Customer Engagement Across Industries with Salesforce Data Pipelines
2020 came in as a disruptive year for businesses and consumers through a series of interrelated crises. A health crisis, an economic crisis, an Inequality crisis, and a climate crisis. The year reinforced the need for businesses to stay agile and responsive to shifting consumer expectations. It was imperative for leaders to disrupt the status quo, or be displaced by more agile businesses.
At Salesforce, we maintained our sense of urgency in building products to keep Salesforce admins and trailblazers at the forefront of driving the digital transformation in their business to succeed in this new normal.
In the Spring’ 21 release, we launched Salesforce Data Pipelines offering Salesforce admins a simple, scalable, and intuitive data preparation and data processing tool for their CRM business workflows. Now admins can seamlessly deploy a 360 view of their customers using data in the CRM or other systems and applications in their Enterprise, but we didn’t just stop there. We partnered with Salesforce Industry Cloud to build a deeper integration with this service by using it for scalable data processing in Industry workflows.
Powering Customer 360 Transformation with Industry Clouds and Salesforce Data Pipeline
Salesforce is making mainstream product investments that accelerate digital transformation for an expanding Industry customer base. These Industry Clouds provide purpose-built apps, workflows, and industry-specific data models all built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. These Industries bring data variability and scale that spans across business models including B2B, B2C, and B2B2C. This is where Salesforce Data Pipeline comes in!
Now, Industry customers across Financial Services, Manufacturing, Rebates Management, and Loyalty Management can benefit from Salesforce Data Pipelines (including our reimagined Data Manager, connectors, ML-enabled data prep, and Enterprise-scale) for workflows ranging from financial roll-ups to loyalty tier calculations to purchase credits.
From my personal experience of building these pipelines for banks, wealth managers, and telcos, these business rules can get advanced or complex pretty fast. The relationships need to appreciate the financial ownerships, family affiliations, and compliance requirements e.g. SOX, FTC, GDPR, and more. Add to that the need for teams to be agile for responsiveness to business model shifts. Digitizing these relationships ensures every employee is on the same page when they engage with the customer. A flexible tool like Salesforce Data Pipeline can help build, validate and deploy new business rules fast with a familiar Salesforce-first tool.
As an example, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud allows users to build trusted customer relationships across sub-verticals like Wealth Management, Banking, Insurance, and Commercial space. Trusted relationships require enabling bankers and advisors with a complete view of the relationship. While Individual-level relationship visibility is key, the household view is critical to ensure the full potential of every relationship. With Salesforce Data Pipeline, advanced transformations like Financial household roll-ups and relationship attribution now become simplified for every Salesforce admin and empowers our trailblazers to stay agile. Admins can further incorporate simple to sophisticated business rules on their CRM data. They can also enrich this customer data with financial transactions, privacy opt-ins, or campaign engagement data from other systems in the Enterprise using out-of-the-box connectors.
Agility with Customizable Data Processing Definitions
Industry Cloud customers benefit from this partnership with out-of-the-box data processing definitions that abstract the business logic, and process the data using Salesforce Data Pipeline using highly scalable distributed data processing and create analytics datasets within Tableau CRM or write-out to Salesforce fields or external datastores like Snowflake or S3. The example shows a data pipeline for Vlocity Communications data to publish out datasets for Customers Interactions and Subscriptions.
Customers can use the Salesforce Data Pipeline Base capacity to run and manage their Industry data pipelines generated by the data processing engine. This Base Capacity is offered to customers within respective clouds as part of the Data Processing Engine functionality. The Salesforce Data Pipeline add-on license, allows customers to buy more functionality and processing including access to Recipe Editor, External Connectors, and more transformations.
Customers can re-use the existing templates, clone and extend these templates or create completely new pipelines using the data processing engine. The edit mode allows users to extend the pre-defined job filters, or add more output columns back in Salesforce. Salesforce is an API-First platform that allowed this Industry Collaboration to bring in a familiar user interface to manage these predefined industry business processes and transformation logic for admins.
Our new Data Manager in your Salesforce App picker allows you to monitor these jobs, see objects connected for your data pipelines, or view your limits.
Keeping it Salesforce Simple
The Salesforce Data pipeline makes data processing more approachable for Salesforce Admins. It removes the need to deploy complex multi-tool integrations, perform custom scripting, or off-platform development.
The business value this partnership enables include:
Agility
Salesforce Admins who are deploying Financial Services Cloud, Rebates Management, or Loyalty Management business process can use the out-of-the-box template flows provided with Data Processing Engine. All Admins have the ability to use data prep experience to create recipes for data processing.
The service packs many rich transformations that are purpose-built for processing your CRM data that will accelerate the deployment of simple to sophisticated data processing needs. This service provides flexible job scheduling and monitoring options, and in Summer’ 21, it enables event-based scheduling to chain multiple recipes through an intuitive user experience.
Connectivity
Salesforce Data Pipeline also allows customers who enable Data Sync to connect to data natively in Salesforce or a number of remote sources that are not local to your Salesforce org. The connectors enable easy access to data from other Salesforce instances (e.g. Salesforce orgs, Heroku, Marketing Cloud), third-party data platforms, and applications (e.g. Snowflake, Marketo). This helps enrich your CRM data with relevant data across your Enterprise, and seamlessly connect this enriched data in your workflows. Be sure to check out the documentation for details. The access to remote connectors also allows access to your Mulesoft instance, which uses Mulesoft’s Anypoint Platform to create templates to connect to sources like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL.
Data Pipeline also provides access to Output connectors including Salesforce, Snowflake, S3, and Tableau Hyper. The Output connectivity simplifies the availability of processed data to your CRM workflows or other applications in your Enterprise.
Native to Salesforce
Salesforce Data Pipeline is native to your Salesforce environment, which makes it part of your Trusted Salesforce Domain and supports Salesforce Trust and Compliance standards.
Being Native has a number of key advantages:
- Authentication and security for your Salesforce users;
- Inherit your Salesforce configuration
- Fiscal and Custom Calendar Fiscal Setup
- Salesforce Sharing and Enhanced Security Predicates
- Profile settings,
- Company Currency and orgs locale/ language
- Shield Encryption at Rest
- Admin productivity (sandboxes, site migrations)
- API-First access to Data Platform for your Lightning or Apex workflows
- Simplify your Data Syncs with Salesforce with the option to use Incremental data access for faster processing
Next Generation ML-Enabled Transformations
Our massively scalable and distributed data platform also provides access to many advanced Machine Learning (ML) transformations for Salesforce Admins. These transformations simplify access to advanced ML algorithms in an easy and intuitive user experience to perform advanced tasks like data quality, data classification, natural language processing, and forecasting capabilities. These features enable admins to analyze customer sentiment, create customer segments, forecast sales revenues, or fill-missing data. More information about this data transformations are captured in Product Documentation.
High Performance Data Store
Salesforce Data Pipeline also provides access to the Salesforce High Performance and Highly Optimized Columnar Data Store. The secret sauce of this engine comes with our dataset columnar data representation and highly compressed storage format that can process hundreds of millions or billion records in a matter of seconds. This enables blazing-fast aggregations to look at macro numbers, with the ability to drill down to detail records to drive actions. Applications can interface with Query Engine via Salesforce Analytics Query Language (SAQL), and with Spring’ 21 Beta support for Standard Query Language (SQL) interface is also available. The query interface also supports a number of CRM analytical processing needs including the Erlang formula for service-backlog management, windowing functions for analyzing business performance, and ML-enabled Time-series functions for revenue or workforce planning scenarios.
Note: Ready to learn more? Read through our Salesforce Data Pipelines Release Notes and Product Documentation. Also, review the Industries Collaboration for Data Processing Engine Release Document and Product Documentation.
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