Last September at Dreamforce, Salesforce created a lot of buzz around their announcement of Salesforce Genie. It was touted as Salesforce’s “greatest innovation in the company’s historyâ€, but what is Genie exactly? How is Genie different from Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, which used to be Salesforce CDP?
With this excitement came a bit of confusion. A few of us in the industry thought to ourselves, How does Genie work alongside Salesforce CDP (Customer Data Platform)? Does Genie erase the need for CDP? Are they parts of the same product? What would the use cases be for the CDP versus something like Genie?
Key Differences Between Salesforce CDP & Genie
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud CDP is still in use today. Where does Genie fit in? Salesforce Genie enhances CDP’s capabilities that can extend across your Salesforce applications, platform, and services (Customer 360) in real-time.
Genie and CDP control identity resolution and data unification; however, their use cases can differentiate within an organization. CDP is a product that sits inside the Marketing Cloud suite. It is designed for activation and audience segmentation. This allows marketers to create and execute more personalized campaigns across multiple channels, driven by customer data collected through engagement behavior.
That’s where CDP’s capability starts to slow down. Genie takes this principle a few steps further. Rather than sitting inside one Cloud, Genie can be layered across your entire network of Salesforce products. This makes the data more actionable, working towards the Customer 360. Data is gathered from all sources within your organization. It can be used across all departments, such as sales, commerce, service, etc., empowering them in real-time with data that can drive value and produce a positive customer experience.
How Can Genie Drive Value For Your Organization?
Now that Genie has gathered all the data necessary to create a unified customer profile, the profile showcases everything you need to know about that customer. Real-time data collection allows you to keep up with the customer’s experience and provide in-moment highly relevant content that can add value for them. Genie applies to all companies in any industry. For example, a retail company collects all of its customer’s data through the various customer activities the brand makes available online – online chat, sms, eCommerce, social, email, etc. Genie can automate the relevancy of your marketing communications, helping improve your customer experience and driving revenue.
While Marketing Cloud’s CDP product offers an excellent start for companies to organize better and manage their customer data, Salesforce Genie has built on top of that robust foundation to offer even more capabilities. Salesforce Genie can connect with your entire organization in real-time, allowing companies to create more personalized customer experiences.