Last week marked the return of an in-person Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual conference. Over 40,000 members of the global Salesforce community joined together for learning, fun, community building, and philanthropy. The conference is also a great opportunity for Salesforce to announce new products and features. And that they did! Salesforce introduced Genie, what Salesforce calls the first real-time CRM.  We’ll discuss what exactly Salesforce Genie is and why it should be viewed as an evolution of existing CDP capabilities.

Is Salesforce Genie just another Customer Data Platform?

A CDP is a centralized and unified source of data to understand their customers better, by creating a trustworthy, first-party record of all of a customers’ interactions with your products and tools.

Salesforce CDP, formerly known as Customer Audience 360, to this point had been focused on the marketing and acquisition phase of a customer journey. This fits with the traditional definition of CDP. With Genie, Salesforce is careful to make the distinction that the new capabilities go beyond this narrow definition. As our friends at No Jitter say, “Salesforce doesn’t think a CDP is what people really want. They don’t want another point solution to integrate with everything else. Salesforce thinks what customers want is a true real-time CRM, with data as part of the fabric of the platform.”

What they call “real-time CRM” is very similar to what we’ve described as a Customer Engagement Platform. The Salesforce Ben Blog describes it well: “Genie is Salesforce CDP, just revamped in big ways.”

What’s so special about a “Real-Time” CRM?

Salesforce Genie is aiming to be the first real-time CRM. With a real-time CRM, an organization can pull data across different business processes to suitably prepare for customer interactions. This data gives organizations an advantage of being predictive of their customers needs, creating a sense of personalization that is specific to each customer. Let’s take a look at an example using an airline.

Imagine a customer has added a flight to their cart, but has not checked out yet. However, you’ve also noticed they’ve visited your “pay using points” FAQ. Your airline contact center is now receiving an inbound phone call from a number that matches that customer’s one in their contact record. Putting all of this information together, your agent can begin the conversation with “we see you have a flight in your cart and we’re exploring ways to pay using points. Would you like some assistance with that?” This kind of seamless communication between Sales and Service opens up many possibilities for personalization.

Equipping service agents is one use-case, but this innovation also opens the door for real-time automation using Flows. The example provided during Dreamforce was a pacemaker detecting arrhythmic heartbeats and that triggered a real-time notification to a patient that they needed to get attention.

Under the Hood – What’s driving the power behind Salesforce Genie?

One of the main exciting features of Genie to our team at Vision Point Systems, is how accessible Genie appears to be across all facets of the platform. One session we attended highlighted how they plan to integrate all of Genie’s capabilities into both Mulesoft and Tableau. Genie is not only centralizing data for organizations, but providing as many tools as possible for organizations to use that data. Genie is architected to take advantage of a data lake, which means your real-time data can be both structured and unstructured. This is an upgrade from Salesforce CDP, which previously only made data accessible through transactional databases.

Genie Spans from No Code to Low Code to Pro Code

No Code

    • Out of the Box Lightning controls for Service Cloud
    • Marketing Cloud Integration

Low Code

    • APIs for Platform Metadata and Business Data
    • Webhooks (Mulesoft)

Pro Code

    • SQL Access for Tableau or external Analytics
    • Zero Copy File-based access for Snowflake or AWS Sagemaker

 

How Do You Get Started?

If your company is interested in using Salesforce Genie, the good news is that it’s really easy to get started, when you choose the right tools and implementation partner. If you’re interested in learning more about how your organization could directly benefit from a real-time CRM, schedule a meeting with one of Vision Point Systems’ consultants today.

Author

Andrew Ramadan

I’m a Business Development Manager at Vision Point Systems where I guide existing and potential accounts through the entire customer lifecycle, overseeing discovery to account management and ensuring they attain desired outcomes from VPS services and solutions. I also assist our executive team in developing our go-to-market strategy for our services team and solutions, developed in collaboration with our technology partners Appian, Twilio, Intercom, and AWS.

Before this role, I spent five years as a technical consultant, primarily leading software development teams building on the Appian platform.

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