Salesforce Customer 360 Explained

The elevator pitch

Dave Norris
3 min readJul 14, 2023

With the introduction of Einstein and Data Cloud Salesforce have created a backbone that drives their future innovation.

The foundation of the Salesforce Customer 360 is underpinned by 3 capabilities:

Artificial Intelligence — Einstein

An umbrella term for features of Salesforce that use machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) to model data to provide proactive insights.

A Hyperscale Data Platform — Data Cloud

Ingests data from Salesforce technologies and your Enterprise applications to provide a single source of truth, provide insights then publish actionable events. It can use machine learning models from Einstein or federate models from your existing investments like Snowflake, Amazon SageMaker and Google Vertex AI. Actionable events can be consumed by other Salesforce apps to drive an outcome.

Integration and Automation — MuleSoft

Is the foundation to exchange data both between Salesforce applications and your wider enterprise systems. Connectors and accelerators act as templates for common industry integration use cases. Composer and Robotic Process Automation adds to the capabilities to move data between systems.

The foundation of the Customer 360

Data moves from your Enterprise into Data Cloud using MuleSoft and/or Data Cloud ingestion APIs. Data Cloud harmonises the data ingested using a common data model and matching rules. Einstein as the AI layer provides Machine Learning models to look for insights.

The user experience of the Customer 360 comes from market leading applications.

Collaborate — Slack

A central collaboration canvas for all applications.

Sell, Serve and Industries — Lightning Platform

Provides Sales, Service and Industry data models, business processes and user interfaces on a configurable and customisable platform.

Acquire and Build Loyalty — Marketing Cloud

Optimised for large transactional volumes of email, SMS and mobile push notifications. Acquire and nurture prospects and craft personalised marketing campaigns across a diverse range of channels.

Digital Storefront — B2C Commerce Cloud

Integrate your back office products and pricing into an online storefront. Delivers aggressive managed caching, content delivery networks and a composable architecture that supports mobile and web use cases.

Data Visualisation — Tableau

Brings together disparate data sources, visualises them, and provides data driven insights.

Custom Applications — Heroku

For custom applications in your enterprise — or net new applications — requiring the full elasticity of B2C scale and the use of existing, modern, programming languages like Go, Scala, Ruby, Python, Node.js and more — Salesforce provides the ability to host these applications and their corresponding data services on fully managed infrastructure.

The apps providing the user experiences

Acquire customers, nurture their relationships with personalised communications, provide first class customer service, look for data insights and collaborate across Sales, Service, IT and Marketing.

These applications simply become another source of data for Data Cloud.

The 2 halves of the Salesforce Customer 360 can then come together to provide access and insights across Sales, Service, IT and Marketing.

The foundation created allows for each part of the Salesforce Customer 360 to use artificial intelligence and take action on data changes across your enterprise to power unique features across the customer lifecycle.

The Salesforce Customer 360

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Dave Norris

Developer Advocate @ Salesforce || Interested in solving unique challenges using different cloud service providers || All opinions are mine.