What does Customer 360 really mean and how you can benefit from it? 6 min 17.12.2020

After visiting the first-ever virtual Salesforce Dreamforce in this article we assume what Salesforce Customer 360 really mean and how it is going to impact your business. But first, let’s try to understand the concept.  

Customer 360 meaning and benefits 

Customer 360 is a special Salesforce technology that combines services to build a single view of a customer. The main idea is to have a complete understanding of your customers at all stages of the life cycle, from acquisition to referral. We tend to see it as a universal solution that can include exactly as many features of the platform as it meets the needs of a particular customer.  

The Customer Is In The Middle

Can you imagine your customer in the middle? What will it be like? 

Customer 360 was designed to unite all your departments around the customer to deliver a connected experience.  

• Sales: your team can be more productive and close deals even faster, and improve sales with the CPQ & Billing solution;
• Service: deliver a consistent service experience across your customers whether online, on the phone, even in chatbots;
• Marketing: create better customer relationships by delivering personal campaigns and journeys which means delivering the right message at the right time and at the right moment;
• Commerce: develop personal customer shopping journeys, even if a customer starts it in one channel and completes it on another with the Commerce Cloud platform; 
• Analytics: with Tableau visualize data analytics from each data source and turn it into insights;  
• Integration: integrate data from any source, important information available in one place (Mulesoft, Jitterbit, etc.);
• Industries: with offered industry solutions and tools to tap into the best Salesforce technology, for industries such as retail, healthcare, travel and hospitality and others;
• Learning: upskill and train your partner even your customers using special learning platforms and tools;  
• Employees: you can empower your employees with build and collaboration tools to allow them to work anytime anywhere; 
• Partners: eco-system of partners; 
• Success: you can tap also into the support areas, expertise and professional services to maximize your value.  

Salesforce Customer 360 Benefits For Your Business

To make sure this approach is suitable for you we can suggest you keep answering these questions: 

1. What industry is your business in?  
2. What is your role?  
3. What is your biggest challenge? 

We consider Customer 360 will find the best solution not only for sales and marketing specialists but also for the company’s executives. Let’s parse some cases.   

Talking about finding better leads for marketing roles in the transportation and hospitality industry Salesforce Customer 360 platform can do the following steps: 

• create targeted emails that build a qualified pipeline by creating dynamic emails your customers want to read and using A/B testing to pinpoint the best approach 
• faster generate better leads by turning cold leads into sales-ready prospects with automated nurture tracks 
• you can score, route and nurture every lead by automatically lead scoring  

If you are a sales manager in the healthcare industry and probably you want successfully win more deals, the solutions listed below by cloud customer 360 for Salesforce will help to achieve them by:  

• centralizing your customer information and aligning customer data in one place  
• streamlining your sales processes and focusing on the right prospects by giving employees the tools to sell from anywhere 
• automating your routine work and giving every employee more time to sell  

In high tech industry to keep customers happy employees in IT roles can deliver it with help of customer 360 in Salesforce solutions: 

• connect with your customers on any channel by delivering the kind of support they expect across social media, text, phone and more 
• get a complete view of every customer by getting a single view of every client across marketing, sales and services 
• help more clients by making every employee a client support expert 

As the executive of financial services, you want to build trusted relationships with wealthy clients and advisors using Customer 360 truth Salesforce:   

• personalize at scale by managing multiple clients and households and easily track every financial goal and life event across your entire client base 
• understand every client connection by viewing all account information for every client, household, relationship network in one place and by tracking goals, taking actions on business groups, following up on any interactions 
• make smarter and faster client decisions with AI by getting insights into clients, their households and business network 
• start every advisor’s day with a task list tailored just for them by putting all the information they need, from client life events to customer history, in one place. 

To make consumer goods buying online easy Customer 360 will suggest you next solutions: 

• launch a digital ordering portal quickly by giving sales and services representatives a single view of customers across digital and physical channels and by giving business buyers the power to make purchases anytime and anywhere 
• get faster time to value by lowering your cost with service tools, live chat and knowledge-based articles which can help buyers to find the information they need without trying to support resources 
• scale as you grow by enabling online ordering, it will help you to reallocate more time and money to other growth initiatives. 

What Does An Ideal Customer Experience Look Like? 

The Warehouse Group, one of the largest retailing groups in New Zealand, is using Customer 360 Data Manager to build a single customer view across six brands. Before, customers would have different profiles for each individual brand. Now customers have a single login across The Warehouse Group brands. With Customer 360 Audiences, The Warehouse Group can connect disparate customer data across each of their brands, including purchase history, online browsing behaviour and more to understand and personally engage with customers based on their individual preferences.  

As we see, with a single source of truth, you can connect to customers by:  

• salesforce customer 360 identity which provides services to identify your customer 
• salesforce customer 360 data center which connects customer data within Salesforce and non-Salesforce systems to create a global profile and issue a single Salesforce ID for each person 
• salesforce customer 360 audience which is a customer data platform that keeps your one central place to unify and enable data personalization anywhere  
• salesforce customer 360 privacy center which is a special tool to make it easier to manage customer data privacy regulations    

That’s why we consider, because of delivering the best solutions for your business and supporting growing expectations, Salesforce doesn’t stop developing their technology, and implements features and tools. We believe our guesswork will work.  

Learn more about Salesforce Commerce Cloud for B2B.