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Extend the Power of Salesforce Data Cloud

Maximize Business Value with CRM Analytics and GRAX

Source: Image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E, March 11, 2024

In today’s hyper-connected world, businesses are inundated with vast amounts of data. From customer interactions to market trends, they have access to more information than ever before. However, despite significant investments by many companies to centralize their data, it remains largely siloed and inaccessible.

As we all know, siloed data has little value on its own. Its real value comes when harnessing it holistically to drive meaningful insights and business outcomes. 

According to a recent Salesforce study, data-driven organizations increase sales conversions by 26% and business user productivity by 29%. That’s why, according to IDC, 83% of CEOs want their organizations to be more data-driven. But only 30% say they are. 

This is where Salesforce Data Cloud comes into play.

What is Salesforce Data Cloud?

Data Cloud is part of the Salesforce Platform, the engine that powers the entire Customer 360 experience. At its core, Salesforce Data Cloud helps businesses unleash the potential of data. 

Building on the company’s customer data platform (CDP) technology, Data Cloud aggregates every data point about an individual customer across multiple Salesforce applications. This includes unifying massive amounts of real-time customer, sales, and service information. Data Cloud also enables users to integrate external data sources with their internal data. 

By bringing disconnected data into Salesforce, Data Cloud acts as a central hub. It delivers a complete view of your customer across all products, services, and interactions. It also offers a much-needed holistic view of business operations. 

By tapping into this information, businesses can gain valuable insights into target audience preferences and behaviors, market trends, competitive landscape, and business health.

Source: Salesforce

Elevating Data Cloud’s Value with GRAX  

Conventional wisdom says people who don’t understand history are bound to repeat it – and not in a good way. This is also true when it comes to businesses.  

GRAX enhances the real-time capabilities of Salesforce Data Cloud with historical data. It captures and protects every historical version of Salesforce data going back to any point in time. It can also easily and quickly pipe this data into Data Cloud. This lets organizations gain granular insights into past interactions, trends, and future opportunities. As a result, they can realize better predictive results moving forward. 

Here’s how GRAX complements Data Cloud:

  • Historical data analysis fuels actionable insights
    GRAX maintains comprehensive historical data in the cloud of your choice. This ensures data is complete and readily available for a unified data lake strategy, data analytics, data models, machine learning, and more. Because GRAX stores all Salesforce-generated data in the Parquet format, you can use popular tools – such CRM Analytics (Tableau), Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, AWS QuickSight, or PowerBI – to gain actionable insights
  • Data accuracy and reliability
    GRAX ensures data integrity and provides robust recovery options. Businesses can trust the data they use to derive insights, knowing it is accurate and fully recoverable in case of loss.
  • Regulatory compliance and auditing
    GRAX helps you meet regulatory requirements related to data retention and auditing. This not only protects you legally but also ensures the historical data used for generating insights via Salesforce Data Cloud adheres to regulatory standards.

The real magic happens when Salesforce Data Cloud and GRAX work in tandem with Salesforce CRM Analytics. 

Better Together: Data Cloud + GRAX + CRM Analytics

While Salesforce Data Cloud provides access to valuable information, including GRAX-based historical data, the true power lies in its integration with Salesforce CRM Analytics. 

Salesforce CRM Analytics, previously known as Tableau CRM, is an advanced analytics platform. It provides AI-powered analytics and actionable insights directly within Salesforce. The solution includes tools for data visualization, interactive dashboards and apps, and personalized recommendations.  

Salesforce Data Cloud plays a crucial role in feeding data into CRM Analytics. Here’s how:

  • Data Integration
    As previously noted, Salesforce Data Cloud can integrate data from multiple sources, including Salesforce applications like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud; important external sources such as GRAX; and third-party applications. It helps create a unified data model with a single, coherent structure. This makes it easier for CRM Analytics to perform cross-dataset analyses and generate more comprehensive insights.
  • Data Preparation and Management
    Before data can be analyzed, it sometimes needs to be cleaned, transformed, and aggregated. Data Cloud provides tools for data preparation and management. This ensures the data fed into CRM Analytics is accurate, consistent, and in the right format for analysis.
  • Real-time Data Access
    CRM Analytics can tap into Data Cloud’s data when it’s needed. This is crucial for businesses that rely on timely insights to make informed decisions.
  • Security and Compliance
    Salesforce’s robust security and compliance measures protect data that moves from Data Cloud to CRM Analytics. It makes sure sensitive customer data is handled safely and in accordance with relevant regulations.

Together, Salesforce Data Cloud, CRM Analytics, and GRAX ensure that rich real-time and historical versions of data are unified, accessible, secure, and manageable. They also make it easy to gain relevant, accurate, and actionable insights. This helps businesses like yours stay ahead of the curve, improve customer experiences and customer relationships, and unlock new opportunities for growth.

Make better predictions

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