In today’s data-driven world, developers are crucial to unlocking the potential of data. But with its vast capabilities, grasping data architecture can be daunting. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through a clear and concise use case showcasing Data Cloud and highlighting its core capabilities with videos detailing each key step. By the end, you’ll have a developer-friendly roadmap to help you navigate Data Cloud and leverage its power to build new experiences for employees, partners, and customers.

In our video series, Data Cloud Fundamentals: A Guided Tour, the team at Coral Cloud Resort, a fictional hotel, leverages Data Cloud to unify their data and unlock valuable guest insights. See how Data Cloud empowers them to make informed decisions, predict guest needs, and ultimately, deliver exceptional experiences.

Where does Data Cloud fit into my system’s landscape?

If your company is looking to leverage your data more effectively, it’s important to first review your goals and current systems landscape to identify the challenges that you are looking to solve. For Coral Cloud Resort, this means understanding where their data currently resides, how they access it, and what information they need to drive an improved guest experience.

Let’s walk through the Coral Cloud Resort use case to help frame the discussion.

Unlock key data sources

Once your company understands its challenges and goals, and has an understanding of where the data sources needed are located, bringing them together can be challenging.

Structured data will have table and column names that differ, and they need to be represented in the same way. Different sources of data will potentially have the same customer or business record represented, and they may use different unique identifiers for their underlying data. Emails, chat transcripts, and knowledge articles are rich sources of unstructured data that are hard to search using keywords, yet they are important for generative AI applications.

At Coral Cloud Resort, guest, reservation, and contact information are key. Coral Cloud uses Amazon S3 and Salesforce as data sources, and the team needs to map disparate schemas to a common model to provide consistency when looking for insights.

Unify data sources

Data about your customers and businesses are typically stored across a number of systems. Each source likely has some overlap, but also contains unique details, and without a common identifier, it is sometimes difficult to know if records across these systems relate to the same person. Identity resolution helps connect these dots, creating a single, comprehensive profile for each customer or company.

Coral Cloud Resort has guest and reservation information in Amazon S3 and contact records in Service Cloud. To create one profile for their guests, they needed a way to find matching records.

Let’s look at how the Coral Cloud Resort team uses identity resolution to create a unified guest profile that links to their reservation data. We explain how it works with some examples.

Drive insights by enriching your data

Accessing your data, mapping it to a common model, and unifying data are important steps that enable a consistent way to drive insights for your business. These capabilities help identify things like customer interests, buying habits, and online behavior, empowering your marketing, sales, operations, and customer service teams make data-driven decisions.

At Coral Cloud Resort, the team wanted to gain insights by aggregating guest lifetime value and lifetime bookings data. These insights would help their front line staff provide a better experience, allow future marketing campaigns to personalize their outreach, and provide new insights for generative AI conversations.

Here’s how Coral Cloud creates a calculated insight to enable this capability — which explains the importance of unifying source profiles to create an accurate output.

Act on data changes

A key capability of Data Cloud is its ability to put insights into the hands of your customers, employees, and partners who need it to drive tangible business outcomes.

At Coral Cloud Resort, the team wanted the ability to:

  • Put their new insights for lifetime value and lifetime bookings right into the Contact record in Service Cloud
  • Display reservation data alongside the Contact record in Service Cloud for the first time

Data Cloud enrichments bring external data directly into your Salesforce records through standard components available in App Builder. In the following video, see how Coral Cloud Resort can start creating new experiences with previously siloed data, showcasing how data stored across their enterprise is now in the hands of teams that need it.

Unlock AI-powered insights

Data Cloud helps developers unify and leverage their customer data across the enterprise. You can then build data-driven applications that unlock AI-powered insights that were previously unattainable and deliver new customer experiences.

Coral Cloud Resort was able to put reservation data and their guests lifetime value into the hands of Service Cloud users for the first time. This is just the start of their journey — Coral Cloud Resort now has a foundation to start building a new generation of applications that leverage data to drive personalized experiences, predictive insights, and accurate generative AI responses.

Looking to take your Data Cloud expertise to the next level? Join an AI NOW Tour workshop in your area to get hands-on with Data Cloud, Einstein Copilot, and Prompt Builder.

Resources

About the author

Dave Norris is a Lead Developer Advocate at Salesforce, focusing on Data Cloud. He’s passionate about making technical subjects broadly accessible to a diverse audience. Dave has been with Salesforce for over a decade, has over 35 Salesforce and MuleSoft certifications, and became a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect in 2013.

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