Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is Live
Previewed at Dreamforce last year, Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is now generally available. A bundle of identity management, privacy and security tools, it provides users with ways to reconcile customer data across all Salesforce clouds and in 3rd party applications.
Salesforce Customer 360 Truth includes Customer 360 Data Manager, a collection of data connectors that enable its customer data platform, Customer 360 Audiences. In order to collect all of a customer’s data from record that may have been created by Salesforce marketing, e-commerce and sales clouds, including third party applications outside of Salesforce, users can tap 360 Data Manager. The customer data is then amalgamated into a single, unified profile under one Salesforce ID.
It has taken more than a year to develop and the Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is the result of the Mulesoft acquisition from 2019. The acquisition resulted in several integration tools and microservices to connect the different Salesforce clouds.
According to Nicole France, Constellation Research analyst, this is a difficult product territory for Salesforce to negotiate because many Salesforce users assumed these features and functions were already part of the platform when they signed up to it. However, the truth is complicated because the requirements for security, customer data management, and privacy extend further than the CRM model Salesforce has dominated for many years.
The analyst goes on to say that even though eSoft may not have been Salesforce’s most interesting acquisition, it has turned out to be a pivotal part of the company’s evolution.
“What we’re trying to do, the tools that we have, the social channels, the digital channels, customer expectations, that it’s all integrated, up to the minute — it all has changed. Customer data is not in one place; it resides in a lot of systems. There is a need here, and it’s good that Salesforce is addressing it,” said France.
Customer 360 adds ID management, single sign-on
The marketing-focused CDP uses artificial intelligence to create segments from customer data. This is activated across CRM, e-commerce, customer service, and other data sources its users connect to. CPDs however, aren’t well known for handling identity management, so Salesforce has built a different and separate tool. Their Customer 360 Data Manager was create to go with Salesforce’s Customer 360 Audiences CDP.
Another release is Salesforce Customer 360 Privacy Centre which enables compliance with emerging customer protection laws (GDPR, CCPA). Administrators can create policies in order to manage the way their Salesforce deletes, retain, archives and anonymises customer data and enables the transfer of customer data back to them at their request (a requirement in some areas).
Even though CDPs don’t generally handle these type of compliance duties Adobe and Oracle, Salesforce’s rivals have also closely aligned their privacy compliance with CDP functions.
According to Ryane Bohm, director of platform product marketing at Salesforce, the 2020 pandemic has shown that there’s a need for Salesforce 360 Customer Truth features as retailers are building new e-commerce operations. Important parts of those operations are single sign-on tools and identity resolution.
A single sign-on login and access management tool, Customer 360 Identity, is in pilot now and due to be released by the beginning of the next year. It is being developed to provide a single customer login across all Salesforce digital properties. There will also be an option for setting up passwordless login such as facial and fingerprint recognition.
According to Bohm, the idea is to give an Amazon-like experience to Salesforce users, where customer have on login for Amazon.com, Whole Foods, Amazon Prime and other platforms.
To create Customer 360 Identity, Salesforce joined forces with customer identity and access management vendor Auth0. Bohm went on to say that the partnership allowed Salesforce to provide admins and developers with single sign-on capability, scalability, and workflow templates faster than if Salesforce had doubled-down and built it themselves.
“They have a library of templates, and they also have the ability to use code to create their own,” Bohm said. “It’s decreasing our time to market by tapping into [what] they already have.”
Salesforce 360 Customer Data Manager is free for subscribers of the different Enterprise Editions, while Customer 360 Audience, Privacy Centre and Identity come at additional costs.
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