Highlights –

  • The company explained that the solution enables enterprise teams to produce seamless, personalized experiences that continuously react to changing consumer information and needs by ingesting and storing real-time data streams and transactional data at scale.
  • Genie, which will be available from today, adds a real-time touch to Salesforce Customer 360’s capabilities.

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce unveiled Genie, a real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) that can assist businesses in providing better client experiences.

Today’s enterprises depend on hundreds (on average, close to 1,000) of internal applications to function. Each solution has a specific function and collects useful client information. However, most businesses keep this data siloed, resulting in nearly 1,000 different versions of data on a single client. This gap is significant and results in poor consumer experiences.

Though the Salesforce Customer 360 platform solves this issue by consolidating customer data into a single, understandable perspective and enabling action, the CRM platform only resolves a part of the issue. With data volume increasing rapidly, companies need a mechanism to respond to information as soon as it is generated to attract new consumers, retain them, and satisfy them. This is where Genie, the newest invention from Salesforce, comes into play.

How is Genie useful?

Genie, which will be available from today, adds a real-time touch to Salesforce Customer 360’s capabilities. The company explained that the solution enables enterprise teams to produce seamless, personalized experiences that continuously react to changing consumer information and needs by ingesting and storing real-time data streams and transactional data at scale.

Genie runs on the Hyperforce public cloud infrastructure and employs built-in connectors to import data in real-time from all channels (mobile, online, APIs), historical data from private data lakes, and legacy data through MuleSoft. The data is then transformed and combined to create a real-time customer graph or a single customer profile. The information in this graph becomes visible and actionable across the entire Customer 360, AppExchange, every industry solution, and custom apps.

With Genie, Salesforce CRM’s Einstein AI, which produces over 175 billion predictions daily, will be able to give forecasts and suggest actions in real time. Similarly, Salesforce Flow automation can leverage real-time data to initiate tasks automatically, saving clients over 100 billion hours each month. Customer 360 can ultimately change how various departments operate. For instance, marketers could send customized messages across channels to respond to client actions across various brand properties in real-time. Sales representatives could receive real-time feedback and recommendations from Einstein to adjust to an ongoing conversation and complete a deal.

Salesforce collaborates with data and AI companies

Notably, Salesforce has collaborated with other players in the data and AI ecosystem to increase the impact of Genie. This includes a contract with Snowflake that enables Genie to access Snowflake data without duplicating it. The company has also collaborated with Amazon to allow businesses to use SageMaker, Amazon’s cloud machine learning platform, with Einstein AI to create new AI models.

David Schmaier, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, pointed out that 500 businesses, including Formula 1, Ford, L’Oreal, and PGA Tour Superstore, are currently using Genie and reaping its benefits.

Additional Dreamforce announcements

Along with Genie, Salesforce also unveiled enhancements for Slack, such as Slack Canvas and a new Net Zero Marketplace that makes it simple and transparent to buy carbon credits.

Experts’ Take

According to Schmaier, “Every business leader wants to take advantage of real-time data to create compelling, personalized customer experiences – milliseconds matter in this new digital-first world. That’s why we built Genie, our most significant invention ever on the Salesforce Platform. Genie makes every part of Customer 360 more automated, intelligent and real-time.”

Jill Thomas, CMO at PGA Tour Superstore, said, “As the game of golf has increased in popularity the past few years, we knew we needed to quickly elevate our digital presence and deliver personalized, relevant experiences to a new, diverse audience across every channel. With Salesforce, we’re much more in control of our messaging and are able to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. This allows us to be truly customer-driven and meet people where they are in their journey with the game.”