Learning the language: Salesforce and Customer 360

What do we mean when we say Salesforce? What does your client mean? What does your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) mean? What do the other architects on your team mean?

This section is focused on clarifying the terminology you’ll need to have effective conversations with all the stakeholders on projects that incorporate multiple Salesforce products.

First and foremost, Salesforce is the name of a software company. Their flagship product is the Lightning Platform, which supports many of their Salesforce branded products, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. In this section, we’ll clarify the difference between Salesforce the company, the Lightning Platform CRM product, and the larger Salesforce ecosystem of products that use different underlying technology.

As a B2C Solution Architect working with Packt Gear, you know that the first thing to sort out is which Salesforce Products are right for Packt Gear.

The Lightning Platform

Over time, the term Salesforce became synonymous with the CRM product, but using the name of the company to mean one specific product that a company sells can be confusing in real projects.

On top of the core Salesforce Platform, also known as Core, Force.com, or the Lightning Platform, Salesforce has built a variety of licensed products that extend the platform by adding use case specific features and functionality. The Lightning Platform is based on an extensible relational database and has robust code and declarative customization capabilities to support a variety of use cases. Many, but not all, Salesforce products are built on the Lightning Platform.

Salesforce Lightning Platform based products can be divided into two broad categories: function-specific or industry-specific. These two categories have no technical significance; they are just ways for Salesforce to organize and sell features to customers. Function-specific products provide features that are organized around a specific use case but can be used across any industry.

The function-specific Lightning Platform based products include:

• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Work.com
• Experience Cloud
• Order Management
• B2B / D2C Commerce
• Net Zero Cloud
• Loyalty Management
• Data Cloud

The industry-specific Lightning Platform based products include:

• Health Cloud
• Financial Services Cloud
• Government Cloud
• Manufacturing Cloud
• Media Cloud
• Nonprofit Cloud

Important note

The set of available Lightning Platform based products is constantly evolving so this should not be considered an authoritative list. Many of these products are not relevant to B2C solutions; we’ll be focusing on the ones that are.

The Salesforce ecosystem

Other uses of Salesforce, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, refer to hybrid offerings that include products on the core Lightning Platform and products built on separate technology. They are owned by Salesforce the company, but they aren’t built on the Lightning Platform, at least not entirely.

Why does this matter? At its core, B2C Solution Architecture is about integration. When leveraging a variety of products that are all built on the Lightning Platform, there’s really no need for integration between them, since they all share a data model and can work together. When including products that aren’t built on the Lightning Platform, however, the work becomes more interesting.

As you evaluate the products needed for Packt Gear, pay attention to which of the products in the overall solution are built on the Lightning Platform and which are external and will have to be integrated.

Customer 360 evolution

As Salesforce evolved and grew from a pure CRM product company to an enterprise software vendor competing in a wide variety of industries, they needed a better way to describe the solution they offer when the entire toolset is applied. This concept became known as Customer 360.

The customer 360 concept

The heart of any successful business is its customers. Salesforce depicts this customer-centric focus with a concept called Customer 360. It’s critical for you as a B2C Solution Architect to be able to separate the marketing message from the technology solution, however.

Tip

Customer 360 is not a product, it’s a mindset. It means combining all of your Salesforce products together in service of a common understanding of your customer and their experiences with your brand.

Customer 360 component products for B2C solutions

While the term Customer 360 refers to all the Salesforce products, this book is going to focus on a few key components that are the building blocks of a B2C solution:

• Service Cloud for customer service, often abbreviated to SFSC
• B2C Commerce for direct-to-consumer selling, often abbreviated to SFCC
• Marketing Cloud Engagement for marketing and digital communications, often abbreviated to SFMC

Remember that, to design an integrated solution, we need to pay attention to which products are built on the Lightning Platform and which are not. Service Cloud is built on the Lightning Platform, whereas B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud Engagement are not.

In addition to these three key products, the following are often used in a B2C solution and will be covered at a higher level in later chapters:

• Salesforce Order Management for order management
• MuleSoft for integration

Customer 360 and Packt Gear

Packt Gear sells products online direct to consumers, supports those consumers through customer service channels, and advertises online through a variety of digital channels including email and social media. Although there are many other operational considerations for making that happen, those are the core use cases for the initial digital transformation. So, a mix of B2C Commerce, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud Engagement sounds right!

We’ll cover the rest in Chapter 3, Direct-to-Consumer Selling with B2C Commerce. We’ll also evaluate integration options for pulling it all together in Chapter 8, Integration Architecture Options.

If your solution has other requirements, we’ll be outlining the overall methodology for evaluating, understanding, and incorporating products into the solution so you can apply it to whatever tools you need in your unique business environment.

B2C solution architecture focus areas

You can’t buy licenses for Customer 360 and, as much as we’d like it to be otherwise, uniting different Salesforce products under a common marketing umbrella does not make them an integrated solution. It’s the job of the solution architect to make this vision a reality by understanding a few key aspects of every Salesforce product in a solution.

A B2C solution architect is responsible for the following aspects of an integrated solution:

• Data strategy, particularly customer data, focused on where data is stored and how it moves between products in support of the overall solution.
• Integration workflows focused on when and how the various products in the solution communicate with each other (APIs, data feeds, based on events, middleware solutions, and transformations).
• Orchestration of user workflows that span between products such as unified customer login or Customer Service Representative (CSR) ordering.
• Feature and functionality mapping between products, ensuring that the best tool is used for any given job.
• Overall solution non-functional requirements such as performance, security, scalability, governance, monitoring, and total cost of ownership.
• A B2C Solution Architect is not responsible for the in-depth technical design of features and functionality specific to any single product in the overall solution.
• In the next section, we’ll cover the Salesforce Lightning Platform, the foundation of many of the products Salesforce offers. To support the B2C Solution Architect areas of responsibility outlined above, we’ll cover the platform data strategy and functionality in this chapter. In Chapter 2, Supporting Your Customers with Service Cloud, we’ll cover the integration workflows supported by the Lightning Platform.