Reimagining Personalization

Precision, Efficiency, and Trust

 

In today’s digital economy, hyper-personalization isn’t a luxury, it’s an expectation. But how do you tailor experiences for millions while fiercely protecting individual privacy?

 

At Salesforce, we faced this monumental challenge head-on: to create a breakthrough personalization system that leverages our 360-degree customer view, bridges myriad system & data silos, and strengthens customer trust and security standards.

 

The stakes? A $3 trillion market and the opportunity to set a new industry benchmark.

Project Goals

Breakthrough Customer Experience

Envision real-time, user-tailored journeys across all channels and touchpoints.

Unified Data & Workflows

Align data and identity to enable delivery of unified customer journeys and scalable, efficient content sourcing and deployment

Strengthen Trust & Security

Robust, flexible systems to drive better data hygiene, tracking, and persmissions to reduce risk and enrich trust

Our goal was to craft a vision showing meaningful customer benefits Salesforce could unlock through data unification and automation while navigating the delicate balance between personalization and privacy.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Before After

Mapping the Customer Journey through our Systems

The consumer journey spans from awareness to sales and service, with myriad moments in between. It is a complex web of interactions, each a key opportunity build or break trust.

These journey maps explore potential touchpoints along the journey (and the systems that enable them) from search ads and social media to personalized emails and customer support.

Salesforce customers want a 360-degree strategy to deliver consistent, personalized experiences across all channels. It seems simple but our legacy ecosystem was full of disconnected platforms and unresolvable gaps where personalized experiences were either not possible or based on fragmented customer profiles.

The solutions we proposed highlighted where and how to resolve these missed opportunities, and how we could intelligently connect with customers, enabling a coherent experience where every interaction reinforces the brand’s promise, creating meaninful value in an increasingly competitive digital world.

Key Tasks

Identify Opportunity

Identify potential opportunities available when we remove barriers and connect data with customer goals

Leverage & Connect Tools

Name potential near-term priorities to connect existing personalization tools and capabilities

 

Principle Centered

Center this vision around key organization, customer, and consumer principles

Explore Experiences

Explore a variety of potential customer and consumer experiences.

 

Unified Platform

Imagine the Digital 360 in a shared-platform model, and demonstrate the impacts

In partnership with subject matter experts across clouds, we developed an informed understanding of key customer needs, product roadmaps, and views on the future of personalization to craft our vision. 

Platform Principles

Single Source of Truth

A unified data platform to ingest, store, and access customer, audience, and activation data.

 

Unified Content & Builders

Delivering consistent experiences at scale requires content integration and efficient tools to store, organize, design, and package content delivery.

 

Testing & Optimization

Embedded capabilities to test, evaluate, and optimize variables like audience composition, channel and content performance, and other key metrics.

 

Aspirations of a fully-realized Customer 360

Salesforce excels at delivering personalized moments. Today, the tools that power those experiences are siloed across functional clouds. To advance from that reality to our vision of seamless capabilities will require new capabilities and engineering commitments.

To make this leap, we must:

  • Transform our customer experience from personalized moments to seamlessly connected journeys
  • Reduce barriers between legacy channels, clouds, and experiences.
  • Connect best-of-breed tools across our legacy silos.
  • Establish a family of shared functions & services: Data ingestion & mapping, profiles, tagging, segmentation, content management, Einstein tools, campaigns, and more.

So our customers can:

  • Create world-class personalization experiences, without an army of engineers.
  • Deliver individualized content to customers through data collection, analysis, and automation.

Project Deliverables & Outputs

In these sample slides from our final deliverable, we called out the ways an integrated strategy could deliver on our long-term aspirations to enable seamless, efficient personalization across channels. I also produced an in-depth analysis of our siloed platforms and personalization tooling, illustrating how those barriers impact the customer journey and prevent quality customer experiences and cost businesses greatly in missed opportunities.

We centered our future vision around key moments on a customer journey, illustrating what an elevated consumer experience could look like. These critical moments, powered by persona- and researched-based consumer profiles, show how customers with various habits, desires, and preferences could have personally optimized experiences at every touchpoint.

Detailed schematics and flows show how dynamic content could be created and delivered with AI- and rules-driven personalization tools powering global templates. We also explored the ways we could empower our customers with unified content-building apps and experiences, enabling quicker time-to-value and speed-to-market.

    Project Impact

    We delivered a tangible vision for high-value investment opportunities of Salesforces’ integrated customer data strategy. The principles and customer impacts illustrated in our deliverables set the course for several hihgly impactful product roadmaps, including major investments in customer identy resolution and management which are essential pillars of Salesforce Data Cloud.  Furthermore, we continued to evolve this work to form key perspectives around ethical data management, generative AI, and our Ethics by Design program.