Salesforce.com Introduces Customer 360 at Dreamforce 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Asserting that the fourth industrial revolution is connectivity, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff announced at Dreamforce 2018 the forthcoming release of Customer 360, a set of services that aims to provide instant access to unified customer data across Salesforce apps.
“All of our companies are doing everything they can to connect all of their employees, their customers, their products—everything is connected. But we know, because we’re here year after year at Dreamforce, not only are we all connected, but for us in business, that behind all of these things is our customer,” Benioff told the audience.
Customer 360, which will improve connectivity across the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, empowers the Salesforce community “to look inside our companies and to illuminate and express who we are and who our customers are,” Benioff added.
Generally available in 2019, Customer 360 has three key components: a click-based user interface for app and data management, a unified customer ID and profile across all apps, and prebuilt packages for the Service, Marketing, and Commerce clouds.
The Customer 360 user interface allows admins to establish trusted connections between apps and Salesforce orgs; map and reconcile data across clouds; and create a canonical data model that provides a single representation of data for all connected systems. The goal is to provide companies with greater connectivity for their customer data and Salesforce applications.
The Customer 360 ID ensures that every system recognizes a customer, regardless of which channel they choose to engage on or how they identify themselves (for example by name, email, phone number, or social media handle). Its data management capabilities prepare, match, reconcile, and update the customer profile across clouds, and its data exchange features enable employees to pull up the right customer data at the right time. Additionally, data is left in the system where it originated and retrieved only when needed.
Companies can quickly deploy experiences for common use cases: a Service Cloud experience that allows agents to see purchase and browse history from Commerce Cloud, for example, or a Marketing Cloud journey that is automatically triggered by an event in Commerce Cloud, such as an abandoned cart. Each package is designed with an eye on accelerating the delivery of connected experiences: Components in Service Cloud have prebuilt connectivity to Customer 360; prebuilt journey and email templates in Marketing Cloud include content and data sourced from Customer 360; and data and events in Commerce Cloud are distributed to every system connected to Customer 360.
Customer 360 also provides companies with access to customer data from systems outside of Salesforce. It does so via the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform (Salesforce acquired MuleSoft earlier this year), which allows users to design and manage API-led connectivity across any application, data, or device, and connect those APIs directly to Customer 360.
The company also announced a new partnership with Apple that brings Salesforce.com’s CRM platform and Apple’s iOS mobile operating system closer together. The partnership focuses on three areas initially: native Salesforce iOS apps for business; empowering Salesforce developers on iOS; and accelerating developer learning and career growth.
The companies aim to work together to redesign the Salesforce Mobile App with unique Apple capabilities, including Siri Shortcuts, Face ID, and Business Chat. The duo also plans to deliver iOS apps that serve the specific customer needs of industries and small businesses, and Salesforce plans to introduce the Trailhead Mobile App initially on iOS.
The companies are developing a Salesforce Mobile SDK optimized for Apple’s Swift programming language. The SDK will allow businesses and developers to build and deploy iPhone and iPad apps on the Salesforce Lightning Platform.
Finally, Apple will launch a Get Started with iOS App Development Trail that teaches developers of any level how to build native iOS apps in the Xcode development environment with Swift.