At its annual user conference this week, Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled what it calls the Holy Grail of CRM: Customer 360 Truth, a set of data and identity services that lets companies link information from multiple systems with their CRM to create a single source of truth (SSoT) about each contact.
Customer 360 Truth connects data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more, across Salesforce apps and other systems, to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer. All of a customer’s previous interactions and shared preferences are brought together to create a complete view.
The goal is to allow companies to better serve customers and even predict their needs, whether addressing a customer service problem, creating a personalized marketing journey, predicting the best sales opportunities or surfacing product recommendations.
Customer 360 Truth includes several components:
- Customer 360 Data Manager, which lets administrators establish trusted connections between data sources.
- Salesforce Identity for Customers, which provides single sign-on and two-factor authentication. Customer 360 Audiences, which builds unified customer profiles across data sources, then creates customer segments and delivers AI-driven insights about the customer.
- Privacy and Data Governance, which helps customers classify all data in Salesforce so they can comply with regulatory requirements.
All of these capabilities are generally available now, except Customer 360 Audience, which is expected to become available in the first half of 2020.
Salesforce’s recent acquisition, Mulesoft, provides a platform to let organizations build application product interfaces (APIs) that connect any application, data, or device to Customer 360.
The company also announced that it is adding new voice capabilities to its Customer 360 platform. Building on last year’s addition of Einstein Voice Assistant that allowed sales reps to perform routine CRM tasks by talking to Salesforce, Einstein Voice Skills will give admins and developers the ability to create custom voice apps across the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform. Salesforce plans to expand the capabilities of Einstein Voice Assistant for any role or industry as well.
Two key new services were showcased:
- Service Cloud Voice, which integrates telephony inside Service Cloud, and can also integrate with voice to text transcription services. This lets Einstein AI provide agents with relevant information while they’re on calls.
- Einstein Call Coaching in Sales Cloud uses natural language processing to identify keywords in sales call transcripts, allowing managers to detect trends and best practices and turn them into personalized coaching.
Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills will enter beta testing in February 2020 and are expected to become generally available in 2021.
Service Cloud Voice will be piloted in February 2020 and is expected to be generally available in June 2020.
Einstein Call Coaching is currently in pilot and is expected to be generally available in June 2020.