Customer data is a goldmine that’s often scattered and hard to use. You might struggle with complex integrations, limited insights, or slow performance. Salesforce Data Cloud aims to change that.

It’s a central hub designed to streamline how you manage and activate customer data inside your organization and across the Salesforce ecosystem. But what does that really mean for your business?

Connect & Harmonize Data: Data Cloud breaks down data silos. It brings together information from different sources—sales, marketing, customer service, and even third-party data—creating a single, accurate view of your customers.

Automate 360° Customer View: Instead of manually piecing together data, Data Cloud automatically builds rich customer profiles. This gives everyone in your organization a complete, up-to-date understanding of each customer.

Understand and Explore with AI & BI: Data Cloud helps you make sense of vast amounts of information. With built-in AI and analytics, you can uncover trends, predict customer behavior, and make better decisions.

Open & Extensible: Data Cloud is designed to evolve with you. It seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce tools and can connect to outside data sources and technologies.

In other words, it’s a one-stop-shop for companies to bring together fragmented customer data and use it at scale.

So, what do you get?

Increased Operational Efficiency

Goodbye, manual data pulls! With self-service data access, teams can quickly find the information they need, saving valuable time and reducing back-and-forth communication. Plus, you can define KPIs once and use them across the business for consistent decision-making.

Direct Access to Enterprise-Scale Data

Data Cloud unlocks the potential of your vast customer data. Power better experiences across your entire business without worrying about the “platform limitations” that often come with scaling.

Faster Deployment of Salesforce Apps & Services

Instead of integrating the same data into each Salesforce tool separately, Data Cloud simplifies the process. This can streamline deployments and eliminate repetitive integration work.

Now that you’ve been introduced to what Data Cloud can do for your organization, let’s look at the platform limitations and challenges without it.

Challenges Faced without Salesforce Data Cloud

• PROCESSING & STORING LARGE VOLUMES OF DATA: Most Salesforce applications cannot handle millions of records gracefully
• DATA UNIFICATION: Unifying data requires the implementation of complex automation & code
• SEGMENTATION: Marketers generally just have SQL as a segmentation option in Marketing Cloud
• INTEGRATION: Ingesting data, even from flat files, requires additional tools & solutions
• PERFORMANCE: Platform limitations around processing time, lookups, and updates are often challenging at scale
• ACCESS: Getting data back out of CRM also requires additional implementation or middleware

Coastal’s Approach: Integrate Once, Activate Easily

The Easiest Way to Get Started with Data Cloud

Start by pinpointing a specific use case where a data-driven approach would have a significant impact. Could you boost sales with better product recommendations? Reduce customer churn by proactively reaching out to those at risk? Once you have a clear use case, Data Cloud helps you manage the data strategy behind it.

To spur your thinking, Coastal has Data Cloud-driven use case examples for:

• Nonprofit
• Communications, Media, & Technology
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare

Coastal offers a free one-hour workshop to help you identify a use case and work through the data strategy to make it possible.

Schedule A Data Cloud Workshop

Some Data Cloud Design Considerations

• How will the data be worked with and in which apps? If bi-directional and strictly real-time integration patterns are needed, those may still happen outside Data Cloud—but consider Data Cloud for all other use cases
• Is a data warehouse already in use? This doesn’t negate the need for Data Cloud, and, in fact, can make it faster to activate that data
• Understand your contract limitations to ensure that you’re building a data model that is flexible but will not be unnecessarily granular and expensive

Real Data Cloud Customer Use Cases

Healthcare system that owns/operates 12 hospitals & more than 90 clinics in the U.S.

Challenges

1. Marketing segmentation is difficult due to the use of SQL in Marketing Cloud and limited team bandwidth
2. Want to add propensity data from third-party vendors
3. Need data visibility in a BI tool
4. Hitting Health Cloud data storage limits because of the mass amount of Appointments (“we can only keep 1-2 years of clinical data in the org”)

Solution

• Redirected integration for EMR appointments, encounters, and more to Data Cloud instead of Health Cloud
• Enabled marketers to segment patients based on appointment and diagnosis history, using drag and drop builder in Data Cloud and built-in activation to Marketing Cloud for journeys
• Matched propensity data, EMR data, and Health Cloud contacts via common identifiers

Software development company that offers solutions for retail & petroleum wholesale businesses

Challenges

Managing fuel and convenience rewards programs for top-tier retailers

1. Segmentation takes weeks and requires a high level of technical skill across multiple teams
2. Massive amount of data—50+ million contacts across multiple platforms, 100+ million email and push engagement touchpoints per month, 10+ million transactions per month
3. Different and sometimes overlapping identifiers for members across rewards programs and apps
4. Complex offer management process between segments and internal loyalty engine

Solution

• Coastal architected processes to both ingest from and write back to the proprietary loyalty management engine
• Reduction of segment creation time from weeks to hours, with the ability of client engagement teams to make their own discovery of new segments and offer opportunities
• Exposed email engagement data within Service Cloud to provide recent offer context to customer service teams

Trusted Partner for Your Success

Salesforce ranks Coastal the #1 Consulting Partner in Expertise in the United States (above more than 2,000 consultancies). With a heavily certified onshore-only team, 6,000+ completed projects, deep industry expertise, and company DNA that focuses 100% on customer success, we’re the experienced firm in a nimble package that you’ll love working with.

When it comes to Salesforce Data Cloud, we have a large team of certified Data Cloud experts and can share industry-specific use cases to speed time-to-value.

You can also rely on our team to rapidly connect your data and work with your enterprise data architecture. Over the past decade, we’ve managed data from every major ERP / EHR system, and data lakes/warehouses with systems such as Snowflake.

Ready to get started?

Schedule A Data Cloud Workshop

Coastal is the #1 rated Salesforce consulting firm, 100% focused on customer success. From strategy to platform evolution, we’re the Salesforce consultancy you’ll love working with.