Salesforce Plays Its Latest Hand in Ongoing CDP Rivalry

Not to be outdone by Cannes Lions, the large marketing cloud providers are trying to one-up each other with a series of announcements in the fast-emerging customer data platform space. Salesforce Connections kicks off officially today in Chicago, where the CRM specialist is set to formally unveil the latest iteration of its CDP (customer data platform), Customer 360, a day after rival enterprise software provider offered an updated glimpse of its Adobe Experience Platform. The two companies have been regularly countering each other’s vendor-hosted conferences with a craftily timed product update of their own in recent years. This week, Oracle got involved by announcing its tie-up with Accenture and Capgemini in the nascent CDP space. Per Salesforce, the updates to Customer 360 will enable companies to unify disparate customer data points throughout their entire organization before using them to formulate a “single customer view” which can then be used to personalize every interaction with them. The expanded capabilities of Customer 360 will also include allowing businesses to better distinguish between third-party cookies and first-party IDs, as well as help them to more easily gain customer consent to use said data for marketing purposes, such as email marketing and advertising. In addition, Salesforce is also promising real-time customer segmentation plus the ability to use its AI capabilities to help brands analyze certain data signals and then decide upon the best time and type of customer interaction needed to drive a conversion. For example, as a customer clicks on an ad, buys a product and opens an email, their customer ID is constantly being updated in real-time. With up-to-date customer records, brands can interact with their customers in the most relevant way possible. “We’re bringing the CDP idea to the world’s number one CRM platform,” said Martin Kihn, svp of product, Salesforce. “I think the CDP category is just an evolution of CRM itself … most CDPs deal with known data such as name, email address, etc., but we have a DMP, so not only are we able to capture the world of programmatic advertising but we can capture any behavioral tag on your app or site.” The latest version of Customer 360 will be available in pilot in the fall of 2019 and will be discussed at length over the next two days at Salesforce Connections, where the company will also further discuss how it plans to build upon the $15.7 billion purchase of Tableau it announced last week.