CRM industry leader Salesforce introduced its most valuable innovation “Salesforce Genie” in Dreamforce 2022. With this addition to the Salesforce ecosystem, customers will get even more capability to provide a highly personalized real-time user experience. What is Salesforce Genie? The Salesforce Genie is a hyper-scale real-time data platform that will now empower the Salesforce 360. As technology moves forward, customer expectations are getting higher and higher.
As we know, data is everywhere as data collection points are evolving with technology. Customers and Industries can get most things out of this data. With evolving technology, they expect real-time interaction with this data. Earlier it was challenging to deal with a large amount of data in real-time. Salesforce genie resolves this with its capability of processing the data at scale in real-time.
What is Salesforce Genie?
Salesforce Genie is nothing but a connection to the platform. It processes the data from the real time data streams or historical data in different steps to harmonize and store it at massive scale. It transforms that data into single, dynamic, source of truth Real Time Customer Graph. After that, we can perform many actions such as flows, journeys, Data Export, activations, etc. to automate the further tasks. Earlier, Salesforce was dealing with only transactional data to manage the operations. The drawback of this was, it was not suitable for mutable data at scale. Genie adds one more layer of “Hyperscale Data Platform” to empower existing transactional database.
With and Without Salesforce Genie
| Before Salesforce Genie | After Salesforce Genie |
| Entire custom architecture for data lake was required to implement the logic to deal with huge data. | Ready to use connectors are available. Minial configuration required. |
| It was really expensive to implement the entire custom solution within Salesforce and highly skilled architects were required to Build complex architecture. | Easy to configure and use. |
| Admins and Business users were having a limited role to deal with data | Admins can manage the data easily. Easy to use for business users. |
| Separate integrations required for newly added features | Plug and play and easy to integrate |
| Hard and expensive to maintain | Configure once, less maintanance |
Difference between Marketing Cloud CDP and Salesforce Genie
Let’s make it clear in one sentence- Salesforce Genie is the “Evolution of CDP”
CDP, which stands for Customer Data Platform launched by Salesforce in a specific domain of the Marketing Cloud. It’s all about dealing with data. It was one of the fastest-growing innovation of Salesforce. After its success, Salesforce started evolving this product by working on customer inputs. Being a CRM Company, it was the vision of Salesforce to providing personalized engagement at every touchpoint. They were able to deliver this vision by evolving CDP to Genie.
The Customer Data Platform was itself a powerful platform to deal with the data, but adding “Real-Time” and “Hyper-Scale” factors to it made it even more powerful. Salesforce is still working to evolve its product in different key areas to deliver beyond marketing automation.
Salesforce Genie Vs Customer 360
Customer 360 is where you create amazing experiences across different clouds for different Industries. Salesforce Genie is not the same as Customer 360. Salesforce genie can connect with different platforms or clouds in Customer 360 to add the magic of real-time in the ecosystem. In short, we can say, Genie now empowers the entire Customer 360. Genie is not an option for Customer 360.
Understanding the Business impact of Salesforce Genie
With the help of Genie, Industries and customers can leverage this real-time data for a more personalized experience across different clouds. The features of Genie such as the Unification of profiles, customers can deliver an optimized and quality experience to the end user. The real-time data outcome by Genie can be further seeded to Einstein AI and Flows, which can take automation even further.
The capability of Salesforce Genie will help industries to interact with the end user in real time and at scale. End users will get an amazing experience than ever before.
Adding Einstein AI, Flows, and Actions on top of Genie will help marketers to carry out automated campaigns effectively and in real-time!
Working of Salesforce Genie in Four Steps
Genie is the engine that powers the entire Customer 360 platform. It starts the magic once we connect Genie to the platform. Salesforce first introduced the Flows for automation. After they added intelligence in automation with Einstein AI. Now Salesforce will make it all “real-time” with the addition of Salesforce Genie. With the four steps, Genie will do its magic in all the clouds. Let’s take a look at it.
1. Connecting the data points
Earlier, Salesforce was designed to deal with mostly transactional data. There are many challenges to using transactional data at scale. Salesforce genie extends the capability of the transactional database by removing most of its challenges in scaling and by adding a “real-time” factor to it.
In the first step, Genie will connect with all the data points to source the data from them. These data points can be any like APIs, Web, Mobile, and CRM Data. Like all other Salesforce platform features Genie is also built on Salesforce Metadata. In the initial phase, Salesforce may provide Connector package metadata, which will help developers to connect the platform with Genie. As both will work on Salesforce metadata, data stored in Genie will be visible and available to use by Customer 360.
2. Harmonize the data
After sourcing the data from different channels, the next step is to harmonize that data. Salesforce created a set of data models which they call a “Customer Graph”. These data models unify data from multiple streams and map it to single unique profiles. Now, irrespective of channel or source of data, it’s a single customer profile.
This unification of data is done in real time and at a hyper-scale. This is the magic of a genie.
3. Engage
Unification helps to resolve the identities, and this is a key feature of Salesforce Genie. Unique profiles give a complete view of a single customer including their past interactions with the brands. Salesforce Genie stores this all data using a Lakehouse Architecture. It helps to classify and categorize the data easily.
Classification and categorization help to show complete and up-to-date information about the customer in a single view. This will be an advantage to the sales representatives to close the deal.
4. Delivery of Better Experience
Genie sources data from different channels and converts it to a single customer profile. It also prioritizes privacy with built-in compliance. It can simplify the end user’s daily tasks with automation and journies. Genie resolves all the collected data so that there will be no need to go through each profile manually.
A customer works on different touchpoints simultaneously and then connects to the support team, with the help of real-time data by the genie, the support representative will get all the interactions on different touchpoints. The available data helps support representatives to understand and resolve the issue quickly.
Customers interact with some products, and they get related suggestions in real-time with the help of Genie’s magic. Such multiple minor things contribute to a great customer experience.
Conclusion
Salesforce Genie is undoubtedly most valuable addition in its ecosystem. It will revolutionize the way of data processing in future. The key points of Genie are “real-time” and its hyper-scale ability. It will help customer to provide a highly personalized experience to end user. It will also help to automate the tasks in intelligent way on the basis of Genie’s unified data.
Stepping ahead of transactional database and powering it with hyperscale data platform was definitely a great move by Salesforce to continue its monopoly in CRM industry.
Abhishek
Mr. Abhishek, an experienced Salesforce Technical Lead with over 4+ years of development experience and 8x Salesforce Certified. His expertise is in Salesforce Development, including Lightning Web Components, Apex Programming, and Flow has led him to create his blog, SFDC Hub.
