Salesforce, a SaaS-based solution, recently introduced Salesforce Genie, a new real-time data platform that will power the company’s suite of customer relationship management products. This will allow Salesforce’s customers to offer highly personalised experiences across all channels, including marketing, sales, and commerce, that can quickly adapt to new information.
For many services and retailers, doing business has become more and more personalised. This is especially true now that the pandemic is pushing even more businesses to digitise. Businesses that do millions of transactions a day may find it hard to stay on top of what their customers want, especially since more and more customers expect interactions to be more personalised than they used to be.
Rahul Auradkar, head of customer data platform at Salesforce, told SiliconANGLE that Genie was built to create a single platform to unify and personalize data that could be accessed in real-time and power the entirety of Salesforce’s platform.
He said that the company’s own customers had told him that more of their own downstream customers had started to expect more personalised experiences. Companies also averaged 976 separate applications running in their businesses, leading to data fragmentation, which meant there could be 976 different versions of a customer within a single company.
If customer information wasn’t shared between departments in real-time, customers who moved between departments might have to say the same thing over and over again. That would make things very frustrating for the customer and could cause you to lose customers and sales. And the situation is even worse in other industries, like healthcare, where real-time data on patients moving between departments can affect people’s health.
With Genie’s customer data platform, all data that goes into Salesforce becomes a single point of truth in real-time. This means that nothing gets left behind. It also changes and harmonises data into a real-time customer graph. This means that all of the data can be used by any app in the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, including custom apps.
Auradkar said that all of this is possible because real-time streaming data is connected to Salesforce Einstein, which is the artificial intelligence that runs an analytical engine that can understand the context and give insights. Einstein makes more than 175 billion predictions every day, and with Genie, it can now use real-time data to make predictions and personalise them.
By working with Snowflake Inc., a company that makes data warehouses, Salesforce has set up real-time open data sharing directly in Snowflake’s cloud. This makes it possible for users on both platforms to access data without having to move or duplicate it. Customers can also “bring their own AI” by using Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Sagemaker instead of Salesforce Einstein. For marketing, Amazon Ads and Meta Platforms Inc. offer first-party advertising with new privacy-safe integrations for ad activation and insights.
“This might be the most significant shift in our platform” in 20 years”
Bret Taylor, co-Chief Executive at Salesforce
“In the next three to five years, we expect this notion of the real-time customer relationship management will come to life, it’s here, it’s now, but it will evolve over that period and we are referring to that as the heartbeat of the future.”
Rahul Auradkar, head of customer data platform at Salesforce
With Genie, users can “turn your data into real-time customer magic.“
