Maximize Data Value & Business Growth with Salesforce Data Cloud

In today’s digital landscape, businesses across the financial services industry constantly seek ways to enhance customer experiences and drive growth. 

One of the best ways to achieve these goals is to maximize the potential value of your customer data. But it’s hard to get much insight from your data when it’s disconnected and spread across dozens (or even hundreds) of systems. 

Enter Salesforce Data Cloud (previously known as Salesforce Customer Data Platform).

Data Cloud helps financial services organizations consolidate and analyze data from different sources. With the unified data set Data Cloud enables, you can create unique customer segments, dig deep into customer behavior, and discover valuable insights that help you identify opportunities and improve your customer experiences.

In this article, we’ll highlight a few of Data Cloud’s most powerful features and glimpse how this solution can help organizations like yours.

Who Needs Salesforce Data Cloud?

If your team uses Marketing Cloud and collects customer data from multiple sources (i.e., website, chatbot, email marketing, social media, etc.), then Data Cloud is for you.

Salesforce Data Cloud helps you overcome the challenges of fragmented customer data by providing a unified platform that integrates information from all your data sources, making it easier to analyze and spot significant trends. 

Because of this, Data Cloud brings significant benefits to any bank, credit union, insurance company, mortgage lender, or other financial services business looking to use data to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and account growth.

What Exactly Does Data Cloud Do?

Think of all the ways your company interacts with customers – on your website, through email, on social media, in person, in your customer portal, on Sales or Service calls, through online loan or service applications,  via purchases in your online store, surveys, etc.

Next, consider all the data your organization collects from these interactions – purchase details, website page visits, link-click metrics, “likes,” demographics, contact info, service requests, email open rates, Sales call notes …, etc. 

Remember to consider where all your data sits once collected – Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, Meta, Point-of-Sale systems, AWS, Encompass, Symitar, nCino, random spreadsheets, proprietary databases, etc.

Finally, please think of how awesome it would be to compare data from all these sources side-by-side without pulling data from separate systems and dumping it into a spreadsheet or analysis tool.

Now you’re starting to get the picture.

Data Cloud is a central hub where you can collect and connect data from every interaction and step of the customer journey, giving you a complete view of customer behavior.

Once you have all the data in Data Cloud, you can create unique customer segments, which you can then push back into Marketing Cloud to tweak your targeting and improve your messaging. 

Your team can also use Data Cloud to uncover patterns and trends that help you better understand customer behavior and expectations, create accurate customer profiles, and make strategic decisions for your business.

Data Cloud lets you get valuable insight from anonymous data collected from your website or social media pages.

Salesforce Data Cloud for Banks & Credit Unions

Salesforce Data Cloud is a major asset for banks and credit unions –  both depend heavily on strong customer relationships for continued growth and success. 

For banks and credit unions focused on growing and maximizing the value of member relationships, Data Cloud gives Sales and Marketing teams an in-depth view of member behavior and product performance. Armed with this insight, you can develop and market products and services guaranteed to delight your members and increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Suppose you’re part of a larger bank vs. a smaller credit union. In that case, you can also leverage real-time insights from Data Cloud to market your products and services to new customers more effectively – and to improve your onboarding, online experience, and customer service for all customers.

Salesforce Data Cloud for Insurance Companies

While insurance companies can certainly benefit from the enhanced customer insight Data Cloud enables, there’s an additional use case that makes Data Cloud even more attractive.

Insurance companies can use Data Cloud to integrate and analyze data about agent licensing, appointments, production, and training/education. This makes compliance more manageable and helps your team identify opportunities for expansion or improvement.

If your business is an insurance carrier, you can also use Data Cloud to identify facts, patterns, and trends to market your products to independent agencies and brokerages.

Keys to Data Cloud Success

Data Cloud is truly a great product. It comes with excellent features, a user-friendly interface, and intuitive workflows. Once your team is up and running, you’ll love everything about it – which brings us to the key to Data Cloud Success: Get the Implementation Right!

And how do you do that?

We have two suggestions:

Pay Very Close Attention to Your Data Model and Data Mapping

• It takes a complex data model to power Data Cloud’s integration and analysis features. The more data sources you integrate, the more complex the data model must be.
• If you get your data and data mapping right, you’ll soon be automatically pulling in data from all your systems and happily using it to create customer segments, craft targeted messaging, and improve your products and services.
• If you build your system on the wrong data model or mess up your data mapping, you’ll likely have data synchronization, accuracy, and access problems.
• To sum up, a good data model and careful data mapping is the foundation you need to guarantee Data Cloud success.

Work With an Experienced Data Cloud Implementation Partner

• The best way to ensure your data model, data mapping, and everything else about your Data Cloud implementation goes right is to partner with an experienced Data Cloud solution provider like EMS.
• Working with a partner saves time, speeds up time to ROI, and frees up your team to focus on using Data Cloud to drive growth instead of trying to become data model experts.
• In the case of EMS, we’ve been there, done that, and know precisely what it takes to successfully implement Data Cloud for financial services businesses like yours.