However, the implementation of a multi-cloud strategy that integrates both creates holistic customer value that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ah, the dreaded domino effect of technological lag. In this commercial age where technological speed is both your enemy and friend, where instants can mean the difference in a sale lost or gained, businesses need a well-connected, lightning-fast integration platform that is flexible, smart, and responsive to change in real time. If not, they’re left behind.

When building a consistent, seamless customer experience, this matters.

Time and time again we see commerce teams who want to integrate a new mobile app with a new cloud (or clouds). This can often be a messy, inefficient, spaghetti-network of multiple customer views without having the ability to fully track and serve a customer across all clouds, thus creating an inefficient data exchange process and sucking up precious time and resources. But what if there was a way to reduce these technological redundancies, spend less time integrating, and more time building customer journeys? As the “missing link” connector between these applications, we do just that.

The benefit? Commerce leaders like you, who want to spend less time on integrating, now have more time to drive innovation and react to market opportunities with no lag, to keep up with the customer across all touchpoints.

Speed vs. Stability?

It’s a classic challenge to balance time-to-market and integration quality… Slow down and you’re left chasing the tails of your customers and competitors; go live prematurely and end up reacting to rollbacks and fixes. Down the road? Disconnected cloud setups, disparate teams, and multiple implementation partners. We always have the latest version of data synced between the Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and can identify a single user across each platform to utilize all customer information across clouds simultaneously. This saves time, and resources spent on inefficient integrations. By applying logic, it pushes data to the relevant platform, creating a stable, efficient exchange of data, whether it’s working for a small business or an enterprise company running a full stack of Salesforce clouds.

While it may be hard to see the physical value, just imagine all Salesforce clouds are fully harmonised while your company is hard at work innovating, bringing new features to market, and converting and engaging with customers. A failsafe multi-cloud approach reduces time to market these new features, minimises time spent by IT creating complex connections, and enables marketing to independently work on the customer journey. The value then becomes visible as features are delivered faster, and your business becomes more flexible and able to adapt as quickly as the landscape changes.

In fact, you’re now enabled to accelerate the pace of change.

What does this mean for you, the commerce team?

You want to be able to get apps, customer data sources, and marketing channels out of testing, and into production ASAP so you can start using them with customers, and start driving conversions. By addressing speed and reducing complexity on the IT end, it enables marketing to integrate whichever apps they like, now and in the future, without causing a tangled mess of clouds and fragmented data.

Alas, a step closer to a more perfect union between IT and marketing solutions.

How does this seamless application landscape look in real life, from your customer’s perspective?

Closing the customer journey loop: Translating digital behavior into point-of-sale opportunities

Jess buys a summer dress from your London store. She receives a paperless, digital receipt, where all the details of her purchase are connected to her digital ID, allowing for personalized content to reach her across all digital channels – social and beyond. The next time Jess visits your website, the homepage carousel displays outfit choices based on her previous purchase. Perhaps a nice necklace and light jacket to pair with that dress? She adds them to her wishlist to consider later. A few days later, the shop sends Jess a welcoming email with her wishlist items and some other relevant options. With this nudge, Jess buys the necklace and jacket, receives a confirmation email, and is reminded to download the app to track order progress at her convenience, as well as receiving the latest offers first. The marketing team has identified Jess as a loyal customer and as a reward for her loyalty, send her a geo-triggered push notification the next time she’s in the vicinity of her local shop, offering a QR code for a discount on a nice belt she already perused online – which is now too good to refuse.

This frictionless, real-world customer journey and experience transcends the traditional limitations between the online and offline customer thanks to a seamless exchange of customer data captured across all touchpoints. For retailers with an offline presence, the dream of bridging brick-and-mortar buying habits with digital preferences is becoming a reachable reality with the right journeys in mind, and technology setup to put them into practice.

In summary?

• A multi-cloud strategy between all Salesforce Clouds enables your business to operate with speed and stability
• Your marketing team is freed up and data is made more accessible to identify, serve and gain greater insights on customers like Jess across every channel
• By controlling and automating data exchange, you can keep compliance in check, processes are made more efficient, and IT resources are needed less
• This means you can reap ROI through saving costs on integration time and increasing profit through improved customer targeting

You're now one step closer to a fully-connected customer ecosystem.