Harmonizing Data to Get a Single, Unified View of Customers

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How Retailers & Other Organizations Can Use Salesforce^® Apps to Optimize Data

When you hear a great song, one of the things you might notice is how everything flows together — the melody and the rhythm perfectly in sync. Like music, your data also needs to be arranged and organized in order to work together harmoniously.

The Salesforce article, “Retail Roadblock: Lack of Data Strategy Stands in the Way of Generative AI Progress,” shared results of their recent survey, which lists customer service, marketing, and store operations as areas of focus for generative AI. “Retailers understand the importance of data, according to the survey, but many are still working through how to unify all of their data and build a single view of their customers,” the article explains.

But issues with preparing data for AI are preventing organizations from getting harmonious, accurate, and actionable information. “The inability to unify and harmonize data means that a retailer’s generative AI model could deliver ineffective or inaccurate results, or responses laced with toxicity and biases. Even though 67% of retailers say they are fully able to capture customer data, only 39% say they are fully able to clean that data, and just 42% say they are fully able to harmonize it,” explained the article.

Whether your goal is to prepare data for AI or to optimize your Salesforce org, it’s important that you have clean and connected data. For example, our customer SquadLocker was experiencing a challenge with associating a new custom object (Sales Line) with their current account object. Since Lookup Helper works with standard and custom objects, it allows them to display related records in Salesforce. SquadLocker’s Rev/Ops Director Nellie Tillinghast said, “Lookup Helper facilitates the ‘relationship’ build so that records show up easily and without human intervention.”

Nellie reports that both Rollup Helper and Lookup Helper have simplified their work and saved time. She adds, “Thanks to scheduling offered on both solutions, our records are updated daily and overnight so that there’s no human manipulation, while allowing for accurate information.”

Providing Data to Teams, Empowering Them to Be Proactive With Customers

When our customer Clear Capital needed to display multiple revenue and volume summaries for use in multiple business units, they chose our apps Rollup Helper and Lookup Helper. Business Systems Administrator Lisa Foster explains, “Rollup Helper and Lookup Helper allow us to link objects to display multiple revenue and volume summaries for our business units. Before these solutions, this would require written code, which can be difficult to write, test, and maintain.”

Now Clear Capital can provide data to their teams that would otherwise be done manually. This allows the marketing team to see the results of their efforts and sales to see what is working well, and where there’s an opportunity for improvement.

“We can spot trends in sales to allow us to be proactive with our customers and prospects. Plus, we were able to resolve an issue that was previously done with custom code and objects by adding a lookup and rollup field to accomplish the same task,” said Lisa.

Helping Customer Service Identify Accounts That Need Assistance

Sometimes simple things like calculations can cause delays for customer service teams. For example, an obstacle reps can experience is calculating the amount of open cases for Account records in Salesforce.

This can be solved by deploying one of Rollup Helper’s pre-built rollups named, "Number of Open Cases." The Number of Open Cases use case calculates the amount of open cases for each Account record.

The result: your customer service team can now see which Accounts need the most help. And your Sales and Marketing team can also hold off on reaching out to customers or prospects until their issues are cleared up. Check out the use cases below to see how you can clean up, manage, and optimize your data.