Telemetry data comes to life with Data Cloud and Tableau

You collect a vast amount of telemetry data as signals. They could come from many sources. For example, vehicles you sell, solar panels you install, or any equipment you sell. Telemetry data from vehicles could include information such as speed, fuel level, engine temperature, tire pressure, GPS location of the vehicles. In the energy sector, companies monitor solar panel battery production and use. Telemetry data from manufacturing equipment monitors temperature, pressure, and machine health. It does this to improve production.

The value of data in generating customer insights and serving customers better is immense. Let’s say you’re a solar energy company and your goal is to better understand and analyze solar installations telemetry data (battery installation health, energy storage levels, energy consumption level) to reduce customer attrition, prevent equipment malfunction, and augment proactive field service.

Let’s start with the end goal in mind

Energy4You is a solar energy company. They want to serve their customers better by enabling their customer service representatives (CSRs). CSRs interact live with customers using a Salesforce CRM front end and Energy4You would like to empower them to have two key pieces of information at their fingertips:

• A visual dashboard that contains a collection of solar energy installation and battery signals for a particular customer or household.
• A “Next Best Action” component that recommends actions based on aggregated and pre-calculated telemetry signals.

With the help of Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau, Energy4You can achieve this.

As Salesforce Data Cloud ingests, aggregates and calculates telemetry data and customer profile information, it serves as conduit to two key solutions:

• Tableau: retrieving data from Data Cloud and generating a visual dashboard containing pertinent information about the performance and status of the battery installed at the customer’s house.
• Salesforce Einstein Next Best Action (ENBA): a Salesforce CRM feature that displays the right recommendations to the right people at the right time based on inputs from Data Cloud. ENBA distills recommendations into a few key suggestions, like a further investigation step, a discount, or an add-on service.

Strategy Overview

Salesforce Data Cloud platform

It all starts with data. Salesforce Data Cloud is front and center because the platform enables you to capture, unify, and activate your known customer data with unmatched speed and scale. You can combine virtually any profile, behavioral, and transactional data from disparate sources for usages such as aggregations, calculations, profile unifications and make it available for cross-channel segmentation and activation, consumption by other solutions such as Tableau, for example.

Tableau

Tableau is a leading analytics platform to help you see, understand and act on data. Tableau compliments Data Cloud with secure, scalable, and flexible analytics. Enabling users with clicks-not-code solutions empowers everyone to use data to meet customer demands. Customers like Energy4You can connect Tableau and Data Cloud using the Salesforce Data Cloud.

Einstein Next Best Action

Einstein Next Best Action (ENBA) displays the right recommendations to the right people at the right time. You can create and display recommendations and actions for your users that are tailored to meet your unique criteria.

Solution Approach

With the help of Data Cloud, Energy4You can ingest telemetry signals using the existing Data Cloud capabilities. Energy4You can choose to ingest via AWS S3 bucket or stream using Kinesis connector or Ingestion API.

Once data is in Data Cloud Energy4You can create Calculated Insights. A Calculated Insight could be, for example, “Count on Telemetry Signals”, where the company wants to calculate whether a signal was received from the customer’s solar battery over the last 72h. Calculated Insights are built with ANSI SQL. They refer to objects and fields in Data Cloud. These Calculated Insights could be used to power Data Actions in the Salesforce Platform.

In Salesforce flows (and yes, we love Salesforce flow), a Platform Event Triggered Flow can look for Data Object Data Change Events. These are any events generated via Data Action using a Data Action Target, like Salesforce CRM, created to produce a Platform Event. Once saved and activated, the Platform Event Triggered Flow will start to listen to Platform Events.

Outcome

Tableau dashboard

The Tableau dashboard’s goal is to show asset information and insights. They come from telemetry and battery data from Data Cloud. They go to service agents in Salesforce CRM. This will let Energy4You CSRs stay in the Salesforce interface. They can do this while using the insights from Data Cloud.

Any Tableau dashboard could be easily embedded into the contact record in Salesforce CRM using Tableau Viz Lightning Web Component. CSRs will view only the dashboard relevant for the customer they are having a conversation with.

Einstein Next Best Action

Energy4You can use Calculated Insights to support Einstein Next Best Action metrics. Using the Calculated Insight “Count on Telemetry Signals”, Energy4You can design a recommendation for the next best action. The CSR can ask the customer to check connectivity between the battery and internet. If the customer confirms that there is connectivity, then the customer service agent might advise them to visit the OEM portal. If there is no connectivity issue, the customer service agent might create a field service ticket.

Summary

The process starts by ingesting telemetry and profile data into Data Cloud. Then, it performs a series of calculations using Data Transforms or Calculated Insights to get the metrics. These metrics are sent to Salesforce CRM as Data Actions.

Once in Salesforce CRM, a Platform Event triggered flow commands the JSON payload parsing and defines updates to a custom object with fields prepared to receive all metrics.

From this point another Salesforce flow, now a Recommendations Flow, can start to treat conditions and subsequent steps to produce the actions and recommendations to Energy4You customers. The recommendation flow makes ENBA possible.

Business Impact and Value

• Improved solar installation monitoring for better recommendations from the customer service representatives
• Efficiencies resulting from cutting costs or boosting gains for customer and field services
• Improved customer CSAT
• Proactive monitoring of customer’s solar panel battery health
• And this is how telemetry data comes to life with Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau.

Resources to support the solution approach described above:

• Salesforce Data Cloud
• Data Sources in Data Cloud
• Calculated Insights
• Data Actions in Data Cloud
• Data Cloud Triggered Flow
• Unlock the power of Data Cloud Across Multiple Salesforce Orgs
• Data Cloud and Tableau
• Embed Tableau Views into Salesforce
• Configure SAML with Salesforce
• Configure SSO from Salesforce to Tableau Online
• Enable Salesforce as a SAML Identity Provider
• Einstein Next Best Action

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