Economic uncertainties and increasing customer expectations are challenging businesses today. Asked to do more with less, you need technology to help you increase efficiency, improve results, lower costs, and deliver success now.
The average company uses nearly 1000 applications to run their business and store customer data. This isn’t efficient, effective, or affordable. You need to rally every employee around a single view of every customer, increase productivity and automation, consolidate and integrate your mission critical applications. At a time when relationships will be tested the most, you can use Customer 360 to build better relationships with customers.
Leaders across every business are prioritizing investments that drive leverage for their organizations and accelerate time-to-value. As a result, companies are increasingly turning to automation, which helps boost productivity by reducing repetitive tasks and delivering personalized experiences via automation that are more efficient and effective at significantly lower cost. This frees up employees to focus on higher value work, like improving customer experiences, setting a solid business foundation to weather the highs and lows of a changing economic climate.
Read on to learn how you can lower cost with one trusted platform, drive efficient growth with automation, and exceed expectations with customer magic.
What’s new with automation, integration, and APIs
Legacy systems and compounding data present innovation uncertainty. Today, the challenge is even more complex than ever before because the number of applications in your landscape has dramatically increased. Every experience you create for customers, employees, and partners needs data that lives across all those systems. For years, the only solution to this problem rested in the hands of a developer with a long backlog of work to do.
To keep pace with today’s demands, we cannot only rely on developers. Everyone should be empowered to drive digital transformation. MuleSoft is bringing together IT and business users onto a single platform for end-to-end automation to drive success now.
3 capabilities for realizing this digital operating paradigm
There are three key capabilities for this digital operating paradigm to become a reality: automation, APIs and integration, and management and control.
Automation
Automation allows business teams to innovate by automating repetitive tasks. MuleSoft Composer makes it easy to build process automation for data, using clicks instead of code. Create a secure process to connect information stored in various systems so you can build real-time, integrated views of your customers and your business.
MuleSoft RPA eliminates manual tasks and processes – from simple to advanced automations – by using bots. You can save time and prevent human errors while also focusing on higher value work. RPA bots interact with applications, extract data, read images, and more.
APIs and integration
This is where power users can leverage different tools to ensure that applications are connected and deliver on projects with reusable building blocks.
Anypoint Partner Manager enables you to perform bidirectional B2B message exchanges using APIs and electronic data interchange formats. Create automated workflows and a complete view of the message flows between systems and your trading partners.
Anypoint Code Builder is MuleSoft’s next-generation integrated development environment for API and integration developers to design, develop, and deploy from a single environment. Anypoint Code Builder will eventually replace Studio. We’re really excited to have a customer beta launching soon, and we already have some great feedback from our early adopters.
Integration with Mulesoft provides a single unified platform, so you can connect and unlock any system – from SaaS providers or to legacy systems alike. Seamlessly unify data, platform and capabilities in your ecosystem.
Management and control
If it weren’t for API management tooling, more than 50% of APIs would go unmanaged by 2025. You need universal governance and control for all of your building blocks. Monitor and control MuleSoft APIs and non-MuleSoft APIs across a variety of platforms with Universal API Management.
To that end, we’ve created a suite of tools:
- Anypoint Manager: Apply pre-built API policies to all your APIs.
- Anypoint Flex Gateway: Extend API manager outside MuleSoft APIs to reduce response times and lower costs to your organization.
Anypoint API Governance: This is a one-stop-shop to monitor and notify owners of deployed assets to govern. - Anypoint DataGraph: Service all of your APIs from a single source of truth. You can link and merge related data types with ease.
How Salesforce uses MuleSoft to improve internal operations
The world is changing. We are facing many macroeconomic challenges, from global inflation to great resignation and labor shortage, and it’s difficult to foresee whatever comes next. This means that our innovation playbook has to change, we need to operate smarter and find new ways to do more with less. How do we do it? The answer is just one word: Automation!
In fact, we surveyed over 2400 decision-makers and found over 90% of businesses are using automations to boost productivity and improve operational efficiency.
Automations are key to any business’s ability to innovate. We at Salesforce, have actively been weaving automation into our own operations. Here are two examples of how Salesforce boosts its productivity and efficiency internally with automations.
Capturing competitive intelligence from our large sales field by automating and doing more with less. Rather than spending days conducting win / loss research, our Salesforce Competitive Intelligence Team uses MuleSoft Composer to automate processes across multiple systems with clicks, not code inside Salesforce. This solution is made for business users that want event-based automations and wish to connect multiple apps without waiting for IT. All in all, the team boosts productivity by seven times more.
The Salesforce M&A team integrates its acquisitions quickly and efficiently with fewer resources. At Salesforce, we need to integrate data from acquired companies into Salesforce’s CRM to unlock a holistic view of our customers, operations, and revenues and to empower sales to start up-selling new products to existing customers fast.
Instead of taking months to bring all the sales related data from MuleSoft’s CRM to Salesforce’s CRM, the team uses MuleSoft Composer to transfer data once and then let Composer sync data every four hours between MuleSoft and Salesforce’s CRM – completing in just two weeks and 50% faster than expected.
Deliver more personalized experiences with MuleSoft and Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Digital adoption has changed the way we interact and customers want more personalized experiences. So it’s no surprise that 84% of customers say that being treated like a person, not a number is important to winning their business. This means that in order to stay relevant and competitive, businesses must deliver digital experiences that feel as personal as human relationships, and they must do this now.
The fact is, customer personalization depends on external data. And gaining access to this data, and being able to efficiently analyze all of it and see the results of your analysis for each customer in one view, is how you can start to deliver personalization at scale. This is where Genie, our enhanced Customer Data Platform comes in.
Customer Data Platform (CDP) enables you to build a complete view of each customer with unified profiles by supporting the ingestion and consumption of data across multiple different systems and platforms, both internal and external to your company.
Genie takes Salesforce CDP’s capabilities, and extends the benefits right across the Customer 360. And because CDP ingests and unifies data from anywhere to reconcile customer identity, the platform can develop a 360-degree view of each customer, so that you can provide tailored, real-time moments of personalization seamlessly across channels and ecosystems.
CDP helps with the following capabilities:
- Ingest, prepare, and harmonize data: ingest prepare, harmonize customer data from anywhere at any velocity into a business friendly data model
- Resolve identity and curate truth: Unify and resolve customer data into a unified profile creating a single source of truth about your customers
- Segment and understand: Categorize customer profiles into rich segments using first, second and third-party data
- Discover and act: Calculate new insights in near real-time to deepen understanding and act when important conditions occur
- Activate profiles for personalization: Action your data to personalize every interaction across all channels and touchpoints
- Explore and visualize: Explore customer data and engagement across channels and Clouds
- Collect consent signals: Collect consumer and data-rights and preferences
Building a single source of truth benefits everyone in the organization and enables your team to deliver success now! MuleSoft is the best way to bring in data from any and all of your third-party data sources INTO Genie/CDP. MuleSoft is also an action layer that enables teams to build automations and act on that data across third-party systems.
Aggregating customer data will enable your marketing teams to deliver moment-based personalizations that will deepen your relationships with your customers and build loyalty for your business.
Democratizing the insights you unlock from your customer data, allows your service teams to provide customers with relevant support and engagement, thus creating efficient interaction and opportunities for upsell and cross-sell.
Conclusion
Trusted, consolidated data also benefits business teams by providing a strong Customer 360 to business teams, these teams will be able to deliver products and services that are most closely aligned to meet and exceed customer expectations.
If you’re looking to learn more about these topics and how they apply to your problems, reach out to us today.
