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Salesforce Rolls Out Customer 360 Truth to Better Tackle Data and Identity

During Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce announced the introduction of a new product – Customer 360 Truth. The product purports to better realize the vision of having a “unified view of the customer” by stitching marketing, sales, and customer service data into a single unified Salesforce ID. The solution is underpinned by the Cloud Information Model, an open-source model Salesforce is pushing to improve interoperability of data between cloud platforms.

Creating a single version of the truth for the customer across channels and experiences has – historically – been an extremely daunting task. Lack of a consistent, unified customer record was often frustrated by (and subsequently fueled) data hygiene problems – duplicate, stale, and conflicting data. Customer 360 Truth purports to help consolidate customer information easily and effectively across channels and applications.

While Customer 360 Truth is a new product, the story underpinning it isn’t. Many vendors (from CRM players to middleware providers) have often touted their solutions as “solving” the unified customer identity problem. The reality is more complex: there’s rarely a silver bullet for easily tackling these problems in an enterprise context. Legacy applications, a blend of on-premises and SaaS solutions, poor data stewardship, and application fragmentation all impose significant hurdles to creating a unified customer view. Customer 360 Truth is a step in the right direction but won’t be a panoptic solution in most mid-to-large tier organizations. It also remains to be seen how many other cloud vendors will play ball with adopting the Cloud Information Model – our expectation is that those already aligned with Salesforce will adopt, but there’s unlikely to be a wave of adoption from those not in Salesforce’s orbit.

Source: Salesforce Sales Cloud at SoftwareReviews, Accessed Nov. 28, 2019

Our Take

• Salesforce, an industry leader in CRM applications, recently introduced a product called Customer 360 Truth to address customer identity management across channels and applications.
• While Customer 360 Truth undoubtedly enhances Salesforce’s capabilities for centralized customer data and identity management, claims that it will radically simplify the issue of identity integration should be treated skeptically.

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