DIA@Dreamforce - Customer 360 with Genie, CDP and Contact Center
Genie - 360° view of the customer (in real time)
"We have been building this for 20 years," says Parker Harris, not without pride, at one point at Dreamforce. Salesforce has announced the all-round view of the customer in one form or another time and again over the past few years. What's different this time?
Salesforce has bought big
MuleSoft and Tableau are two key pillars of Genie named to enable big data integration and analysis. Another is Krux, the Data Management Platform, but it had the shortcoming of not being as transactional as Salesforce was used to. Evaluation yes, easily configurable actions: No.
Enter Genie: In Salesforce CRM, merge data points from all possible sources, evaluate them with Einstein, and build business logic based on them.
Salesforce has learned
"If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist" - was kind of charming as a slogan 10 years ago - but with increasing amounts of data and systems, it's aged badly. This year at Dreamforce, we could hear over and over again that companies use, on average, well over 900 technical services and tools to run their day-to-day operations. These services generate data, and Genie is supposed to be able to handle it.
But this is how the slogan takes on relevance again. Salesforce as a central data-turning-and-transaction machine across all channels - that pleases Marc Benioff so much that he puts on rabbit ears.
If you wanted to somehow make the 900 data sources usable in Salesforce (or another transactional system of its kind) to trigger business processes, you had to integrate or aggregate and then integrate on a large scale - with the usual costs of such complex projects.
With Genie, a second source of transactions emerges, not from the familiar CRM database, but from a data platform that Salesforce modestly calls the "Hyperscale Data Platform".
Based on the picture of Data Flows, it is clear that there are still two types of data flow: Synchronous and Asynchronous - Websites and Mobile Apps are currently supported directly in Genie - also MuleSoft Ingestion API can provide real-time data. But everything else has to be provided in usual batches.
It is important that not only Salesforce flows / automations can be triggered, but the results of the data unification can also be played out to Google Ads and other providers.
All existing Salesforce CDP customers can benefit from Genie. There will be a separate SKU for the Service Cloud (see below).
Genie in the contact center
The pressure to further digitize processes in the service area in particular is felt by 8,000 survey participants at different levels: brand loyalty has been falling since Corona, costs have exploded, and at the same time the global economy is constantly fluctuating - uncertainty is high, and neither budget nor human resources can be planned well.
From the service staff's point of view, the cost pressure means that quality suffers - the customer, on the other hand, wants the best quality and wants it fast - via all channels such as SMS, chat, or telephone. The service experience becomes the yardstick.
In order to strengthen brand loyalty on the one hand through a very good service experience, and on the other hand to deal with constantly changing service staff, Salesforce wants to come up trumps with Genie - for example, by showing for each transaction whether the customer has recently abandoned a shopping cart or whether (as in the picture) it is a high value customer.
Developer and Architects
Architekten
Salesforce Well Architected
For architects, the big news continues to be Salesforce Well Architected - the framework that was recently released and gives guidelines. Really worth reading.
DX@Scale
For those interested in packaging, it's worth checking out the session from the creators of dx@scale - the "curated" open source framework that allows Accenture and others to deliver modular Salesforce projects.
Developer
CDP Queries
There was eye rubbing at the Developer Keynote, as Genie fires up SQL Queries (among other things) against Data Platform via Apex.
As a cool goodie Apex DataWeave comes along, although only in Developer Preview according to the release notes (GA on the Dreamforce Slide is unfortunately not true).
DataWeave allows the use and storage of MuleSoft DataWeave scripts as metadata to then evaluate in Apex CSV or JSON or XML much more comfortable than before. All slides are available here.
DevOps Center
With DevOps Center (Beta), Salesforce and GitHub have entered into a long-term partnership. Admins and developers can either pick up changes from an org and upload them to GitHub or "push them directly to the branch", as the jargon goes. Not only that, but DevOps Center also handles the deployment pipeline. Using drag and drop, user stories can be lifted from a dev sandbox into the test sandbox. Currently, DevOps Center only supports the Org Based Development Model - you already have to bring/create your orgs yourself. DevOps Center is available to everyone for free.