The fast-paced, near-frantic nature of customer service demands a lot from your teams, whether they’re based in sales, service, support or other departments. Customer expectations are being ever more powered by the instantaneous, highly personalised capabilities of generative AI. While this truly is a monumental leap forward in terms of the kind of experiences enterprises can deliver, it’s also created a new standard of customer expectations when it comes to brand engagement, from the very first contact.
Naturally, the pressure is on customer-facing teams to meet the challenge of delivering fast, engaging personalised experiences to customers at scale. The question is, how? Salesforce is already empowering organisations across sizes and sectors with a host of services that deliver out-the-box solutions for better, more meaningful customer engagement based on data.
Salesforce’s existing integrations with Google’s Vertex AI and BigQuery deliver rapid build-your-own AI capabilities and seamless data flow across cloud platforms. Now, Salesforce is empowering even more businesses with the ability to provide instant, awe-inducing customer experiences by using their data. Once again, partnerships and integrations are the name of the game when it comes to data value enhancement and, this time, it takes the form of their innovative Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) integration with Snowflake.
Salesforce and Snowflake: What’s the Connection?
Salesforce initially partnered with Snowflake to make data sharing across platforms an easier, less labour-intensive process. Long been considered a barrier to building deeper, stronger relationships with customers, data sharing across clouds, platforms, tech stacks and enterprise systems has traditionally been a costly, time-consuming process taking focus away from core customer services and processes.
Salesforce, through its expansive partnerships with industry giants like Google, has long been on a mission to break down these barriers to productivity and innovation by simplifying data sharing across systems. It was this shared vision of faster, easier access to invaluable data that caused Salesforce and Snowflake to join forces to initially offer “zero copy” data sharing capabilities between Salesforce Data Cloud and Snowflake via Tableau.
Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) to the Data Party
Now, Salesforce and Snowflake have joined forces again to take the concept of zero copy data sharing even further by introducing BYOL to users looking to harness the combined prowess of Salesforce and Snowflake.
By introducing BYOL, Salesforce and Snowflake make it even easier for users to break down data silos within their existing clouds and tech stacks. Salesforce users utilise Data Cloud to power the free flow and access of data across the Customer 360 platform. Now, with BYOL, they can take these actions even further with additional insights taken directly from Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
Salesforce’s BYOL data sharing capabilities mean that customers can access direct Snowflake data within Salesforce and vice versa, without the need for traditional ETL (extract, transform, load) processes. Anyone familiar with ETL knows that it generally requires ETL tools and software to amend and change data structure and architecture to allow for sharing across platforms. BYOL eliminates the need for ETL infrastructure, giving users faster access to the data they need, when they need it.
What Data Cloud’s Integration with Snowflake’s Data Cloud Means
BYOL’s zero-ETL data sharing capabilities mean that businesses can access real-time data across cloud platforms without compromising on data integrity, security and governance. Through this, customer-facing teams can quickly and conveniently combine their customer data with enterprise data from Snowflake to build more personalised customer communications and experiences, react to changes in market trends and optimise their customer engagement campaigns.
The free, uninterrupted flow of data across clouds allows marketers to utilise both CRM and non-CRM data in AI models to predict and anticipate customer behaviour, preferences and responses. Analytics teams can benefit from BYOL by harnessing historical data from customers with web and browser data and analytics from Snowflake for pattern and trend recognition among customers.
Sales personnel can utilise predictive analytics and forecasting with data from Salesforce and Snowflake to improve their campaigns, enhance metrics-based performance and make adjustments to strategies as needed.
Salesforce: Empowering Businesses to Do More With Their Data
Across the board, Salesforce is creating the benchmark for the kinds of data-driven experiences that not only customers are looking for, but organisations and employees. BYOL is the next step in Salesforce’s ongoing mission to break down barriers and roadblocks inhibiting the free flow of data within enterprises, powering in-the-moment, mission-critical insights that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
Being agile and responsive to customer needs and preferences necessitates instant access to customer, CRM and enterprise data across clouds, platforms and architectures, and Salesforce is leading the charge in making data accessibility and insight a seamless, satisfying experience.
At CloudSmiths, we’re one of the biggest Salesforce partners in Africa, along with being implementation experts in Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS and Snowflake, among others.
If you’re ready to learn how we can help transform your data agility and operational efficiency, book a consultation with us below.
