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In today’s digital environment, most consumers are waking up to inboxes that are filled to the brim—a direct result of the non-stop competition of marketers for our attention. Some of that content is valuable and well-targeted; much of it is not. As a result, brands must create highly personalized content experiences for every customer, across every interaction, every time.
The key for how brands can do that successfully lies in the what and how of modern data targeting: what data is being used, and how a brand is using it. Traditionally, many companies have relied on a collection of quick fixes—cookies, third-party data, incomplete or siloed first-party data, and the like—to try and personalize individual consumer messaging. But such an approach can’t consistently fuel the kind of advanced content targeting consumers now demand.
“Personalization means knowing a customer across your enterprise—from the products they use to the channels they engage in,” said Lisa Fairbanks, Global Head of Customer Experience Solutions at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “But it’s a hard data challenge and most companies can’t do it alone.”
A single source of truth and 360-degree view of every single customer.
Until recently, this wasn’t possible, but now, companies can ingest and store real-time data at massive scale from every channel (e.g. mobile, web, in-person), and CRM data, among other sources. This allows marketers to truly tailor their messaging to a specific buyer’s needs and wants. The goal for every brand today is to deliver seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real time.
“Every brand - from the largest retailer to an automotive company to a local pizza business - needs to stand out with its customers, and the only way to do that is by leveraging real-time data to provide the most relevant and personalized customer experiences, with every customer, at every touchpoint,” said Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, EVP of engineering at Salesforce.
To help companies solve this challenge, in 2019, Krishnaprasad's team at Salesforce began developing a low-code SaaS tool, the Customer Data Platform (CDP), that could seamlessly consolidate myriad consumer touch points into one customer profile. Since its launch, CDP has been Salesforce’s fastest growing organically-built product ever, with over 500 customers today.
In September 2022, Salesforce launched Genie - a hyperscale real-time customer data platform that enables companies to turn data into customer magic by delivering highly personalized experiences that adapt to customer behavior and needs in real time. Genie creates the world’s first real-time CRM because it goes beyond marketing, extending the hyperscale power of CDP across sales, service, marketing, and commerce applications.
Essentially, CDP acts as a great unifier. Out of the box, it can take the disparate data sources within an organization so marketers have what Krishnaprasad calls a “Truth Profile”: the 360-degree profile of a customer companies need to target content effectively, based on direct actions that customer has taken with the business.
“As a marketer, I’m now focused on the unified individual. A Truth Profile provides the real-time insights they need to become more efficient with their resources and relevant to customers by automatically informing sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams how to engage every customer on every channel, every time. A true win-win scenario. ,” Krishnaprasad says. “Is the person a homeowner? That comes from back-end data. Have they bought anything? That’s sales data. Have they experienced product issues? That’s service data. Have they clicked on an ad? That’s marketing data. And you don't have to write a single line of code.”
CDP was designed to be easy-to-use for both business and technical users; much of the interface is as simple as dragging and dropping key data points into a central pane to create detailed views of a single customer’s lifetime interactions with the company.
Salesforce required a range of services to support the complexity of CDP as well as its ease of use. Because of the breadth and depth of its services, AWS could provide all the services that Salesforce needed, from troubleshooting to new feature development. Amazon EMR, Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS DataSync were critical to bringing CDP to life. That time-to-innovation has been critical; with AWS, Krishnaprasad’s team can spin up new regions in just weeks. And with various types of compute resources available—like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances—Salesforce can leverage the right service it needs to scale efficiently.
It’s still early in CDP’s adoption, and Salesforce is continually adding features and capabilities to the platform. But Krishnaprasad and the team are already hearing success stories.
“We’ve seen a broad adoption, from the largest pharmaceutical companies to banks to pizza stores,” he says. “We’ve even seen one pizza chain find a 30 percent uplift (ROI) in the coupons it sends—‘Oh, this person likes pepperoni? Let’s personalize their experience with our brand based on these real-time insights and send them what they most want and need.’”
In the end, maybe the most telling CDP anecdote comes from one of the product’s earliest adopters: Salesforce itself. The platform was so potent that the company’s own marketing arm was eager to adopt it in order to standout in today’s increasingly cluttered internet. Today, Salesforce’s digital teams have been using CDP for roughly two years, and Krishnaprasad says it’s not just marketing’s preferred tool: marketing, sales, and ad targeting have all seen their campaigns become more effective after adopting CDP.
“Our own internal digital team had the same challenges as any customer. We were relying on all these very bespoke implementations and technologies, so we really didn’t know who was visiting our site,” Krishnaprasad says. “So becoming customers of our own product was huge. It became a great validation. We can say confidently whatever we’re selling actually works—it’s actually usable by us.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for AWS.
