)

The Einstein Analytics system, which is integrated with Salesforce’s Customer 360 solution, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist businesses in analyzing and understanding customer behavior. It can help businesses to identify patterns and trends in customer data and make data-driven decisions. 

One of the key benefits of Einstein Analytics is that it can automatically refresh customer data based on their behavior, which enables businesses to quickly respond to changes in customer needs and preferences. This can help businesses to maximize customer engagement and increase customer satisfaction. 

The system can also help businesses to create custom reports and dashboards to gain insights into customer data, as well as perform advanced analytics such as predictive modeling and forecasting. Additionally, it allows businesses to build and deploy machine learning models to automate and optimize business processes. 

Einstein Analytics is designed to help businesses to gain deeper insights into customer data and make more informed decisions, leading to a better customer experience and ultimately, more revenue.

Salesforce Platform

The Salesforce platform provides a variety of tools and applications to help businesses manage and analyze customer data. The platform includes modules for sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics, and it can be customized to meet the unique needs of different businesses. 

The Salesforce platform allows businesses to store and manage customer data in a centralized location, which makes it easy to access and analyze customer data across different departments and teams. It also allows businesses to automate and streamline business processes, such as sales forecasting, lead tracking, and customer service. One of the key features of the Salesforce platform is its flexibility and scalability, which allows businesses to start small and grow as needed. Salesforce can be integrated with other systems and applications, such as marketing automation tools, social media platforms, and e-commerce systems. 

The Salesforce platform also offers a variety of tools for gaining insights into customer data, such as Einstein Analytics, which can help businesses to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, the Salesforce platform includes a range of developer tools that allow businesses to create custom applications and integrations to meet their unique needs.

So why utilize Salesforce Customer 360?

1. It offers distinctive experiences to customers.

Using Customer 360, teams can collect, store, and share data on each client. It can also create marketing campaigns that are tailored to your tastes.

2. Your company will prosper and thrive as a result.

Customer 360 will evolve along with your company. It is a flexible and scalable solution that can meet the needs of both a smaller business and a huge multinational enterprise.

3. It can improve the experience for customers.

Customers expect a consistent experience 80% of the time. However, if we have separate marketing, sales, and customer service teams, attaining this goal will be challenging. Aligning the workflow and meeting the client’s expectations will be possible thanks to technology that connects all of the departments. Collaboration across various organizational departments is made easier.

How can a single experience be delivered by Salesforce Customer 360?

It can manage apps and data with a single-click user interface.

Peer-to-peer connections were formerly the only way for businesses to gain a worldwide viewpoint on each client’s information. Admins can make secure communications between Salesforce apps and the communities using Customer 360. They can also search and combine data from different cloud services to provide a unified view of customer data. 

Your business will be able to link client data to a single location easily and securely thanks to these capabilities.

Bundles for services, advertising, and e-commerce are already established.

Every “out-of-the-box” Customer 360 solution has everything your business needs to create linked interactions right now. Its connectivity will already be present in Service Cloud components. Utilizing content and information from Customer 360, Marketing Cloud will rebuild its email and trip templates.

Furthermore, all 360-connected systems for customers will receive data and events from Commerce Cloud. Although Salesforce’s execution of a single view of the client is innovative, the concept itself is not. Customer 360 manages data correctly, allowing it to exist in the systems that manage it and request it as necessary, rather than producing vast volumes of redundant data. Instead of preserving data, businesses can now concentrate on developing fully unified experiences across all channels.

The same ID and profile are used by all apps.

Regardless of how a customer identifies themselves, all Salesforce applications will be capable of identifying them across all platforms using a single identity, or ID. With Salesforce Customer 360, data management features prepare, match, reconcile, and update the target customer across the cloud. With Salesforce Customer 360, data exchange tools give you instant access to pertinent user information.

Final Thoughts

Without a doubt, Salesforce Customer 360 represents a significant advance in the direction of reinventing customer experiences. Your business’s growth and client interactions will be greatly accelerated by the fantastic features and benefits. Your company could need Salesforce CRM and its Customer 360 platform to compete with its competitors in today’s cutthroat industry. If you still lack such a solution, we advise investing in Salesforce 360 for your company. By giving your sales staff the right tools, you can help them grow and perform to their full potential while also saving time and simplifying their work. Your sales team is capable of great things.

Additionally, it will raise the level of efficiency in each of your departments. Numerous Salesforce consulting firms are available to assist corporations in quickly integrating Customer 360 solutions. You may get assistance from Salesforce consultants and experts at any time, letting you take advantage of better client retention, enhanced customer interaction, and stronger customer loyalty.

Indeed. Salesforce’s Customer 360 is a great choice for enhancing the business environment and elevating your organization to previously unachievable levels of productivity and sales. due to its wide functionality, which consists of elements like email tracking, lead management, business opportunity management, and sales collaboration. Try it now to achieve the outcomes you’ve always wanted.

FAQs

1. How can companies tell if Customer 360 by Salesforce is the right choice for them?

Salesforce Customer 360 is designed to be customized to meet the unique requirements of each enterprise. Some businesses may only require one of the industry’s best solutions to support a specific division or business goal, whereas others may benefit from consolidating more of their customization options onto a single, centralized channel to better manage client relationships.

2. Is Salesforce Customer 360 functional with other programs?

Salesforce Customer 360 is made to integrate with other applications to provide a unified back-end experience that aids in the successful management of your organization. One way to integrate Salesforce with other products is through the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace. Each piece of software is simple to set up, allowing you and your team to begin using Salesforce products right away.

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.