Workforce Management Featured Article
Salesforce Lets the CRM Genie Out of the Lamp
When companies began adopting rudimentary customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in the late 1990s, they did so because the technology held a promise. The idea was that it would be a tool that could be conditioned for use much faster than traditional solutions, such as sales reports, spreadsheets, marketing analysis and other old-fashioned methods. In short, it was somewhat close to real-time.
Somewhat close to real-time isn’t real-time, however. In order to provide the best possible customer experiences, personnel invested in the sales process need information about what’s happening right now. Customers increasingly expect their experiences to be personalized, and without real-time data, it’s simply not possible. Disconnected digital experiences are still the norm rather than the exception.
Looking to close that gap, CRM powerhouse Salesforce unveiled Salesforce Genie, a hyperscale real-time data platform designed to power the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
With Genie, every company can turn data into customer “magic,” according to Salesforce, delivering seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real time.
“Responding to customer needs in real time is more critical than ever, but is becoming more challenging as the amount of data created, captured, replicated, and consumed each year is expected to more than double by 2026,” wrote Salesforce in its announcement of Genie. “Companies must seamlessly connect digital and real-world customer interactions in order to provide the most relevant, personalized, and compelling experiences, in every moment.”
As the heart of real-time Customer 360, Salesforce Genie ingests and stores real-time data streams at massive scale and combines it with Salesforce transactional data. Genie includes built-in connectors that bring in data from every channel (mobile, web, APIs), legacy data through MuleSoft, and historical data from proprietary data lakes.
Genie transforms and harmonizes the data into a real-time customer graph, according to Salesforce: a unified customer profile record. Because Genie is built using the Salesforce metadata model, everything in the customer graph is visible and actionable across the entire Customer 360, every industry solution, AppExchange, and customer apps.
With Genie, Einstein AI and Flow automation services can harness the power of hyperscale real-time data to enable more dynamic and responsive actions and engagement. Einstein, which generates over 175 billion predictions every day, can now deliver personalization and predictions based on real-time data. Flow automation, which saves customers over 100 billion hours every month, can now use real-time data to trigger actions automatically.
Edited by Erik Linask
