Last October, I shared my observations from the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, paying particular attention to the company’s recent acquisition of Mulesoft and the announcements surrounding what co-CEO Marc Benioff described as the company’s Customer 360° vision. At the October gathering, Mr. Benioff told the story about how Italian fashion designer Bruno Cucinelli and his company is using Mulesoft to enable a single view of all customer data in its Marketing and Commerce Cloud implementations. Benioff went on to explain that Customer 360 is now enabled across all Salesforce Cloud applications, connecting customer profiles contained in those applications into one 360° view.

The June 2019 Salesforce Connections event held last week in Chicago continued on that theme, with particular focus on the Commerce Cloud (the former Demandware). Salesforce has gone a long way towards making the connections between the Commerce Cloud, the Customer Cloud (the CRM system), and Service Cloud, using Mulesoft both to connect those services together and to also enable retailers to front-end their legacy portfolios. In her keynote address, Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi highlighted the rationale for the company’s efforts; the company conducted a consumer survey recently that revealed that 78% of consumers expect a continuous and seamless experience through marketing, sales, and service (in other words, throughout the entire path-to-purchase). This is absolutely consistent with RSR’s own studies in the last couple of years.

Let’s Party (City)

Salesforce has continued to push hard to integrate the company’s Einstein AI engine into the Commerce suite; Buscemi proudly pointed out that Einstein now creates 7.6B predictions every day. In the context of the Commerce Cloud, Einstein automatically makes product recommendations to consumers as they shop on the eCommerce site.

The best illustration of how Einstein improves the experience was offered by Commerce Cloud CEO Mike Micucci. In his keynote, Micucci highlighted how Party City is using Salesforce to delight customers. The live demo he shared had to do with planning a child’s birthday party (parents, take note – this is really cool!).

Imagine a parent picking a photo from social media of a desirable birthday theme. The parent selects a photo; Einstein performs a visual search to deconstruct the image to identify those products that are available at Party City (in the example that the CEO shared, 30 products were identified). Einstein makes some recommendations to complete the party set (in the example, 4 more items were selected). The parent-turned-customer places items in the cart and chooses “pickup in store “. Mulesoft then “looks ” into the warehouse system to ensure that inventory is available. The order is nearly complete, but options for additional services are offered and selected. The customer commits to the order and pays. Voilà! All of that took less than five minutes.

How Customer 360 Is Achieved

There’s been a lot of effort across the retail and technology industries to realize the vision of a complete view of the entire customer experience. Some companies are pushing the idea of a central customer data repository ( “CDP: Customer Data Platform “), while others have pushed for a federated query that pulls all relevant customer data from available operational databases in order to present one “virtual ” customer profile to the consuming service. Salesforce has come to the conclusion that both of those methods are needed.

At the Chicago event, SVP for Customer 360 Product Management Patrick Stokes told a group of industry analysts that Salesforce will enable a single customer ID across all of its clouds, which creates the ability to execute federated queries and arrive at a single view of the customer (this capability will be generally available in November 2019).

At the same time, Salesforce announced its “CDP ” initiative, with an anticipated delivery of the feature set for early next year. The objective for the CDP is to provide users with “a system of insights ” and “a system of engagement “, that will include a segmentation engine. As with all the Salesforce suite, the Einstein AI engine is embedded.

‘Clicks To Code’

In another major announcement, SVP for Commerce Cloud Product Management Kathryn Murphy announced the company’s “clicks to code ” capabilities for Commerce Cloud. Salesforce has long pushed the concept of “No Code “, as a way of insulating business users from the complexities that come along with computer programming. A 2017 company blog stated that:

” …demand for apps can’t be met by full-time developers alone. We’re entering the age of the citizen developer, where everyone in the business is empowered to build apps that automate processes and make their area of operation run more efficiently…. The Salesforce platform is uniquely set up to enable developers across the entire spectrum: from people with no coding skills at all, right through to skilled developers. Today, you can build an app in Salesforce Lightning purely with mouse clicks – or you can use Heroku to develop complex applications using your own choice of programming language. “

That concept has come to the Commerce Cloud. At the analyst breakout session, Kathryn discussed how, with just a few actions via the “clicks to code commerce page designer “, a non-IT’er can quickly change the Commerce user interface (the “storefront “, in Commerce Cloud lingo). And in her keynote address, Kathryn demonstrated the new page designer, showing off the ability to make realtime changes to page elements, drag’n’dropping Einstein recommendations onto the page, and adding new page components via a dropdown menu. It was very slick – and easy.

One step up from “click to code “, the company announced new Heroku features. Heroku is a mobile app development platform, and last week’s announcement covered new features such as templates, APIs to Commerce services, Einstein integration, and the ability to use Mulesoft to integrate to external applications.

Kathryn pointed out that the objective is speed-to-value; as business needs change, Salesforce wants to enable businesses to respond in a fast and agile way. That in turn brings up a third announcement from the Chicago event, the Mulesoft Accelerator for Commerce Cloud. Mulesoft is one of those tools that make ex-CIOs like me wish that we had capabilities such as the ones it touts 10-15 years ago. Mulesoft enables companies to establish “application networks “, connecting new UIs and core services with legacy applications via APIs, with the objective to unlock the data in those legacy datasets and create whole new capabilities faster.

The Mulesoft platform is a key to how Salesforce addresses not only its internal integration requirements (it is a key technology underneath the federated Customer 360 queries), but also helps retailers realize a hybrid cloud+legacy strategy. RSR’s recent benchmark on Cloud Computing pointed out that retailers are looking towards a hybrid strategy as the best path forward to modernize their technology portfolios. Salesforce is right there with an answer.

Moving Fast To Help Retailers Move Faster

Salesforce is now a mature company – the company was founded 20 years ago in 1999, and it’s been wildly successful with its CRM cloud. So it has the money to be bold, and the company is intent on enabling us humans to be ready for what Marc Benioff calls “the 4^th Industrial Revolution “. Rather than sitting on its lead (after all, the Salesforce CRM is the #1 CRM on the planet), the company is accelerating its value to retailers in the hope that retailers will in turn accelerate their value to consumers.

It must be having its effect. Today, the Commerce Cloud manages 24 million unique shoppers, processes 2.1 million orders per day, offers 650 million Einstein predictions each day, in 84 countries across the globe. It delivers all of this service with a 99.99% availability.

That’s a lot of connections.