One of the biggest challenges when it comes to creating connected, personalized customer experiences is managing multiple systems that are disconnected from one another.
The data needed to create a personalized experience is there, but it’s spread across numerous platforms making it difficult to get a clear and complete picture of the customer. Often, this means manually pulling and analyzing data across multiple sources, which leaves room for human error, blind spots in trend analysis and over or under prioritizing the wrong data sets.
Yet, it has never been more important for organizations to gain a holistic picture of their data, especially when it comes to their customers. In fact, nearly 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Furthermore, 70% of customers say they expect experiences in which their preferences are known across touchpoints.
Simply put: customers want to be understood. They have high expectations for organizations to provide intuitive, personalized and efficient experiences.
To deliver on this expectation, organizations need a single source of truth for all customer data. However, creating a single source of truth or complete view of the customer has been difficult to achieve for most organizations. Even with CRM solutions, organizations are contending with siloed data, disconnected apps, and complex patchworks of incompatible systems with no way of connecting it all.
Unleashing the power of MuleSoft
To overcome the common barriers that have hindered organizations from gaining a 360-degree view of their customers, and maintain consistent, reconciled data across various systems, an integration platform is needed. Tools like MuleSoft or Customer 360 Truth, which leverages MuleSoft, are being used to eliminate friction and enrich Salesforce Customer 360 with more usable data for sales, customer support, marketing, and more.
MuleSoft (known as MuleSoft Anypoint Platform) is an integration platform that connects applications, data and devices on-premises and in the cloud with an API-led approach. Salesforce’s Customer 360 Truth, which is part of the broader Salesforce Customer 360, is a very similar tool that also enhances data management across apps and systems. And, in fact, it uses MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to facilitate this.
Both connect with other systems to provide real-time access to consistent, reconciled data delivering the right data at the right time and bridging the gap between systems.
Stitching together relevant data
Important customer and company data is often sitting in any combination of ERPs, order management systems (OMS), and one or even dozens of data extensions across various Salesforce Clouds or other third-party systems. This includes data across marketing, sales, service, and commerce. It’s data that’s all imperative to delivering smart, personalized experiences. With integration tools like MuleSoft, this data can be pulled automatically into the right systems to prevent silos from occurring.
MuleSoft is essentially the thread that stitches this data together to create a single source of truth. It also makes the data available in real-time to the systems customers interact with to enable personalization.
With MuleSoft, insights are surfaced across all structured and unstructured data. And specifically within the Customer 360 Truth tool, Salesforce Einstein provides AI-powered recommendations to teams, empowering them to take quick action. This helps guide decision making and improve accuracy.
Additionally, one challenge most organizations are faced with as they embark on their digital transformation journey to create more connected customer experiences is it’s not always possible to upend legacy systems that are entrenched within the organization. Instead, they have to find ways to maintain that system while integrating new apps and solutions. MuleSoft enables that.
Think of MuleSoft as a map that sits on top of data across the organization. It tells the systems where the data is and how to retrieve it. And more importantly, it leaves that data in the systems that manage it, which is crucial to the IT teams who have to maintain them.
While MuleSoft doesn’t help with personalization, it does provide the right data at the right time so teams can efficiently apply additional logic and create a more holistic view of a customer. This will prove mission-critical as APIs become more pervasive and customer expectations continue to shift toward unique, personalized experiences.
