Authored by Mankiran Chowhan, Vice President-Enterprise Business, Salesforce India
Maintaining a durable and resilient business, and staying connected with customers is critical for companies navigating today’s economic headwinds. You can’t know your customer if you don’t have all the relevant data and a single source of truth. Yet trying to manage huge amounts of siloed and scattered data points about a customer’s needs and wants often feels like an anchor preventing organizations from moving forward.
Instead of a unified, 360-degree view of the customer, you have fragmented glimpses and disconnected experiences.
The volume of data companies generate continues to grow exponentially and is expected to more than double by 2026. According to a Salesforce research, more than a quarter (28%) of Indian business leaders are overwhelmed by the amount of data that exists today.
In this all-digital world, milliseconds matter more, especially with the petabytes of data generated from our always-on smartphones, connected cars, home security systems, and many other devices.
Disjointed experiences waste the customer’s time, increases support costs, and doesn’t elicit customer loyalty. As customer expectations rise, connecting and extracting value from data in real time will become a key pillar of businesses’ growth strategies.
Harmonized Data - The Intelligent Heart of Customer Engagement
Today, having a single, unified, and real-time view of every customer, at scale, is the intelligent heart of customer engagement. By breaking down data silos and using real-time customer insights, companies can power their sales, marketing, and commerce interactions, and deliver relevant and tailored experiences, while saving time and money.
The combination of real-time data, AI and automation is reshaping industries entirely. A great example of where milliseconds matter is healthcare. With real-time data, a company can create a unified health score for patients complete with data like blood pressure, temperature, and demographic and environmental information.
Take automotive for instance. When we talk of connected cars, we mean that the car will connect drivers, manufacturers, dealers, and auto lenders in ways that create more personalized experiences and higher levels of customer service. In real time, the data that is coming from the car can help shape the features and change the way drivers are experiencing the car itself.
For automotive businesses, being able to unify vehicle data, retail data, and customer data into a single, real-time profile for every customer enables them to build personalized experiences at every touch point. Connected data allows automotive companies to provide timely maintenance reminders and tailored offers for aftermarket products and services, enhancing customer satisfaction.
For financial services providers, harmonized data is helping leaders to make more informed decisions for their customers and their businesses, which is of particular importance given today's volatile economic climate. By monitoring customer activities and life events, experts can better understand and proactively help them plan for key milestones, such as buying a new home, paying for tuition, or planning for retirement.
Eliminating Cost and Complexity
With the power of CRM, data and AI, companies can now create seamless, connected, and hyper-personalized customer experiences that weren’t possible before.
Having a golden record that captures everything about a customer in real time across every interaction eliminates the cost and complexity of building a single view of the customer, making it easy for companies to take action on their data to deliver the value that customers need.
Building a strong data culture is key to maximizing the potential of information and equipping teams to make smart decisions. Having a customer data platform that acts as a single source of truth is integral to driving business resilience, meaningful customer engagement, and future growth.
