What are the trends and directions of Salesforce, the world’s leading customer and sales management software? What should companies consider this year, and what changes await concerning data management? Here’s a small overview of them:
1. Customer data platform (CDP)
A personalized customer experience is based on versatile and structured data. It is also clear that the amount of this data is growing year by year and day by day – especially for large companies. Therefore, the question of how to use this data for the company’s benefit is increasingly being raised.
Salesforce’s CDP, which made a giant leap in development last year, can aggregate various company data, create logical connections between them, and at the same time, take into account the preferences of a specific customer. In other words, CDP can make this data quickly and conveniently usable and accessible to a company’s sales and marketing team.
2. First-Party Data
The keywords of 2023 will undoubtedly be privacy, security and the use of first-party data. These are data stored on the website you visit to make its use convenient. Since the collection and storage of data is becoming more and more regulated and many companies have to think this process through better than before, the growing popularity of CDP can be predicted here as well because this platform uses first-party data and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has already been taken into account.
3. Ready-made solutions
Instead of reinventing the wheel, organizations are moving to ready-made data models that take their business specifics into account. For this purpose, Salesforce has created a unique Industry Cloud that covers the needs of many fields of activity: for example, health, finance, media, manufacturing, energy and utility services, automotive industry, government agencies, non-profit organizations, education and even vaccination services.
4. Better use of unstructured data
This is data that isn’t formatted to any standard and doesn’t help you achieve your business goals in any way – it’s basically just floating around. 2023. we will see more and more desire to structure data sources and make them work to our advantage.
5. Good architecture
Well-Architected is a framework announced at Dreamforce ’22, the industry’s largest conference for software architects. This is the direction in which large environments such as Salesforce are developed with more and more customizable and reusable components, and user comfort and scalability are kept in mind for all new services.
6. Salesforce flow
The Salesforce service, Flow, is increasingly gaining the favour of users. As the name suggests, it is a tool that creates a flow of data and automates even more complex business processes. Flow Builder is an interface used to build individual flows and can create code-like logic without using a programming language. We have an extensive overview of Flow and user adoption here.
7. Cybersecurity
There is nothing to do; collecting data also comes with responsibility. The stakes are high, and malicious attacks are on the rise for businesses using Salesforce, both from external cybercriminals and internal vulnerabilities. Insider threats include, for example, company employees who may endanger the organization’s data – either intentionally or through negligence. Data protection must be the joint responsibility of the internal organization and the company providing the customer management software service.
8. Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have exploded over the past few years. Salesforce has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence and launched Einstein, a tool that perceives and analyzes data like humans. Einstein has opened up new possibilities for a new generation of customer experience. The demand for Einstein Analytics is increasing daily, as analyzing customer behaviour and doing informed marketing and sales decisions are critical in the ever-changing business world.
