Salesforce Genie Unleashes Bleeding Edge Features, Catch ‘em All

In the world of Pokemon, the characters select a champion by throwing a red-and-white ball where the monster is contained, saying its name, and announcing “I choose YOU!” The creature emerges, prepared to test its mettle against your foe’s chosen champion. If you’re using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP), you have already hurled that pokeball and yelled “CDP, I choose you!”

You have chosen well, for a variety of reasons. If you have yet to make use of a CDP, you’re in for a treat. But, choosing your pokemon isn’t the end. Pokemon evolve: Charmander becomes Charizard, Pikachu becomes Raichu. So is the case for CDP.

Since its launch last month, Salesforce Genie has set the business world on fire, but many have been left with little clarity as to exactly what Genie is. Much like pokemon, perhaps the best way to think of Genie is an evolution of CDP.  

Excavating Old Ruins

CDP is a must-have for marketers. If you already have it, then you know its value. However, for those just getting started, it is worth recapping. Understanding what a CDP does will also give existing users the ability to more crisply delineate how Genie is the evolution of the platform.

In short, CDP is technology that collects and collates data from a variety of sources for a complete understanding of customers. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is an extremely potent tool when you have thousands or even millions of customers interacting with various aspects of your company.

To accomplish this seemingly Herculean feat, a CDP stitches together information from disparate sources such as email, mobile data from Marketing Cloud, your Customer Relationship Management (CRM), external sources like e-commerce data platform, your data warehouse, your ERP or third-party apps.

Once that data is gathered, CDP then begins to homogenize it into standardized customer interactions. This fills in gaps in your knowledge about the customer, allowing you to see the complete picture of their interactions with your company in a way that eliminates redundancies and paints as clear a picture as possible.

Then, CDP allows marketers to make use of the data to personalize customer journeys, tailoring them to each customer based on the information they have garnered from CDP. Finally, now that customer data is unified and marketers are putting it to work, they can more easily use it to pull useful insight, sharpening their ability to do things such as create segments, quantify ROI or create lookalike audiences.    

Rubbing the Lamp

The launch of Genie took CDP a step further. The name is apt: it is an almost mythical, magical presence to unlock hidden potential. Two key features aimed at increasing scope and reach take what CDP can do to the next level. First, Genie is real-time. Second, it functions across departments.

For the most part, CDP is for marketers. They make use of its functions, because those functions relate to marketing. With Genie, every department can avail themselves of the uses a CDP offers. This opens the floodgates for sales, operations and finance to be able to see the same view of the customer traditionally reserved for marketers.

For instance, marketers typically look at data that has been aggregated, a sort of 10,000-foot view. Sales might want a more micro-focused lens through which to view customers. With Genie, such a parsing is possible.

Further, while CDP features some real-time data, Genie ups the ante, making every element real-time. This enables your team to make use of Salesforce features like flows and automations in new and exciting ways, personalizing customer experience in ways never seen before.

Genie takes abstract data previously in CDP and turns it concrete.

The Three Wishes

While Salesforce has yet to roll out all the features that will be available with Genie, many have already launched. If you already have CDP, you can become part of what is essentially the beta test for Genie. Doing so will allow you to tinker with some of its capabilities to gain insight into the nature of its evolution.

If what Genie does is confusing, you’re not alone. Luckily, an experienced partner will be on the bleeding edge of this new technology. Making the most of this new revolutionary technology’s features requires acumen that an experienced partner can provide.

So, catch ‘em all. See CDP’s final form. Get Genie.