The Salesforce Customer Success Platform (CSP) is the official name of the Salesforce portfolio of products.
This cloud-only platform for CRM and other capabilities includes the following clouds to enable sales, service, marketing, collaboration and communities, analytics and business intelligence, and application development.
Salesforce provides numerous solutions or “clouds” that are all available from an all-in-one platform. This platform is frequently known as the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to reflect Salesforce’s aim to provide solutions that customers need to grow their businesses and achieve success.
The Salesforce clouds that make up the Customer Success Platform include the following:
- The Salesforce Sales Cloud for sales enablement, sales force automation and lead management.
- The Salesforce Marketing Cloud for marketing automation, customer journey mapping, social marketing and more.
- The Salesforce Service Cloud to automate processes and consolidate information to enhance the customer experience.
- The Salesforce Community Cloud for internal and external communication between employees, partners, contractors and so forth.
- The Salesforce App Cloud for developing mobile apps for a wide range of use cases and target audiences.
- The Salesforce Experience Cloud for creating branded, CRM-connected digital experiences to drive brand engagement and accelerate channel sales.
The Salesforce Sales Cloud is ideal for sales teams looking to improve their sales outcomes with rich customer insights and intelligent alerts. Sales Cloud combines all customer information in one place and provides real-time reports and an intuitive workplace to help sales staff improve lead management, enhance productivity, automate sales activities, manage sales pipelines from lead to close, and ultimately, sell more.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an AI-enabled solution to help marketing teams enhance their marketing strategies and achieve better outcomes from their engagement efforts and campaigns. With Marketing Cloud, they can create personalized customer connections, automate customer interactions, improve digital marketing strategies, and deploy smarter campaigns across entire customer lifecycles. Marketing Cloud’s Customer Data Platform centralizes customer data that marketers can activate to any channel, plus AI-driven analytics capabilities that they can leverage to optimize campaigns and spend.
Salesforce Service Cloud is designed to help service businesses optimize their service centers and resolve cases fast. With this customer support platform, service organizations can build omnichannel contact centers, so customers can choose their preferred channel for communications with the business. Also, customer support can be embedded into existing mobile apps and websites to provide more personalized and more timely customer service.
The Community Cloud targets organizations looking to build communities and portals that seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. The platform provides many collaboration tools to connect various stakeholders, such as customers, partners and employees to the information they need. Community Cloud also includes features to provide personalized recommendations to new connections (experts, groups, content), enabling organizations to build more meaningful communities with deeper participation from community members.
Salesforce App Cloud makes it easy to build mobile apps for different use cases in HR, operations, field ops, IT, retail and life sciences. Numerous development tools and solutions are built into the Salesforce CSP to help business users easily build and deploy model-driven and custom apps. The platform also includes enterprise-level security features to ensure app security, plus governance and compliance capabilities to control user and data access.
Finally, Experience Cloud in the Salesforce CSP enables businesses to build portals, help forums, support pages, and other kinds of sites to better engage with customers and collaborate with partners. Through a self-service customer service and account portal, companies can empower customers to find solutions to customer service issues and access their data. Similarly, they can build a partner portal to easily collaborate with partners and find new ways to increase their own and their partners’ revenues through content-sharing and training.
The Salesforce CSP also includes Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud is a key element of the CSP that includes ecommerce solutions for B2C, B2B2C (business to business to consumer) commerce and B2B companies. With Commerce Cloud, these businesses can create high-quality ecommerce websites for their specific product sets and target audiences.
Commerce Cloud sites can be customized, depending on the number of buyers (small in case of B2B but potentially large in case of B2C), order size (often small in case of B2C but potentially large in case of B2B), speed (B2C sites need to be fast to avoid cart abandonment and ensure high conversions) and other factors. Commerce Cloud for B2C commerce and B2B2C include Einstein AI, allowing marketers to personalize customer journeys and recommendations, make predictions, capture key insights and make better decisions using AI.
Uses of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform
The different clouds that make up the Salesforce CSP enable businesses to streamline various functions, like sales, service, customer experience management and marketing. In addition, the CSP and its productivity-boosting features are designed to help organizations better connect and engage with customers, easily manage customer and prospect relationships, and improve internal and external collaboration — all by using the power of data.
Every organization’s business-critical data is stored securely in the cloud and easily accessible through the CSP user interface, regardless of which solution they use. With this data, business users can manage their contacts (including prospects and customers), organize tasks, collaborate with colleagues and close more deals.
Other solutions in the Salesforce Customer Success Platform
Apart from the various clouds, Salesforce CSP also includes solutions for analytics and business intelligence (CRM Analytics), predictions (Einstein), and API lifecycle management (Anypoint Platform).
With CRM Analytics, users can uncover new insights and make more accurate predictions from business data. The solution, which works on both desktop and mobile devices, aggregates data from different sources — Salesforce CRM, ERP, log files, data lakes, etc. — and generates actionable insights and recommendations to support business collaboration and decision-making.
Salesforce Einstein is an AI assistant for CRM that is embedded in the Salesforce UI. Einstein includes both a platform and out-of-the-box applications that enable businesses to leverage AI for a wide range of use cases, including insights discovery, predictions, automations, content generation, workflow streamlining, customer research, dynamic product recommendations and service case triaging.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform simplifies the design and management of business APIs and integrations. Through this platform, organizations can easily see, manage, secure and scale any kind of API with minimal admin overhead and regardless of API architecture or origin. They can also monitor and maintain API health from a single place as well as get vital insights and metrics to ensure API performance and resiliency.
Data in the Salesforce Customer Success Platform
All the solutions in the Salesforce CSP are driven by vast quantities of data. The platform takes all the important data belonging to the organization and organizes it into a simple UI. This ensures easy availability and analysis, so users can make better use of the data. Also, the latest data is always available in real-time and via a simple interface, eliminating confusion and minimizing the potential for making bad decisions based on incorrect or outdated information.
Data in the CSP is securely stored and well-organized in the form of objects and records. All records can be linked to show the relationships between data and help users to see the whole picture. The data is also tracked and shared, and all apps in the Salesforce CSP are connected to it. This allows users to access the information they need on-demand, and use it to guide their actions and decisions, without having to waste time figuring out what it means. Further, they can access the data from both desktop and mobile devices for easy analysis and decision-making.
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