Customer 360: What Is It?

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed and podcast host Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connection with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how tos and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds Podcast. This is Bobby Tichy along with Cole Fisher and Nick Burggraf. We have a special guest today that I'd like to introduce, Ryan McCambridge. Ryan is our managing director of strategy here at Lev, and I've had the pleasure of working with Ryan at a couple of different places now. First at ExactTarget and then through Salesforce and then here at Lev. So Ryan, if you wouldn't mind just giving yourself a brief intro that'd be great.

Ryan McCambridge: Thanks, Bobby. I appreciate you having me on. I really have enjoyed the series of content that you guys have released so far and I'm just excited to be a part of the conversation today. Like you said, I lead our strategy and thought leadership group here at Lev. My job is really just to listen to our customers and understand what they're doing and what their challenges are and helping them to understand how they could think about optimizing their ROI and their investments in our technology stack, specifically as it relates to Salesforce, but sometimes in other products that are integrating and amplify what they're doing in marketing. So thanks for having me on.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, you bet. Thanks for joining us and excited to talk through today a very hot topic, not only in the Salesforce ecosystem, but I think in general, in technology, the notion of customer 360, and we'll be speaking specifically about how it relates to Salesforce, but really the whole notion of how do we get a single view of a person, of a customer, of a subscriber, a constituent whatever industry we're thinking of. How do we get a single view of someone across all the different platforms across the tech stack? So what we want to talk through today is what is customer 360 as it relates to Salesforce? How are they positioning it? When is it going to be available and then run through a sample use case of where it will really be helpful and some of the elements that will be important as you start to consider customer 360 as a solution. To put a caveat on this, there is no general release date at this time for customer 360 that Salesforce has provided other than I think later this year or beginning of next year. So there's no specific timetable at this point, but as a consultancy and as folks who are talking to customers each day about this exact problem, we thought it was really relevant to start down this path so you guys can hear our perception on it as well as get a better sense of what Salesforce means when it talks about customer 360. So Ryan, I'd love for you to go ahead and give a high- level overview of customer 360 and what it is as it relates to Salesforce.

Ryan McCambridge: Yeah, I think it's interesting, right? There's these really buzzwordy topics that are out in the industry, as you were saying, is this a CDP? Is this a golden record database? What exactly is customer 360? And I think Salesforce is being very intentional of not calling it, any of those things, but what they are trying to define it as is a single way of identifying a customer across multiple different keys that particular customer could have. So I'm probably oversimplifying it in the eyes of Salesforce, but it really is a key store. It's saying," Hey, this traditional way of how Salesforce has been bringing about integration between their products doesn't scale." Right? They ask you to integrate the data and then actually move it between products. And quite honestly, that's not scalable, it's not effective, it's not efficient. And they needed to solve for that. Their solution for that is this customer 360 solution that is going to allow for this solution to understand and do matching and decisioning based on information between systems and then store those keys in customer 360. So that if an event is happening in one system that needs the other system to do something because of that event, it knows who that person is. And if an event is occurring in one system, that's a new event and knows how to tie that information back to an existing customer within that system as well. So I think this is a really powerful concept. I think it's a really smart architectural idea for how Salesforce wants to bring this to market. The other component of it is they're not walling it off to their garden either. So from what we understand, in addition to the Salesforce ecosystem, this will have an integration protocol, whether that's API, or you can do it through manual data integrations into one of the platforms. You can tie in other tertiary systems into this to continue understanding who those customers are and what they're doing as it relates to what's important in your ecosystem. So this is long overdue. I think there's a lot of solutions out here that are probably half baked or three quarters baked and some probably fully baked where people have said," Hey, we don't have time to wait, but this is going to be extremely powerful for those who don't have that fully baked solution and says, Hey, how do I bring about a best in class solution to offer scalability and growth for my company as my investments in other technology grow, as well as the expectations on the experiences my customers have?" So I know that was a long- winded way of saying 360's here to help you understand your customer and bring transparency to your customer across systems faster.

Bobby Tichy: There are two main things that you mentioned that stuck out to me and I think that we hear a lot and I'm sure you do too. One is about having data in a way where we're not just duplicating it in the source system, so to speak within the Salesforce realm, but rather interconnecting them through that key store that you mentioned. The customers that I work with that are ahead of the game, especially on the technology front, always pushed back when it's the talk of data duplication, right? Why are we taking the data from the data warehouse and then putting it into sales cloud, and then having sales cloud pushed into marketing cloud? Why can't we just have it in one place and then have it married it all together from there, which I think is a solution that this will help provide for sure. I think the other element too, that you had mentioned is how do we integrate with other systems outside of the Salesforce realm? I think that as it started to come out, a lot of the questions that we got were, was this only going to be for the more I invest in Salesforce, the more I'll be able to use it? And I think the answer to that is probably yes. Get to be seen for sure, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't, but at the same time, to your point, they're not putting up that wall garden. They're providing a level of integration where whatever other system we need to include, we can.

Ryan McCambridge: Yeah. And I think you have to give credit to Salesforce for that, right? I think their perspective is always APIs, APIs, APIs. How can we make this open? How can we make this more available to our customer? So hats off to them on that. But again, if they know if they want to grow and solve these problems, allowing for that is going to make them even more desirable.

Bobby Tichy: I think to your point earlier, there are a ton of companies and industries that are going to benefit from this. I think one area where we see a lot of potential for this is on the retail side, especially if we think about folks who are not only B2C in direct to consumer, but also wholesalers in B2B. So I kind of look at this from the lens of, as an example, a speaker manufacturer, and the background that they've got on the B2B side, they've got this B2C direct as well. They're not only a wholesaler to their channel, but they're also a technology company. So a lot of their speaker technologies implemented and integrated into other speakers out there too. And they are fully fledged, seven different elements of Salesforce, but they've also got a ton of different technology outside of the platform. As we've continued to talk with them, they're a prime candidate I think a lot like other retailers would be where we need to see that kind of connected view, where data from other systems needs to be connected, but also we need to be able to marry up this data without having to duplicate it or wait on an ETL job to send it over to be waited on for a period of time. It's how do we get data faster? How do we not replicate that data? And also how do we manage all of our technology solutions a little bit better?

Ryan McCambridge: And ultimately more moving parts is more risk, right? It's more opportunity for somewhere in that chain to break. And we've seen it, right? We've seen where if this one component that really isn't critical path, but the design of how these integrated products work fails, it really has cascading impacts across the business. Then as you were talking about retail and specifically in those CPG use cases, there is a demand to get into direct to consumer and traditional wholesale and consumer goods spaces. That means you have to know who your customer is. Obviously you need to know who your suppliers and distributors are, but if you're going to get into that direct to consumer space, expect those expectations from those consumers who traditionally might've been working with your wholesalers and distributors and retail stores to now want that same experience with you. So you're not off the hook. So a solution like this is going to be critically important, probably doubly important because you do have a B2B and a B2C component of your business.

Bobby Tichy: What would you say to folks that are looking at building this kind of solution rather than trying to implement what Salesforce has done? The reason I ask is because I think that for more engineering or technology minded organizations, that's the route they're going to go because they feel like their own solution would be better. But curious on your take of building versus buying, especially for something like this.

Ryan McCambridge: I think that there's just risk if you build it yourself. The reason I say that and the rationale behind that is there's always going to be key decision makers that are making these critical business decisions around how do we identify and score and match our data, right? And then that's a snapshot in time. Well, we all know something is going to happen next, right? I mean, it was social, and then now it's mobile, and now it's IOT. What's the next thing that's going to come online that's going to need to integrate into your enterprise approach to making that golden record that the new organization might not know what you've done already? Whereas I think Salesforce brings a product that I'm hoping, and from what I'm seeing is going to be very user- friendly, right? It's going to have the marketer and the end user in mind to configure and understand what business roles have been made. We go into customers and we ask what they're doing now. And a lot of them don't really know, right? It's been built by an IT team and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a gap, right? Where new people come, those people with historical knowledge leave and nobody really understands exactly what's happening within their own systems. So can it be done? Can it be done well? Yeah, I think we see that all over the place, Bobby. We have world- class customers who are doing this. I just think that a solution that's uniquely designed to solve this problem in a very specific way that's using UX and UI to make that simple for the marketer and for the end user is going to be a super compelling use case that's going to be hard to overcome when it comes to building versus using a tool like this.

Bobby Tichy: Any other thoughts you have on customer 360 that you'd include here? I'm trying to think of any other kind of point of clarity or context that would be helpful, but curious what you think.

Ryan McCambridge: I mean, the last thing I would leave people with is just, if you're currently in the ecosystem, I think just be prepared that there's going to be some unwinding and redevelopment that your team's probably going to have to do. The ecosystem as it continues to grow, these are growing pains that I don't think are uncommon for new technologies that come out like this, but just be prepared. We're happy obviously to spend some time with you to think about what components we think would be impacted as you think about bringing on customer 360, whether that's how you selected your subscriber keys, what is truly database of record as this key store comes online and changes the way data's really going to be moving. So all I would say is be patient as it comes, consult with your partners, whether that's us or another certified partner in the ecosystem, lean on them, because there will be an effort. It's to be determined on how heavy of a lift it is, but I would just make sure that you know it's not going to be turnkey per se, or a light switch on and off, or all of a sudden this data just knows about all the other data around it. It's definitely some unwinding that's going to have to be done here. So be patient, leverage your partners, make sure that you're not trying to go at it alone, but overall I'm pretty excited on where this product's going and the perspective and the investment that Salesforce is putting into making it a reality.

Bobby Tichy: I would encourage people to see the forest through the trees, right? Understand, like you mentioned, it's going to be an iteration or an iterative process not only as Salesforce releases it, but as organizations implement it, but the ultimate outcome will be really beneficial for organizations and their tech stack for sure.

Cole: I think a lot too about how this isn't really a new concept, it's something that we, as marketers have been talking about for years and even patchwork creating for a number of organizations, but yeah, in that same concept of do we build this ourselves or do we use this productized Salesforce version? I think about all the work that goes into trying to backtrack some of the large- scale inaudible that we've done that have been similar to this. We've talked about the 360 view of a customer for years now. A lot of times, we've done a pretty good job of executing on that with a number of customers, but it's going to be a lot to unwind. I think when you talk about that build versus buy... What happens right now when we go through with a lot of these customers that have done this in the past that have built this type of view in the past, are they going to have to unravel and do they have the key resources in place that were there when we built it? Hopefully they have a partner that was well- documented, and still has the ability to navigate what they've done in the past. But yeah, I think patience is a good point because it's going to be undoing that, or if you build it, trying to add to it down the road, that's going to be a lot to handle. So the productized version of this, hopefully is the savior to that pain point.

Ryan McCambridge: So Cole just to add onto that, one of the things that I think is important to think about is that a lot of the products that Salesforce owns today that are being integrated in these not so scalable ways have been acquisition products. So they all have their own key issues, right? Like, none of them were ever developed to say," Hey, one day I hope to be acquired and be able to easily integrate into the composite key concept at Salesforce." So I think that's an advantage, right? Because Salesforce has to figure this out with systems that are quote unquote, theirs now, but with known components that are difficult, which are these unique keys, like commerce cloud, having its own unique key, marketing cloud, having its own unique key, same thing with sales and service [ inaudible 00:17:38]. So if they can get this done and they do it right, I think this could be a product that people just buy to manage their key stores, even if they're not using Salesforce. So lots of opportunity, lots upside. I'm excited to see how this unwinds over the next couple of months.

Bobby Tichy: For sure. Well, thanks again for joining Ryan. Really appreciate it. We're moving on to completely unrelated. And I'm going to start, because I was thinking about a skill that I wished that I had, and there are many. Because I don't have the money-

Cole: inaudible would call completely talentless.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. So my wife, who is a property developer is renovating this property right now. I decided that one day I was going to help her so I took the day off. I was ripping up carpet taken off trim, feeling like the true Tim Allen, Tim, the ToolMan-

Cole: Just out of curiosity, Bobby. What inaudible were you wearing?

Bobby Tichy: Well, that's a good question Cole. I was wearing bib overalls that my father- in- law had bought me from Rural King. For those of you not in Indiana, Rural King is a kind of like a hardware slash farm store. I was wearing these overalls while I was doing this and I saw a piece of trim behind the toilet in the bathroom, and I tried to get it out and I couldn't because the angle was wrong. So I said to myself," Well, we're not going to keep the toilet. So I'll just pull the trim as hard as I can and break the wood trim, and then it'll snap and it'll be fine." So I go ahead and start pulling this like," Gosh, this is really hard. This trim is really strong." Well, long story short, the trim was stuck on the water pipe, behind the toilet and I just decided to continue to pull this thing until it broke. It broke the water pipe off of the wall, not at the switch, off of the wall. So water just sprays everywhere. And I try to stick my thumb in the water pipe and for those of you who have ever dealt with any kind of water, know that's not going to stop anybody. So then I try to find the water shut off. I can't find it. So I run outside. I start yelling for Joanie and I'm running around the house-

Cole: Oh, whilst wearing bib overalls.

Ryan McCambridge: Oh my goodness.

Bobby Tichy: My wife was able to turn off the water because I am not handy or have any skill of any kind whatsoever. And she's much more handy than I am. And my father- in- law came about a half hour later and found the water shutoff valve so I know where it is from now on.

Cole: When she shut it off did she tell you immediately or let you kind of continue with laps around the house?

Bobby Tichy: Oh, no. She let me continue with laps around the house. Yeah. I took a couple of laps around the house and when I saw the water finally going down after trying to stop it with each one of my fingers.

Cole: No, this one's a [inaudible 00:20: 45 ].

Bobby Tichy: So Cole, what about you?

Cole: Honestly, there's a lot of things I'm really bad at, but if I could change one thing or become really good at one thing, it would be being amazing at names and faces. I think that's a huge skill. I think it's one that I'm genetically predisposed to, their must be synapses in the brain that I lack when it comes to names and faces because I have a Rolodex of probably a hundred. And if I haven't seen you in six months, there's zero chance I'll remember your name.

Bobby Tichy: I can definitely confirm their are brain synopsis that you're missing.

Ryan McCambridge: We know that for sure.

Bobby Tichy: Including this one, considering one of the Salesforce meetings we were at, you called the RDP the wrong name, which was just great.

Cole: I'm just awful at it. Honestly, I went to a seminar on how to remember names. There was this guy who had been on the Oprah show, former NBA player and he went on the Oprah show and he met everybody in the audience and then on the show they would point people out. What's her name? And he'd say her name and where she was from. And some fact about her. An amazing thing. And I got home from it and I was in high school at the time because it's always been a lifelong problem. And I got home from it at the time. My dad asked me, he goes," How was it?" I was like," It was great. I think I'm going to be amazing at names." He was like," Oh, who gave the seminar?" It's impossible for me.

Bobby Tichy: The only thing I got out of that whole story was that you watched Oprah.

Cole: I didn't watch her. The guy was famous for being on the Oprah show and being world renowned at how good at names and faces he was.

Ryan McCambridge: I'm just glad he didn't say Donahue.

Bobby Tichy: Nick, how about you?

Nick Burggraf: Oh, I'm really good at everything.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, he's got all the talents.

Nick Burggraf: I am handy, I'll give you that Bobby. But the one thing I am bad at and it's actually good. I came from a division of NBC Sports so you'd think I'd be a sport guy, but we were watching ESPN in the background here. I have no idea how anybody retains sport knowledge and it is a definite crush to a lot of the man to man conversations of," Hey, you catch that game last night?" Oh, yep. Sportsball? Whose winning the football match? That is a skill I wish I had, the small talk about sports games.

Bobby Tichy: Ryan, how about you?

Ryan McCambridge: Well, I definitely fall into the same campus Cole, where I do get jealous of people who can just recall people's names. I just remember Scott Dorsey, being a guy like that, the old CEO of ExactTarget. I literally met him for two seconds walking out of a hotel in a blizzard. And six months later I ran into him and he's like," Oh yeah, Ryan, I wish we had more time to talk as we were... I'm like," Oh my gosh." Super jealous. I mean, for me, I grew up with a father who everybody loved. One of the talents that he really had was just understanding how to connect with people on a different level. And it's so easy to fall into a trap. And I think a lot of us here in, and especially in these kinds of roles where we're the type A, very extroverted personalities and I need to be a better listener because I really think that learning how to stop, pause and listen more is such a critical trait to making people feel included and really feeling like you have a deeply vested interest in what they're trying to do. So those that's some of the struggle that I fight with every day and wish I was better with, which is maybe not talking so much, I could talk forever, right? And this is why I love these kinds of things like podcasts, but maybe having the wherewithal to know when to stop and listen more than always trying to insert suggestions or thoughts into a conversation. So that for me, that's-

Cole: [ crosstalk 00:24:44]. I wish to say Ryan... I'm sorry. I wasn't listening.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, well, thanks again, Ryan. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening everyone. As always, you can email us at intheclouds @ levdigital. com. Again, that's intheclouds @ levdigital. com and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks guys.

Ryan McCambridge: Bobby has a special on handyman services if you need anything.

Cole: I'll look him up.

Ryan McCambridge: $399.

Bobby Tichy: Take care everybody.

Ryan McCambridge: Yeah.