What is Salesforce CDP – Everything You Need to Know

What does Salesforce as a company Known for? The company majorly stands for its commitment to creating solutions which provide an extensive customer centric products and services. They catered all their products towards solving problems for organizations, which can help to service their customer more efficiently. 

Whether it’s their Customer Relationship Management tool, with which they initially started, or the latest acquisition of Slack, which is well renowned business communication platform. Everything they create or acquire is focused towards one thing, solving companies’ customer related problems and providing a seamless experience to their customers.

Having a solution such as CDP has become a very crucial component in marketing nowadays. In today’s world, it very important to know your customers and understand how they are interacting with your products and services across many channels and platforms they are using. Before taking any decision, today’s customers explore a lot of different alternatives, so that they can get as much information as possible to make the right choice.

They may start by searching on search engines, reading articles or watching a video about the product or service which they are looking, go through various portals to compare the prices, check reviews, etc. And all these things are not even consistent. The decision can span from an hour to more than a couple of weeks. All these activities which users do for achieving their expected outcome are the customer journey.

If you don’t understand the customer behaviour and have a track of customer interaction across different channels and platforms throughout their journey; as a marketer, it becomes very difficult to serve right communication at the right time on right place. As a result, you can miss out on a lot of opportunity here.

What is Salesforce CDP?

Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps in unifying all the customer data throughout your organization, whether it’s online or offline. It integrates data from various data sources such as CRMs, databases from all departments, marketing cloud, ecommerce engines, customer service, sales cloud or any other respective platform where data is available.

It’s an easy-to-use platform, which can be operated by any non-technical user. Few weeks of hands on training is more than enough for any individual to get hold of the platform. It helps in collecting customer data and using that data to create superior customer experiences. It not just unifies the data across all data sources, but also stitches that data with each individual customer.

CDP has the capability of merging PII(Personal Identifiable Information) such as customer’s email, name, phone numbers. With the anonymous data about customers, like their behavior on the website or app. This helps are orchestrating complete customer journey, which ultimately helps create seamless and personalized experiences served towards the stage of the journey in which the customer is at that point in time.

A Brief History

Salesforce acquired a company named as Krux in late 2016 from where the journey of Salesforce CDP started. They first rebranded it as Salesforce DMP, which was majorly acquiring anonymous customer data for creating audience segments, suitable for targeting on different demand side platforms(DSPs).

Later in autumn of 2019, they started adding more core functionalities to the platform, specially integrating PIIs of customers and worked towards creating associating this known data with anonymous users. This helped in enriching the first party data and making them more powerful for marketers. Initially, it was called as Customer 360 Audiences, now also as Salesforce CDP.

Since then, they are on the spree of acquiring companies such as Datorama, Tableau and Evergage(currently Interaction Studio) to enhance the capabilities and accompany their Customer 360 vision.

Now Salesforce CDP is a part of the complete Salesforce Marketing Cloud(SMC) offerings. SMC comprises other products which can be seamlessly integrated with CDP to create a unified epicentre for the customer’s experience. It provides solutions for Email Marketing, analytics, Social & marketing automation and many more.

Benefits of Salesforce Customer Data Platform

CDP provides a lot for functionalities which can be boon to any organization’s marketing. Salesforce CDP act as a repository of all data about your customer, whether known(PIIs) or unknown(anonymous). It creates segments of the audience which can be used for efficient communication and can be activated across associated channels.

• Salesforce CDP act a single source of truth about your customers. It creates a unified customer profile for each individual customer, which serves as a foundation for tracking customer journey.
• Complies with all the policies and regulations which are created for protecting customers’ privacy, whether its GDPR, CCPA or any other regulations. It makes data sharing with other third parties more accountable and secure.
• Creating audience segments is easy and can be rapid, which can then to export to any third party ad platforms. Making marketing more efficient and ROI driven, as these audience segments are targeted with more personalized marketing experiences leading to better ROAS(Return on Ad Spends).
• Since all data is unified and structured, it helps in creating a base for using predictive analytics, machine learning and AI, for generating far better insights, recommendations, forecasting and predicting future behavior of customers.

Salesforce CDP Architecture

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, who is SVP Engineering, Marketing Cloud Salesforce, has explained the architecture beautifully in AWS Reinvent(YouTube Link) in 2020.

Complete Salesforce Architecture is built on four basic microservice principles.

1. Cloud-Native Foundation: Simply put, building and running software, that are based on cloud architecture. You can easily create and deploy products faster and scale as per your requirements. Salesforce CDP architecture is created keeping in mind about the flexibility of deploying the product on any cloud infrastructure. In case, if in future there is a requirement of re-deploying the product, that can effortlessly be done.
2. Choose the right tech for portability: Portability becomes a big issue at the later stage, when you need to do any kind of up-gradation or you work on creating something new as a part of the overall product. Having the right technology behind, which is agile and services which are used in the development, can be added or removed smoothly as per requirement. Salesforce CDP is built on AWS, which provides a plethora of services under their umbrella, to serve the goals.
3. Monitor and Measure Everything: Monitor each service, if they are functioning accurately and measuring everything, doesn’t matter how small or big any activity is. Alert systems are in place to monitor everything and if anything happens, which is not the normal, then the respective authority are alerted immediately.
4. Watch cost like a hawk: This principle is so important, but is vastly underestimated. You need to have a check on the cost involved with each of the services and how it can be optimized to bring it at the optimal level. It is important to create the cost model from the beginning of the project, as this will help in understanding the overall effectiveness of the product.

The complete Customer Data Platform architecture is created considering the five V’s ( Data Velocity, Data Variety, Data Veracity, Data Volume and Data Value). Developing a product which is so sophisticated is quite an arduous task to accomplish, especially with the rapid change in the technological development in the recent years. So, the complete development should be created taking care about the flexibility and adaptability.

As explained by Mr.Muralidhar Krishnaprasad –

So we first start with the storage stack. So, as with any traditional big data storage stack, we have a file storage where all the files are stored, and they are stored in ORC format today. There’s a hot store for us to be able to supply data fast, certainly a sequel metadata store for the metadata and a hive meta store for all the big data processing.

On top of that is the traditional compute for big data. That’s part of Preston air flow. We use air flow for all the workflow engines, presto, and spark for querying and doing data processing.

Above that, we have all the data modelling aspects, whether it’s even data or data models for the file data and all the ETL transformations as the data is coming in.

Finally, you have all the CDP service systems for micro-services like I’ve introduced solution segmentation and so on.

Obviously, data has to come in, so we have a full-blown connector infrastructure to various systems, including CRM marketing cloud third-party connectors via app exchange.

And the activation channels back on the other side to messaging advertisement channels, personalization channels, the data analysis, why a Tableau de drama and a whole control management plan of these micro-services, and then to sort of tie it all together, a lightning based app setup and metadata.

AWS powers Salesforce CDP, which is helping it to unify and manage billions of record on consumer data, at scale. Complete Salesforce CDP architecture is deployed on AWS(Amazon Web Services) Cloud, which provides one of most agile and robust data infrastructure which can hold exabytes of data, without compromising on reliability, speed and  security.

As you can see in the below diagram, Salesforce CDP uses many products of AWS to serve their purpose. For storage, Amazon S3 and DynamoDB are used. Spark, presto and other jobs run on Amazon EMR. Amazon RDS is used for all the big data processing, all the compute runs as Kubernetes on EKS and visa.

Main Use Cases of Salesforce CDP

Use Case is nothing but the scenario in which a product can be used. The CDP is built taking into consideration on the issues which marketers face in the real world on almost everyday basis. Salesforce CDP is one of the most agile and potent systems out there.

You can find your required use cases in the below mentioned features. If not, then don’t worry, the platform is flexible enough to get a customized solution provisioned towards your use cases.

Following are some of the primary use cases:

Data Unification: Unifying data from all available resources, whether is Email Management tool, CRM systems, Databases, Ad Platforms, Analytics tools etc. is done on the platform. For example, it can import data from Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data, into Salesforce CDP to ingest and associate with the respective customers.

Customer Identity resolution: Salesforce CDP helps in creating building a coherent and uniform customer experience for customers by creating a single customer profile id and record. Customer information from other data sources can then be merged and be associated with this profile id. This act as a single source of truth for each customer, and helps in creating customer journey across all platforms and channels.

Audience Segmentation: Using Salesforce CDP, you can create different audience segments, that also at a very granular level. These segments then can also be combined and exported to marketing channels for creating superior personalized engagement experiences for the users. These audience segments can literally be updated in real-time, that can be immediately deployed for serving in marketing campaigns.

Delivery Management: This robust platform can assist your marketing team in having control on the spends across marketing channel and streamlining all the campaigns according to the key metrics which are important for delivering ideal results. One can target their customer efficiently and with engage communication, ROI can be improved dramatically.

Consent Management: Important PII information about the customer needs to be secured at any cost. Data in Salesforce CDP is encrypted to secure this sensitive data. There are numerous laws and regulations for different regions with which any organization needs to be in compliant, in order to collect data. Being compliant on paper in one thing but implementing and abiding that compliance at platform level is quite challenging. Salesforce Platform complies with GDPR, CCPA and any other data related regulations for varied regions. So your problem of managing and collecting data is already taken care, just by associating with Salesforce.

Analyze Metrics: Visualize your data in platforms such as Tableau and Datorama, which have an extensive library of templates, plots, graphs and dashboards. Your data from CDP can easily be exported to these platforms and powerful interactive dashboards can be created, that can be utilized for analyzing the data and deriving insights. Since all the data from disparate sources is harmonized, you can understand about your customers’ behavior at the macro level.

How to implement Salesforce CDP?

Before getting into the implementation part, one you understand the pre-requisites for the same. You need to have a strong action plan and strategy with right milestones and goals to keep the progress in track and aligned with your business requirements. You should have clearly defined use cases which you are trying to solve using the customer data platform.

Though more focussed towards marketing department, it will be like a digital transformation for the whole company’s ecosystem, and proper preparation and support will be required from all the team members across the organization. Identify the questions, queries upfront and create a list before implementation.

Document everything step-by-step for detailed understanding. This will also be helpful in something goes wrong in the future. It will act as a reference guide. Talk with Salesforce CDP support and account management team to get a complete idea about the system requirements required for the execution and check if any further enhancement is required at your end.

Salesforce recognizes three important points to be considered before starting the implementing process:

1. Identify the Stakeholders: Spot the people who will help in the decision making and assisting the core team throughout the implementation phase.
2. Identify Data Sources and Integration: List down all the data sources which are available within your organization. Recognize which department is having what type of data and how that is going to be integrated with the CDP.
3. Identify CDP Users: Once implemented, who will be the users of CDP platform? Are they admin, marketing managers, data specialists or any others. What kind of access will be provided to them according to the hierarchy or responsibilities within the organization?

Once you are done with all the above mentioned steps, you can move ahead and get started with the implementation steps. One of the best advantages of Salesforce CDP is that it’s a Self-Service platform. You don’t have to be highly sound on tech to get started with it. They have provided a detailed step-by-step implementation guide to help you with every step. And of course, their account management and support team is always there to assist you in proper enactment of the product.

Implementation steps are distributed into four parts:

1. Configure and Connect: Here, the Salesforce CDP admin, who is having the highest authority, identifies all data sources that need to be configure and connected across the organization. He creates users access, administers system arrangement and decided what needs to be associated with anything.
2. Ingest, Map, and Model: What data needs to be imported from all available sources such as marketing cloud, sales, service, customer support, data warehouses,. And how that data needs to be mapped with the Customer data platform, is managed in this step. The relationship between the data model and the objects is ensured, which can be direct or indirect for data segmentation.
3. Create Identity Resolution Rules: Identifying customers and creating profiles unique to them is handled in this step. This is one of the primary function of Salesforce CDP and its required that this is done with highest accuracy.
4. Segment and Activate: Here comes the crucial role of any marketing specialist. Now, you have all the available structured and harmonized data, to segment it as per your requirements and then activate the same on marketing channels. You can create very detailed and enriched audience segments, which can be further used for serving personalized experiences.

What is Customer 360 then?

Incorporate all Salesforce Products to create a Seamless Customer Experience. Customer 360 provide a customized solution for their customer based on industry which they belong. Providing solutions for industry such as Financial Services, HealthCare & Life Sciences, Retail, Consumer Goods, Manufacturing, Communications, Media, Public Sector, Energy, Transportation & Hospitality, Education, Non-Profit, Personal Services, High-Tech and various others.   

One can select a particular department and identify goals for it and create a customized solution. For example, if you are from Media industry, you can select marketing department and select goals which you are trying to achieve like Win More Deals, Accelerate Advertising Sales, Maximize Audience Engagement, Personalize every marketing journey, Drive growth in data driven advertising, Grow Subscriber relationships and many more. Similarly, you can select any other industry, department and goals to suit your needs.

For more information you can visit – https://salesforcecustomer360.herokuapp.com/  and click on “Get Started” button to explore more about the solutions specific to your industry.

Which BI tools can be integrated with Salesforce CDP?

Business Intelligence(BI) tools, such as Tableau and Datorama, can be directly integrated with the CDP. Both of the these tools were acquired by Salesforce in recent years. Acquisition of Tableau was completed on 1st August 2019. And Datorama was acquired in August 2018. Both platforms are widely popular among BI developers and community, and provide extensive options in creating variations of dashboards and reporting templates.

Apart from these two, if you want to get integration with other BI tools, you can use MuleSoft, which is one of world’s leading integration platform for APIs, SAAS and SOAs. It can connect with any softwares, applications and data sources easily, which are available on the Salesforce App Exchange. And most of the applications are available on the app exchange. And in case any application or tools is not there, you can get customized solution from MuleSoft to that respective tool integration. 

Is there a difference between Salesforce CDP and Interaction Studio?

Largely, the difference between both the platforms is based on the functionalities which they have. Salesforce is built to unify user profiles with data available across all sources in the organization. While Interaction studio is built to help create personalized experiences for those unified profiles. Both platforms are part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and can be used as a complement to each other. As without each other, they won’t be able to fulfil their use cases.

Salesforce CDP is created on top of Krux, a company which Salesforce acquired in 2016. Initially re-branded as Salesforce DMP, has been upgraded with more functionalities and now can be used as a complete data management solution.

CDP is developed for the following purposes:

1. Unify and identify Customers profiles and associate them with all available data sources.
2. Manages consent, as it helps in maintaining data privacy of users and has compliance with regulation policies.
3. Segment and enrich first party, second party and third-party data.
4. Visualize and understand customer behavior across their journey.
5. Activate Data on all external platforms, such as advertising channels.

Salesforce Interaction Studio is built on top of Evergage, which was acquired in 2020. The platform helps in getting an in-depth understanding of customer behavior and can be used as a base for implementing numerous machine learning models. Based on customers’ or prospects’ interaction data, one can create one-to-one engagement experiences across all touchpoints that also in real-time.

Interaction studio is developed for the following purpose:

1. Compare and optimize experiences for your customers. You can use A/B testing and other testing method to test experiences and increase interaction and engagement.
2. Apply Machine Learning and AI models on top of enriched and structured data for better behavioral analytics.
3. Unify your messaging across all different touch points which users interact throughout their journey.
4. Connect online and offline experiences of your customer to have a holistic view of your customer’s communication with your brand.
5. Assist users to take the next best action which is suitable to them and enhance their engagement.

Can you integrate other companies’ tools with Salesforce CDP?

Yes, you can connect with various other tools and software available at Salesforce App Exchange from their integration platform called as MuleSoft. It can connect any systems, applications and data sources. MuleSoft’s two main platforms are Anypoint platform – which helps in connecting using APIs and integrations and another is Composer – which helps in integration just with clicks and no coding is required.

Most of the organization will use different products and services at their end to serve their needs. It’s unnecessary that these products will be from the same vendor. If the products are not from the same vendor, then the core system databases and formats will be different. So, to tackle this problem, Cloud Information Model(CIM) is created.

CIM is a schema, which can connect systems with different data structures and formats. It serves the purpose of delivering a standard-based solutions for enterprise products. CIM helps developers to speed up the process of integration, building and testing products compatibility and ease the pain of integrating data. Salesforce and other big companies such as IBM, Google and AWS have joined hands for this initiative and numbers of companies associating with this model are increasing consistently.

Salesforce Customer Data Platform Pricing

The CDP is definitely not for small businesses. Monthly price starting for per user/per month is $12,500/- which is quite a lot. But as they say right, if you want something of high value, pay the high price. A lot of functionalities are provided on the platform, which is created by taking scalability and security into consideration.

In these prices you will get majorly all the functionalities such as Unified profiles, Super Message, Segment Publish and Engagement Everts, which CDP provides. but limits them in terms of the number of units.

Wrapping it up!

Salesforce is the pioneer in creating products which focus on enhancing the overall customer experiences using data-centric approach. Right from the start, whatever product they build or the companies they acquire, aligns with their V2MOM(Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) strategic plan.

One can say that, Salesforce CDP is not very ideal for small businesses at the start, but as they grow, they can definitely consider this robust platform, which has so many integrated functionalities and trust of Salesforce. Data Management is one of the biggest challenges which any company faces in the recent years and stitching that data with one another to create a single source of truth is a completely different ball game altogether.

Using a data-centric solution such as CDP is adamant for any organization for their smooth functioning and consistent growth. And Salesforce CDP is one vendor which you can trust for long-lasting and sustainable growth. It’s an exabyte scale declarative customer data platform. The platform is built by marketeers, for marketeers.