Transforming Actionable Data into Actionable Insights

How to maximize value from your Salesforce data

Salesforce Customer 360 is an incredibly effective platform for managing and improving interactions with prospects and customers. However, businesses can only realize its true potential by transforming Salesforce data into actionable data and actionable insights. This is both more complex and more easily achieved than you may think.  

What exactly is Salesforce Data?

Salesforce data encompasses all the information generated and stored within the Salesforce ecosystem. It includes customer details, interaction logs, transaction records, and custom fields that organizations use to track client engagements. With this data in hand, you can better understand customer behavior, preferences, and trends, and make informed business decisions.

What role does Salesforce Data Cloud play in enabling insights?

The Salesforce platform provides a unified customer view by integrating data across various Salesforce products and external sources. It enables businesses to create a cohesive customer profile using live data. This helps ensure consistency and personalization across all touchpoints.

Salesforce Data Cloud complements this by acting as a data management solution. It facilitates the collection, storage, and analysis of live Customer 360 data, including the below, and supports real-time data synchronization and integration. Together, they help make live customer data easy to access and act upon.

• Customer Data
  Personal information, purchase history, interaction logs, and preferences
• Transactional Data 
  Includes purchases, returns, and service requests
• Engagement Data
  Data from marketing campaigns, email interactions, social media engagement, and website visits
• Custom Data
  Unique data fields created to capture specific information relevant to your business

When is Salesforce data considered actionable?

Data actionability refers to its capacity to inform decisions that positively impact business outcomes. To be truly actionable, data must be relevant, accurate, complete, timely, and accessible.  

1. Relevance
   Relevant data relates directly to the question or decision at hand. It aligns with your business’s goals, challenges, or operational needs. For instance, if you’re working on improving customer satisfaction, relevant data might include customer feedback scores (e.g., NPS scores – net promoter score), support ticket resolutions, and response times.
2. Accuracy
   Accuracy refers to the correctness and reliability of data. It must be error-free and reflect the true scenario as closely as possible. Inaccurate data can lead to misguided insights and decisions. To ensure data accuracy, make sure you validate data sources, use robust data collection and protection methods, and regularly audit data to catch and correct mistakes.
3. Completeness
   Complete data provides a full picture without gaps that could lead to misinterpretation or partial insights. This is crucial for understanding the true scope of a situation or problem. Missing data can skew analysis and lead to conclusions that don’t account for all variables or factors involved. To ensure data completeness, you must integrate detailed historical data from all relevant sources.
4. Timeliness
   Timely data is available whenever it is needed. It helps businesses make decisions at the most opportune moments using the most current and relevant information.  
5. Accessibility
   This means data is readily available to those who need it (e.g., in your organization’s own cloud environment), in a format – like Parquet – that is easy to understand and use. This might involve using data visualization tools, dashboards, and training programs to help stakeholders understand and leverage data-driven insights.

What is the difference between actionable data and actionable insights?

Actionable data is the raw data material. Actionable insights are the refined product that businesses use to guide decisions and strategies. In practice, actionable insights are derived from actionable data.  

For insights to be actionable, they must be relevant to your business goals, have clear implications, timely delivery, specific directions, and measurable outcomes.  

Relevance

Relevance means the insight is directly applicable to your objectives, challenges, or decisions at hand. 

Example: An online retail company that uses Salesforce Customer 360 to track customer journeys notices a significant drop-off at the checkout stage. The insight is that customers are abandoning carts due to unclear shipping options. This is relevant as it addresses the goal of improving online sales conversion rates.

Clarity

Clarity means the insight is straightforward. Decision-makers can easily grasp the implications. 

Example: A marketing team analyzing historical email campaign performance finds a clear pattern. Emails personalized with product recommendations based on the customer’s browsing history have a 40% higher click-through rate. This guides the team to focus on personalization strategies for future campaigns.

Timeliness

Insights lose their value if they are not delivered in time to influence decisions.

Example: A financial advisory firm integrates real-time financial market data with client portfolios in Salesforce. An insight about a sudden market downturn triggers timely alerts to advisors. This enables them to proactively contact clients with strategies to mitigate potential losses, such as rebalancing portfolios or considering safer investment options.

Specificity

Specificity involves providing enough detail in the insight for it to lead to a particular course of action.  

Example: A SaaS company uses feedback collected through Salesforce Service Cloud. They learn that customers have a hard time using a particular software module due to its confusing user interface. With this insight, the product team prioritizes redesigning that module’s interface in the development roadmap.

Measurability

Measurability means you can quantify the impact of actions you take based on the insights. This allows organizations to track the effectiveness of their decisions and adjust strategies accordingly.

Example: A healthcare provider uses Salesforce Health Cloud to revamp their patient appointment scheduling process based on patient feedback analysis. They can determine if this was effective by examining changes in no-show rates and patient satisfaction scores.

How GRAX makes actionability easy

GRAX makes Salesforce data and insights more actionable by making it easy to collect, protect, and distribute detailed historical data. This is vital for several reasons:

• 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 analysis tools – such as Tableau, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, AWS QuickSight, or PowerBI – to gain actionable insights. 
• Timely, relevant insights
  Businesses can tailor data retention and analysis strategies to their specific needs. This ensures insights are both timely and aligned with operational goals.
• 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 businesses meet regulatory requirements related to data retention and auditing. This not only protects businesses legally but also ensures the data used for generating insights adheres to regulatory standards.

To transform Salesforce data into actionable insights, you need a clear understanding of the data available, tools to analyze and interpret this data, and strategies to apply insights. Salesforce Customer 360 and Salesforce Data Cloud provide the infrastructure and capabilities to manage and integrate live customer data. Solutions like GRAX make it easy to ensure all your historical data and insights are actionable, so you can get the most value from them.