Unleashing the Power of Zero Copy for Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery
We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Salesforce Data Cloud’s Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) Bi-directional Zero Copy integration with Google BigQuery. Building on our recently announced Zero Copy Partner Network, this groundbreaking feature facilitates seamless data integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery, eliminating the need to copy or move data between platforms. Zero Copy represents a significant leap forward in data integration, offering Zero Copy Data Federation (Data-In) Access from BigQuery to Salesforce Data Cloud, as well as Zero Copy Data Sharing (Data-Out) from Salesforce Data Cloud to BigQuery. This heralds a new era of data integration, empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their data assets. With simplicity, speed, and scalability at its core, this game-changing capability enables businesses to innovate and thrive in today’s data-driven world.
Zero Copy access revolutionizes productivity for not only Architects, but also IT Teams, SIs, Developers, CDOs, and CIOs to bring data to business users enabling marketing and sales teams to leverage their enterprise data faster with no friction. Complex Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) pipelines become a thing of the past as organizations embrace a unified experience where data from disparate sources is harmonized with a single click.
To unlock the full potential of personalization, organizations must leverage customer data effectively. By harnessing a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer across all touchpoints, marketing and customer experience teams can gain invaluable insights to act at the right moment in the customer journey. To help build the comprehensive 360 degree view, customer experience teams require access to intuitive low-code and no-code user interfaces to unlock data. This is where BYOL Zero Copy access integrated with BigQuery becomes pivotal. It revolutionizes data collaboration to connect and unify customer data with BigQuery. Powering customer experiences with a rich unified profile combining Salesforce CRM and BigQuery data now just takes a few clicks!
The integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery now makes it easier than ever to build a rich unified customer profile for personalization, audience segmentation, analytics with Tableau, automation with Flow and innovative AI with Einstein.
Challenges of Traditional ETL Processes
Traditional ETL processes have long been the backbone of data integration in organizations. However, they come with their fair share of challenges that can hinder efficiency and effectiveness.
Complexity and Cost: Traditional ETL processes often involve building and maintaining complex pipelines, which require skilled personnel and significant investment in both time and resources. Managing data movement, transformation, and scheduling tasks can be intricate and costly, leading to increased operational overheads.
Data Freshness and Delays: Copying data during ETL processes can introduce delays, resulting in stale data that does not reflect the real-time state of the business. Lengthy ETL job durations exacerbate this issue, leading to further delays in data availability. Additionally, failures in ETL processes, such as timeouts or schema changes, can prolong data processing time and disrupt data delivery schedules.
Data Governance Concerns: With the growing importance of data governance and compliance regulations, organizations need to maintain control over their data and ensure its security and integrity. Traditional ETL pipelines often involve copying or moving data, which can raise concerns about data governance, data security, and regulatory compliance.
Scalability and Flexibility Limitations: Traditional ETL processes may struggle to scale effectively to handle growing volumes of data or evolving business requirements. Scaling up existing ETL pipelines can be challenging and may require significant redesign and reimplementation efforts. Additionally, rigid ETL architectures may lack the flexibility to adapt to changing data sources, formats, or integration patterns.
Unlocking the Value of Zero Copy integration with Salesforce Data Cloud
The introduction of Zero Copy integration with Salesforce Data Cloud offers transformative benefits, addressing these challenges and unlocking unprecedented value for customers:
Unlocking Insights: Salesforce Data Cloud’s open and extensible architecture breaks down barriers, enabling organizations to access previously siloed data effortlessly across data in Salesforce Data Cloud or Google datasets such as trends, BigQuery etc. By harnessing the power of Zero Copy with Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery, businesses can maximize the value of their data assets, unlocking insights that were previously inaccessible.
Faster Access to Data: Zero Copy integration enables swift access to data, whether federated in or shared out to external lakes like BigQuery. Accelerated data delivery empowers organizations to make agile, data-driven decisions, fostering responsiveness and competitiveness in dynamic markets.
Data Freshness: With Zero Copy integration, the need for data movement is eliminated, ensuring data freshness in real-time. Users gain access to live data, enabling informed decision-making based on the latest information available, without delays or inaccuracies.
Enhanced Security and Governance: Zero Copy integration enhances security and governance by mitigating risks associated with copying and moving data. Organizations maintain granular control over data access and governance, ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory requirements and safeguarding against security vulnerabilities.
Simplified Setup: Point-and-click Zero Copy Data Federation and sharing capabilities streamline setup, eliminating the complexity of traditional ETL pipelines. This simplification reduces dependency on IT resources and accelerates time-to-value, enabling organizations to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives.
This integration offers full management and governance, allowing customers to focus on analytics and insights without worrying about typical challenges associated with integrating enterprise systems.
“…Trying to get a handle on our customer data was a nightmare until we seamlessly connected Google Cloud and Salesforce Data Cloud. No more copying data between platforms, no more struggling with complex APIs. It’s revolutionized how we do segmentation, understand our customers, and drive better marketing and service actions.” A Large Insurance company
Empower your team to focus on Business Value and insights
The Zero Copy innovation bridges the gap between customer data and operational insights, empowering businesses to adapt swiftly to changing market dynamics and customer preferences. Various stakeholders within businesses are empowered by the collaboration between Salesforce and BigQuery. These empowered individuals include:
- Marketers can enhance segmentation and personalize campaigns by merging CRM and non-CRM data. Utilizing custom AI models, they can predict customer preferences, leading to hyper-targeted campaigns and increased engagement.
- Business users can leverage intelligent forecasting and performance analytics by integrating CRM and third-party data in BigQuery. This allows them to refine strategies, optimize performance, and prioritize customer-centric success.
- Data scientists can leverage BigQuery to build AI and machine learning models for determining customer purchase propensity scores. By combining Salesforce objects with BigQuery’s product category data, new insights can be unlocked, informing strategic decisions.
- Analysts can drive informed decision-making by merging historical sales and contact data from Salesforce with web analytics data in BigQuery. This holistic view helps identify customer trends and behavior for strategic insights.
Customer use case scenarios
Marketing Insurance Campaign Journey: Combine customer profile, insurance policy, and plan data in BigQuery with customer data in Salesforce Cloud for targeted outreach campaigns in Marketing Cloud. This facilitates cross-selling of other financial products.
Targeted Promotions and Customer Reachout: Merge customer purchase and profile data from BigQuery with customer feedback and service data in Salesforce for targeted customer outreach in Marketing Cloud, including promotional deals.
Customer Satisfaction Using Service Cloud Data: Combine customer and case data in Salesforce with customer feedback data in BigQuery to determine customer satisfaction ratings, enhancing service quality.
Prioritized Offers and Data-Driven Next Best Action: Utilize customer/billing accounts and service data from Salesforce along with prospect, order, and billing data in BigQuery to generate prioritized offers and next-best actions using Salesforce Einstein.
AI and Machine Learning:Integrate customer and marketing engagement data in Salesforce with POS data in BigQuery for reporting and building Google Vertex AI/ML models. This facilitates the prediction of customer propensity to buy, enabling targeted marketing strategies.
With Salesforce Data Cloud’s open & Extensible architecture, BYOL Zero Copy enables data to be enriched as it flows breaking down silos and freeing trapped data.
A Retailer’s Journey: Leveraging Web Engagement and POS data in BigQuery with Customer Insights in Salesforce Data Cloud for Personalized Marketing, AI and Analytics
Demonstrating the Seamless Integration of Salesforce Data Cloud’s Zero Copy with BigQuery, we envision a scenario where a clothing retailer effortlessly creates operational customer profiles to enhance personalized experiences.
Imagine a large clothing retailer leveraging Google BigQuery to harness web engagement and POS data, seamlessly integrated with Salesforce Data Cloud, to tailor marketing campaigns and customer interactions. Moreover, they seamlessly share first-party (1P) data and Unified data from Salesforce Data Cloud with BigQuery, crafting effective campaigns that drive sales.
Marketers have streamlined cross-channel templates to personalize promotions based on users’ web activities. These same promotions are readily accessible to Sales and Service representatives within their console, ensuring customers encounter tailored deals aligned with their web engagement during interactions.
See how easy it is to achieve this with just clicks and not code.
Live Access to data with secure connectivity
The data specialist first creates a secure connection between the BigQuery project and the Salesforce Data Cloud Org. Once the connection has been established, the data specialist creates the Data Stream, where they define the objects and fields they would like to use. They then create a new data stream based on the BigQuery connection that they just created.
Map and harmonize the data
With Live access you can now start using this data in Salesforce Data Cloud to map the Data Lake Object (DLO) that is created when a Data Stream is deployed to an existing or a custom Data Model. In this case, the retailer created their own custom data model and mapped the fields using external Data Lake Objects federated from BigQuery.
Note that when using Zero Copy Data Federation, Salesforce Data Cloud utilized external Data Lake Objects (as opposed to native Data Lake Objects). External Data Lake Objects only store the metadata of the source table in Salesforce Data Cloud. All your data is now simply available for use with any of the supported Salesforce Data Cloud services. Users will have the same experience, irrespective of whether the data resides internally or externally.
Segment and Activate
Now your marketing team has all that they need to initiate the segmentation to generate the targeted customer cohort. The marketing manager begins by creating a new segment based on the unified individual and schedules it to refresh every 24 hours to obtain customer web engagement data.
The marketing team wants to determine the cohort of customers who made at least one purchase, both at the store and via the web. Using the unified profile data, we can determine the customer’s preferences, their preferred mode of shopping and other personal preferences to segment the data and offer them customized deals, based on their past purchases.
The Marketing team now activates the results to the desired channels including marketing emails, SMS notifications, web personalizations, paid social media, etc.
Note how the marketing team was able to run the segmentation and derive the desired results without having to deal with the complexity of obtaining the data from multiple sources or writing complex queries to join all the data. With the Zero Copy Integration to BigQuery, Salesforce Data Cloud handles the complexity to ensure that the business user can focus on deriving business critical insights.
With Zero Copy Data Sharing to Google BigQuery, use the results of Segmentation to drive increased sales
The marketing team aims to leverage the data for running effective Google campaigns. They utilize Salesforce Data Cloud’s Zero Copy Data Sharing feature to share insights on multi-channel shoppers and rich Unified individual data and Segments with their Google Project.
By harnessing the powerful integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery, the marketer unlocks unparalleled insights into their advertising strategies. This transformative approach allows for a comprehensive analysis of advertising effectiveness by seamlessly combining Unified individual and Segments data shared with BigQuery from Salesforce Data Cloud. By leveraging these robust datasets, businesses gain a holistic understanding of their campaigns, empowering them to optimize their advertising campaigns with precision and drive impactful results.
Expanding on marketing insights, the retailer utilized the Model Builder capability, Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) to integrate Google’s Vertex AI results with Customer 360 data from Salesforce Data Cloud. This fusion enabled the development of a propensity-to-buy model, analyzing various customer data facets such as purchase history, browsing behavior, demographic information, and interactions with marketing campaigns.
Tableau Insights
The campaign’s success prompts the retailer’s leadership team to seek comprehensive customer engagement insights. With just a few clicks, the marketing team uses Tableau insights in Salesforce Data Cloud to produce a customer engagement dashboard.
Salesforce Data Cloud integrates fully with BI tools like Tableau, with out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards to visualize data and make it actionable across the entire C360 including Sales, Service, and Marketing organizations.
Conclusion
The groundbreaking Zero Copy integration between Salesforce and Google BigQuery eliminates the complexities of ETL processes. This trusted, secure, and flexible bidirectional integration empowers organizations to enhance customer experiences and achieve unparalleled success. With a comprehensive 360-degree view of customers enriched by Salesforce Data Cloud Zero Copy, teams can glean invaluable insights, personalize interactions, and deliver greater value to customers across all touchpoints.
Contributor to this blog:
Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Director of Product Management
Get Started Today!
Contact your Salesforce or Google BigQuery Account team today to learn how you can start leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud’s Zero Copy integration. For more information about this and other integrations across our platforms, visit our Partnership webpage.
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