Customer Engagement Platform

Deeply Integrating Data & Identity with customer journeys

Salesforce had a big problem. Scaling our Customer 360 business quickly had entailed growth via acquisition, creating a fractured data landscape that made it effectively impossible to leverage real-time customr data across Sales, Service, and Marketing. In order to connect the customer journey across these channels, we needed a centralized platform to efficiently collect, store, sort, and serve this critical information in real time.


To begin this journey, we needed to assess current and forecast market needs, establish core requirements, and showcase how such capabilities might create value for our users and their businesses. In this project, we took on those tasks and explored the insights and abilities we could enable, and the elevated, magical end user experiences it could deliver.

Enabling magical customer journeys

A practical design vision for a new data platform built to enable highly personalized experiences across channels.

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement means creating meaningful, connected experiences instead of isolated transactions. It requires aligning team structure, operations, and technology to maintain a continuous feedback loop with customers. This helps businesses adapt to evolving needs, uphold brand integrity, and use customer data ethically to deliver exceptional experiences.

Personalized engagement relies on an integrated tech stack. Our north star was to spearhead the case to build a connected CRM that could deliver a real time, 360-degree view of each customer so that our customers could execute tailored content and experiences enabling brands to address rising customer expectations.

How did we approach the project?

  • Deeply analyzing the problem space
  • Conducting customer interviews
  • Reviewing market trends to understand evolving needs and pain points.
  • Mapping gaps in existing processes
  • Identifying opportunities for innovation

Next, we explored solutions through rapid ideation and iterative prototyping, leveraging cross-functional input to ensure feasibility and alignment with customer expectations. We tested concepts early and often, refining based on feedback to hone in on the most impactful ideas.

Finally, we crafted a compelling vision, combining insights, data, and storytelling to articulate a clear path forward. This vision not only addressed immediate needs but also positioned the product to anticipate future market demands and deliver long-term value.

Years before we launched Data Cloud, Salesforce’s in-market data platform solution, my team led the creation of a vision for this experience, in partnership with senior leadership. This effort explored the potential value and benefits for our customers and their consumers, to unlocking the legacy-driven separation between marketing, sales, and service clouds.

Thorough, Iterative, Rapid Design Process

Customer Research

We spoke with over a dozen key customers who had expressed a strategic desire for identity resolution and a common data platform.

Competitive Research

In this emerging market segment, we examined the features, promises, pricing, and limitations of key upstarts, disruptors, and our major competitors to inform our outlook.

Rapid Idea Generation & Evaluation

Our skunkworks team delivered storyboards, strategy decks, and feature proposals weekly. We presented regularly to senior stakeholders for feedback and direction.

Prototype Delivery

Our tight communicaiton loops and limited timeframe demanded quick prototype development. We leveraged Figma for basic click-throughs and worked with our design engineering team to flesh out richer interactions for customer presentations.

Technical Requirements

Data Unification

Salesforce Platform Data Unification

Single Source of Truth

Legacy platform distinctions made it impossible to enable real-time integration of customer attribtutes. Delivering a true SSOT for customer identity was essential to enable true 360-degree views of customers.

3rd Party Data Integration

Enriching customer views with external data sources was critical. Most, if not all SaaS customers rely on a variety of providers. This feature would help businesses leverage their rich customer data from any platform.

Customer Identity Resolution

Legacy cloud architecure meant Sales, Marketing, Service, and others each had their own Customer ID, fostering confustion, duplication, and missed opportunities. We needed to design a system that resolved this urgent problem. 

Rich Customer Profiles

Customer profile with cross-channel tracking, insights, and activity

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Sophisticated segment creation & activation

Empowering teams to build, test, and optimize their customer segments was a must. We needed to provide powerful tools to explore, create, test, publish, and activate customer segments.

AI-powered Segmentation

With the prospect of vast oceans of rich, meaningful customer data, AI was a critical tool to enable digital teams to track, target, and serve customers in ways that were relevant and personal. Deep AI integration leveraging our best Einsten models was a must.

Data Stream Integration

Bring in the Data

Technical Goals

  1. Segment performance insights

Experience Highlights

Our prototype starts with an informative, customizable audience dashboard that gives digital leaders in sales, marketing, advertising, and service orgs an array of meaningful insights, data points, and action plans that make sense of the vast oceans of behavior, transactional, and servicing data that previously were disconnected, buried, and almost impossible to explore.

Leveraging our best AI powered models and features, we intelligently surfaced key customer behavior patterns that digital marketing could leverage for smarting campaign design and execution. We provided meaningful customization and automation, allowing users in different teams, roles, and geographies to tailor their home pages to their specific needs.

And finally, we opened the doors to scalable data stream integration, building a vision of a Salesforce platform that no longer would be bounded by the walls and org structures of the past, but would empower customers to build their own apps, data lakes, and execution paths based on what served their interestes, industry, and insights.

Outcome

In just 6 weeks, our team executed on a rapid research, exploration, and design vision effort, ultimately presenting our work to C-suite leadership. The high fidelity prototype was a powerful visual and experiential artifact that illustrated the huge opportunities Salesforce could unlock if we made the right investments to connect our previously-siloed customer identity, tracking, and intelligence systems architecture.

This skunkworks project laid the critical foundation for the major, strategic investments Saleforce made that ultimately led to the development of Data Cloud, the landmark achievment that today powers Salesforce’s fastest growing business and a critical moat that provides huge benefits to our best and most loyal customers.