Deep down in Sales Cloud, when you look past the usual functionality like sales force automation, sales performance management or partner relationship management, you can find the heart of the beast: an enterprise grade customer data management (CDM) system with a wealth of functionality to discover.
Customer Data Management is all about managing customer data not just within one application, but across an entire application infrastructure. It is all about collecting, cleaning, enriching and sharing customer data with the end goal being: making sure that every application always has correct, complete, up-to-date and consistent customer data at any time.
It has been a part of Sales Cloud for as long as I can remember, but I never have had time to really dive into it … until now. Over the next few weeks, I will be documenting here my own experiences while I rediscover the Customer Data Management functionality in Sales Cloud.
The following is a list of the topics I look forward to discuss in more detail:
Party Model aka Trading Community Architecture
The party model is at the core of the Sales Cloud customer data management solution. It stores any type of entity you might want to interact with in an application landscape. From the usual suspect like accounts, contacts, consumers, partner and competitors to less expected employees and suppliers.
It is because of this unified look at parties that Sales Cloud can cleanse and enrich them, truly create a single 360° view on any of them and share that information with other applications who would benefit from top-notch quality party information.
Address Verification
Once we have contact and customer data in Sales Cloud, we can start cleaning and enriching the data. Address verification is off course … all about verifying addresses. In Sales Cloud, we do this through a partnership with GBG Locate. I mentioned this already in my earlier post on Oracle Data Cloud for Sales.
Data Deduplication
Keeping the data clean is big responsibility: If your business-critical data is a mess the rest doesn’t matter. It is inevitable that double entries will sneak into your applications. And double entries lead to incomplete and misleading insights. That is why the ability to deduplicate and merge or link information is of huge value.
Data Enrichment
Documented already in my post on Oracle Data Cloud for Sales, was the partnership we have with Dun&Bradstreet to enrich customer and contact information on hundreds of attributes for hundreds of millions of accounts.
Cross Referencing
Another key functionality in a customer data management system is the ability to identify and keep track of information in other applications that consume the cleaned and consolidated customer data. Sales Cloud CDM does this by building a cross reference table storing unique identifiers in other applications against the customer data available in CDM. This cross reference table is the essential part that allows an CMD system to play its critical role in receiving and distributing its information in an application landscape.
I hope you’ll enjoy the series!
