Harnessing the power of data to drive business insights and innovation is paramount to business success. To have any chance of staying ahead, everyone needs to be able to capture, transform, and activate data from many sources.
Salesforce Data Cloud and MuleSoft combine to create a powerful synergy that redefines what’s possible with your data. Let’s explore how these tools can propel your data strategy to new heights of innovation and success.
What is Data Cloud, and how does it work?
Data Cloud was launched to address the growing need for businesses to manage vast amounts of customer data efficiently. In a world where customer interactions span multiple channels and touchpoints, having a unified view of the customer is paramount. Data Cloud was developed to help businesses overcome data silos, enhance customer engagement, and drive intelligent decision-making through a connected and comprehensive data platform. It unifies real-time data from marketing, sales, commerce, service, loyalty, and beyond, to create a unified profile for every customer.
Data Cloud operates by ingesting huge datasets from various sources, transforming data into a unified format, and activating data for use across Salesforce and other applications. Data Cloud comes with an established and proven customer data model out-of-the-box and uses advanced data processing capabilities to cleanse, deduplicate, and enrich data, all while ensuring accuracy and consistency. It then leverages Einstein AI and machine learning to generate insights, take action on these insights and deliver personalised experiences.
Key functionalities include:
- Data ingestion: Import data from diverse sources such as CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and external databases.
- Data transformation: Standardize and enrich data to create a unified customer profile.
- Data access and activation: Use the unified data to allow data consumption and drive personalised marketing, sales, and service initiatives.
Integration challenges
Data Cloud brings powerful capabilities to natively connect to many data sources and unifiy this data. However, integration is a very complex problem in its own right:
- Data silos: Disparate systems and databases can create isolated data pockets, making it difficult to achieve a unified view. In a recent survey, 81% of respondents state that data silos hinder digital transformation efforts.
- Data quality: Ensuring data accuracy, quality, consistency, and completeness is crucial for reliable insights.
- Complex Integrations: Connecting various data sources with different formats, protocols, and security requirements can be complex and time-consuming. There are on average 991 applications across a digital estate, but only 28% of them are actually connected.
- Real-time data processing: Handling real-time data streams and ensuring timely updates is essential for dynamic customer interactions.
How MuleSoft can help
Data Cloud natively connects to all first-party data in Salesforce, to major third-party sources like Amazon S3 and Snowflake, and to a number of SaaS applications. However, the reality is that companies have critical data across hundreds of other systems. These include legacy applications and homegrown systems, which often sit behind on-premise firewalls, as well as other cloud-based applications.
Anypoint Platform can help overcome these challenges by extending the capabilities of Data Cloud through:
Data ingestion
- Securely bring in data from any source in batch and/or (near) real time, ensuring that Data Cloud has up-to-date information.
- MuleSoft’s connectivity and powerful data transformation capabilities enable the conversion of data into the required formats, enhancing data consistency and usability.
Data consumption
- Allow secured, managed, and controlled access to a single unified view of the customer allowing a true customer 360 view and insights.
- Augment and combine the unified customer view with data from additional data sources and operational systems (e.g. order history from an order management system).
Data activation
- Leverage data to inform business decisions and activities.
- Allow decisions to be securely sent to external systems outside of Salesforce for stakeholders to action in (near) real time.
By leveraging MuleSoft with Data Cloud, businesses can efficiently break down silos and ensure high-quality, real-time data availability. The result, shown in Figure 1 below, is a fully connected digital data ecosystem using native Data Cloud connectivity along with the extended capabilities of MuleSoft.
Key use cases of MuleSoft + Data Cloud
Here are some compelling use cases where the power of Salesforce Data Cloud and MuleSoft combine to transform your business:
- Unified customer profiles: Create comprehensive customer profiles by consolidating data from CRM applications, legacy and homegrown applications (sitting behind on-premise firewalls), transactional systems, SaaS applications, and social media.
- Enhanced customer service: Service agents can be equipped with complete customer insights, enabling them to provide proactive and personalized support.
- Data-driven sales: Use enriched customer data to identify sales opportunities and tailor sales strategies for higher conversion rates.
- Personalized marketing: Integrate customer data from various touchpoints to deliver highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns (e.g. through Adobe, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, etc.).
- Action on analytics: Based on insights and observations in Tableau (or other analytical tools), MuleSoft can be used to invoke an action and trigger a flow to act on customer insight and/or business decisions. For example, a high cart abandonment rate is identified in Tableau and a MuleSoft Flow is then triggered to send personalized emails and SMS notifications to affected customers.
Keep on learning
Embark on your data adventure today by exploring the powerful combination of Salesforce Data Cloud and MuleSoft. By leveraging these cutting-edge technologies, you can unlock the full potential of your data, driving innovation and achieving a competitive edge in today’s dynamic business landscape.
If you’re considering leveraging Data Cloud for your business, ensure that you have an effective integration strategy in place to deliver a fully connected digital data ecosystem through a composable architecture using MuleSoft’s proven platform, approach and operating model. With Data Cloud and MuleSoft both being key elements of the Salesforce ecosystem, the synergy between them allows you to open up the universe of connectivity for all your data ingestion, consumption and activation use cases.
To find out more, please contact your Data Cloud or MuleSoft representative.
