Salesforce on Tuesday introduced Salesforce Customer 360, a unified customer ID that connects profile data across its Sales, Services, Commerce and Marketing cloud product suites.
“There are so many ways for a person to engage with a brand nowadays and a certain level of control has been lost behind these layers of technology and media,” said Patrick Stokes, the senior VP of product management for the new product.
Unveiled at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce Customer 360 is a free additional feature available to clients operating Salesforce’s cloud products. Salesforce Customer 360 becomes an onboarding and integration hub for data housed in Salesforce or pulled from other sources.
On top of Salesforce data – which may include CRM or transaction data from Commerce Cloud or campaign data from Marketing Cloud – any partner plugged into MuleSoft’s integration API can be incorporated into Customer 360.
Stokes called MuleSoft’s middleware technology, which Salesforce bought earlier this year for $6.5 billion, critical to the new offering.
“Sourcing data from multiple places instead of just Salesforce consoles enables [metrics] like risk of churn, lifetime value and more complete profile data,” he said.
Salesforce Customer 360 should also give customers a better sense of their true customer or audience base.
A brand with 25 million different data-driven profiles across Salesforce products and other vendors might only be looking at a few million individuals, Stokes said.
The IDs should also help Salesforce partner in areas where it is not directly involved, such as media buying and attribution.
Once Customer 360 has eliminated duplicates and strengthened the data attached to profiles, it can send those IDs to buying platforms or measurement partners such as Google, which announced an attribution partnership with Salesforce in June that marked the first time Google Analytics data was allowed to leave Google-owned systems.
Customer 360 is launching with products for a few common use cases, including linking data from its marketing and commerce clouds to connect, say, abandoned ecommerce shopping carts to online ad audiences or enabling live service agents to access a customer’s case history and lifetime value data, Stokes said.
“But where I see this growing,” he said, “is into something like an app store for integrations.”
