Customer 360 Without Customer 360

The idea of a Customer 360 launched at Dreamforce a couple of years ago and we heard more about it at Dreamforce ’19. While Salesforce has done a lot to develop this idea into some neat options, at least for us – it seems really expensive, potentially requires the use of Mulesoft, and is a LOT of work. Don’t get me wrong, I still think its great. I’m super excited to see what the end result will look like in coming years… but for now I can’t say that its really achievable. There ARE some things we can do to help though – things we can do to pull customer data together and display it when and where its relevant. And we can do it with the most amazing product ever… Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics). Let me show you how!

The whole idea of Customer 360 is being able to show information from across systems and channels in one place. On top of that, you only want to see the relevant information and only when its relevant. If you’re anything like us, you generate a lot of data. More data than you know what to do with, and certainly more data than anyone’s brain could organize if its put in front of you. My approach to this has three parts. First, we pull all of our data into one place using Tableau CRM. We organize it, filter it, transform it… make it useful. Then we use Lightning Components to surface the bits that are relevant, directly on Record Pages where the data is needed. Its great… and it works!

a Use Case

I’m currently constructing a view like this for a customer care team. Most of their data is in Salesforce, but they also need to consider product usage data, customer interactions with website assets, and more – and that data is not in Salesforce, nor does it really need to be. It would take up a lot of storage space and for things like usage data or click data – maybe you only ever need to see that in an aggregated way. What good is raw data to someone who is just trying to make a phone call? Its not. So what do we do?

Step 1: Connect

Your data might be in a variety of places – wherever it is, you can almost certainly connect to it with Tableau CRM. For this use case, I’m connecting to data in AWS, Marketo and Salesforce. There are SO MANY connectors available out of the box in Tableau CRM now, and they add even more with nearly every release. Here’s the full list on what you can connect to out of the box. If your data isn’t accessible through one of these options, you may need to use a middle-man. We use Dell Boomi to bring some data into Analytics and utilize the External Data API.

Step 2: Make the data actionable

Like I said earlier… raw data isn’t useful for anyone. Well, maybe someone, but not most people. How can we group and present this information to a busy person who just needs to quickly digest it so they can have an informed phone call? And here’s where your Tableau CRM wizardry and creativity will come in. First we want to consider the record page where this is going to live. What is the current layout? At what points will this data be necessary to see and how should I be able to access it? From a page loading perspective, I recommend putting embedded dashboards behind a tab, in an accordion, etc so that they are not adding to your initial page load time. Or, could we add a visibility filter to the component so that even if it does load on initial page load, we’re only loading it when we absolutely have to? Of course we can, and we should. We should consider all of these things. And WHERE we decide to put this data will start informing the design of the actual dashboard.

• How big is going to be?
• Is it going to be in a side panel or a wider panel?
• Do we need to restrict the height of it at all so that we’re not taking over the whole page?
• If we’re taking up a lot of the page, is there anything else on the page that we could remove and move into the dashboard instead?
• Will we need to have links or quick actions available?

All good questions. All things that I asked myself when I was going through this process. For the usage data in particular, I was actually already replicating that data and showing it in a related list in the Salesforce record. It was taking up a lot of data storage, and the raw data, again, isn’t that useful to look at. Going through these questions one by one, I realized that I could actually get that data out of Salesforce completely and only show it via Tableau CRM. I still have the ability to show the raw data if I want to.

Step 3: Embed your Dashboard on Your Record Layout

The beauty of this is that we have an out of the box Lightning Component to play with here. Drag it on to your Lightning Page Layout, tell it which dashboard you want to display, and then we’ll also need to set a filter so that we are automatically filtering the dashboard by your Record. And BOOM we have a way to display all this external data, giving our users the information they need exactly where they need it, and its ACTIONABLE and thoughtful. Its not just a bunch of rows of data, its aggregated, visually appealing, and easy to understand and consume.