What is Salesforce Data Cloud? Real-World Use Cases, Implementation & Pricing

Salesforce Data Cloud (SFDC) is a hyperscale data engine that unifies unorganized business data and seamlessly connects it to your CRM. It brings all your structured and unstructured data to a single place, building a single source of truth for customer information. 

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and low-code analytics tools, SFDC processes information to offer rich insights for high-quality customer profiles. It facilitates quick data access and actionable insights for your service agents, sales representatives, marketers, and merchandisers, helping every cloud—sales, marketing, service, and commerce—process better.

How Can Salesforce Data Cloud Transform Your Business?

Connects Organization-Wide Data 

Salesforce Data Cloud connects your customer data from internal and external sources to offer a comprehensive view. It brings data from internal sources such as multiple orgs and clouds, as well as from external sources such as Amazon, Azure, and more, using the MuleSoft connector. 

It enriches mobile and web app experiences by connecting data from data lakes and warehouses using zero-copy integration. Instead of physically copying or moving data, zero-copy integration uses pointers and references to the source. This reduces your storage costs and improves the application’s performance while eliminating data silos. 

Harmonizes Your Data 

SFDC converts your data across Salesforce objects and fields into a common format using a standard metadata framework. This simplifies data analysis, reporting, and data integration with other systems while also ensuring the data is organized and accessible to relevant business teams.  

It offers ready-to-use reference data models and customizes them to meet your business needs. You can selectively choose relevant data for relevant services. It filters out unnecessary information and protects against loose data access, allowing your services to run smoothly.

SFDC offers a Visual Builder that showcases data relationships among Salesforce data objects before deploying them. It clearly explains how your data will be structured and connected.   

Unifies Data Using Rule Sets 

Salesforce Data Cloud helps in consolidating your customer profiles from various data sources by employing customizable rule sets that resolve identity issues. It uses two key processes: 

• Matching Rules: Define criteria at both individual and account levels, such as email, name, or phone number, to determine which profiles should be merged.
• Reconciliation Rules: Once the profiles match, these rules decide which values are to be kept using methods like “Last Updated” or “Most Frequent” to ensure accuracy.

By combining these processes, you can tailor the unification process to meet your business requirements. It results in comprehensive and reliable customer profiles. 

Enhances And Enriches Data  

SFDC offers low-code tools that help in processing and enhancing your data. Using these tools, you can analyze your data and calculate metrics such as customer lifetime value, propensity to buy, engagement scores, and more, helping you make insightful decisions. It uses customer data to segment high-value audiences, helping you focus and cater to their needs. 

SFDC allows the integration of machine learning models from external sources and leverages them to work on your data, providing important and informed insights.

Governs Your Data 

Salesforce offers a highly secure environment, expanding its security enforcement over the Data Cloud. It ensures consistent access across all data sources and establishes a secure and private connection while sharing sensitive data.  

Encryption key management helps establish secure and private connections. It handles key creation, storage, and rotation, ensuring that only authorized systems and users can decrypt and access the data. By tagging and classifying unified data and metadata, Salesforce Data Cloud applies governance policies that further secure and regulate access, ensuring compliance with privacy standards and internal policies.

Activates Data 

SFDC facilitates easy integration of your data across internal as well as various third-party platforms, such as advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, or messaging apps like WhatsApp.

It brings your data from objects, fields, and insights directly into your contact, lead, and account pages. This allows your business teams to act on this data by automating an action or a workflow using automated Flow. 

For instance, a customer’s loyalty status changes from “Silver” to “Gold” in your data model. The Flow can automatically send them a welcome email, update their profile in other connected systems,  and notify a sales rep to follow up. This way, it empowers your business teams to leverage the potential of actionable data fully. 

How Does Data Cloud Work with Other Clouds?

Sales Cloud 

Data Cloud and Sales Cloud work together to revolutionize the way your sales team caters to leads and opportunities, driving maximum sales outcomes. 

Offers Unified Customer Insights 

It provides a 360-degree view of customer profiles by aggregating data from marketing systems, transactional databases, and third-party resources such as IoT devices. It offers your sales reps a complete customer history to anticipate their needs.

AI-driven Lead Personalization 

It uses Einstein AI capabilities from the Data Cloud to score leads based on customers’ behavioral data. This allows sales reps to focus on high-value leads that are more likely to convert. 

Hyper-Personalized Sales Engagement

Enables your sales reps to deliver contextualized pitches by suggesting relevant support content and resources, such as case studies or whitepapers, that resonate with the prospect’s industry or pain points to build trust. 

Improved Forecasting And Pipeline Management 

By analyzing historical customer data and current market trends, the Data Cloud forecasts the accuracy of your pipeline and identifies deals that might be at risk. Therefore, using ML and AI prediction, it suggests the next best action for your sales representatives toward deals needing attention and addresses risks promptly.

Service Cloud

The collaboration of Data and Service Cloud empowers your service reps to deliver unified, context-aware interactions for proactive issue resolution.

Unified And Personalized Service Interactions

Your teams get unified customer service interactions across cases and calls and details of the products or services, such as warranty and subscription ending. It helps agents resolve issues faster with full context, reducing repeated interactions. Plus, it helps in prioritizing customer service delivery for loyal and VIP customers across their preferred communication channels, improving overall satisfaction scores.

Proactive And Predictive Service Enablement 

Using AI intelligence and real-time data, the Data Cloud can predict issues such as IoT device failures or subscription renewals. Further, it creates alerts and recommends solutions using case routing. It pulls relevant data to the case, such as case details like issue type, urgency, customer tier, and the customer’s interaction history. For instance, a case about a “broken HVAC unit” would include data like warranty status, repair history, and customer location.

Omnichannel Service Orchestration 

Data Cloud harmonizes data across channels such as email, phone, chat, social media, and more. Using AI intelligence, it creates personalized responses based on customer data and a reliable knowledge base. This helps agents provide accurate and relevant replies with just one click.

Analytics For Continuous Improvements

The collaboration enables service analytics dashboards. These dashboards track the KPIs like first-contact resolution (FCR) and agent performance, helping you boost needful areas.

Marketing Cloud 

Data Cloud for Marketing enables your marketing teams to understand customer needs better and deliver consistent experiences across all communication channels. It offers user-friendly segmentation, calculated insights, and first-party advertising, aiming to drive maximum marketing ROI. 

It enables your marketing teams to access both structured and unstructured data. This rapid access allows them to launch marketing campaigns quickly and respond to market trends immediately. 

Explore the capabilities of Data Cloud, and discover what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud all about.

Commerce Cloud

The collaboration of Data and Commerce Cloud empowers your commerce teams to maximize online revenue.  

Unified Customer Profile 

It gathers customer data from commerce touchpoints, including online purchases, in-store interactions, CRM, and social media, into a single profile. With this, your commerce teams can identify high-value customers and deliver personalized offers based on their browsing history, past purchases, and preferences. 

Enhanced Customer Insights

Using Einstein AI capabilities, Salesforce Data Cloud applies predictive models to commerce data to predict Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to prioritize high-value segments. It recommends next-best products, such as “customers who bought this also bought this and might be interested in this,” creating up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Moreover, this collaboration helps you tailor product recommendations, emails, and web experiences. 

Your commerce teams can deliver 1:1 personalization without manual effort, increasing average order value (AOV) and loyalty.

Inventory And Supply Chain Efficiency

By facilitating integration with ERP and inventory systems, the Data cloud tracks real-time inventory data and alerts procurement teams when the stock runs low or the demand exceeds. It helps your teams to reduce stockouts and overstocking, overall improving margins. 

Delivers Actionable Analytics 

With pre-built dashboards in Commerce Cloud, SFDC tracks KPIs like conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, and CLV, helping you make data-driven decisions. 

It offers charts showcasing your top-selling items and categories so you can focus on your best-selling verticals. Additionally, it provides insights into your customers’ product search habits and reveals the common products they purchase, allowing you to attract them with effective strategies while leveraging the Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce Data Cloud Implementation Guide 

We have listed the core steps to get Data Cloud up and running, ensuring you effectively connect, prepare, analyze, and act on your data while maintaining high ethical standards.

Pre-Requisites of Salesforce Data Cloud Implementation 

Identify Stakeholders & Users

• Determine project stakeholders, key decision-makers, and Data Cloud users.
• Align everyone and restrict access to relevant users.

Document Business Requirements

• Create a roadmap to avoid challenges and ensure measurable success.

Identify & Prepare Data Sources

• Ensure seamless mapping and integration by identifying all data sources.
• Obtain proper permissions and credentials for data access. 

Review Billing & Limitations

• Understand cost structures and limitations to prevent budget overruns.
• Plan for scalability based on potential cost areas.

Define Data Model Requirements

• Choose between standard, custom, or hybrid data models based on project flexibility and maintenance needs.

Establish Identity Resolution Rules

• Define rules to merge customer data accurately and eliminate duplicate records.

Plan Audience Segmentation

• Identify desired segments and the necessary data for targeted strategies.

Consider Architectural Strategy

• Evaluate data needs, growth plans, and residency requirements.
• Decide on a single Data Cloud org for centralization or multiple orgs for better control.

Data Cloud Implementation Steps

#1. Add Data Cloud To Your Salesforce Account 

• Go to Settings > Your Account > Browse and Buy 
• Scroll down and locate Data Cloud Provisioning > Add To Cart > Check Out 
• Review the details of your order thoroughly. 
• Click on Order & Sign. 

You have successfully enabled Data Cloud.

#2. Configure and Connect

• Set up your environment by enabling the Data Cloud permission set. 
• Go to Setup > Users > select the relevant user. 

• Open your user record.
• Hover over the Permission Set Assignments sub-tab.

• Allow relevant access to them to create other users and allow access while also managing your data spaces.

Data Cloud admins connect your various data sources, such as CRM, Salesforce product clouds, and others, using pre-built connectors and zero-copy data federation for fast onboarding, yet in their original form. 

#3. Prepare and Model Data

• Go to the top left search box, search ‘Data Cloud’, and click on it. A Data Cloud window opens.

Ingest Data with Data Streams

• Use Data Streams to bring data into Data Cloud.

• These streams transfer data into Data Lake Objects (DLOs), which harmonize it into a unified data model.

Create a Data Stream

• Click Create New Data Stream.
• Select Salesforce CRM

• Choose the appropriate Data Bundle (e.g., Sales or Service) to fetch relevant information automatically.

Enhance and Cleanse Data

• Use formula fields to cleanse data and generate additional useful insights.

• This ensures the data is in the optimal format for segmentation.

Define Data Lake Objects (DLOs)

• Select source fields and formula fields to structure the DLOs.

Deploy and Map Data

• Deploy your Data Streams and save both the original and harmonized fields.
• Map these to a data model (e.g., Customer 360 Data Model) to create a source-agnostic view.

#4. Create Unified Profiles

Build unified customer profiles using Identity Resolution. 

• Navigate to Identity Resolution
• Create a New Ruleset
• Select Data Space
• Select Primary Object
• Create Match Rules: Define match rules to identify which profiles should be unified during the identity resolution process. For example, a rule might specify that all records of individuals with the same email address and name should be combined into one profile. 

• Create Reconciliation Rules: Define reconciliation rules to determine which values to use in the unified profile when multiple values exist for a field.

• Run Ruleset

#5. Build Insights

• You can gain a comprehensive view of all your data in the Profile Explorer tab. 
• Use and analyze this unified data to gain calculated insights. You can create useful metrics based on profiles, segments, and population levels. 
• Select the appropriate method to calculate insights:
  • Create with Visual Builder – Use a guided interface.
  • Create with SQL Expression – Leverage SQL queries for custom calculations.
  • Create from a Package – Use predefined templates.
  • Create Streaming Insights – Process real-time data and more

• For instance, if you choose to Create with SQL:
  • Select the option
  • Click Next
  • Enter the calculated insight name. The Calculated Insight API Name field is auto-filled.
  • Enter the new insight SQL query expression. The SQL statement character limit is 131,021.
  • Check that your syntax is valid. 
  • Click Activate
  • From the Schedule dropdown, select a schedule.
  • Select the start date and time of the schedule.
  • Click Enable.
• Publish your calculated insights to begin processing. 
• View the results in the Data Explorer tab and filter or analyze them using buttons in the top right corner. This helps you forecast trends and better understand customer behavior. Also, this data can be used to train AI models as well. 

#6. Act On Your Data

With this data, you can: 

• Activate insights across your channels. 
• Use your audience segments and insights to trigger marketing campaigns (e.g., via Marketing Cloud Engagement or Journey Builder).
• Integrate Data Cloud with Tableau, Sales Cloud and other internal as well as external platforms to drive actions.
• Automate business processes using flows that react to data insights.

The steps are as follows: 

Navigate to Data Actions

• In Data Cloud, go to the Data Actions tab and click New.
• Select Data Action Target
  • Choose the data action target and click Next.
  • Create a Salesforce Platform Event Data Action Target
    1. In Data Cloud, navigate to the Data Actions Target tab, and click New.

2. Enter the action target name.
The Action Target API Name field is auto-filled.
3. Select Salesforce Platform Event.

4. From the Select Salesforce Org dropdown, select Salesforce.
5. Save your changes.
OR

Create a Webhook Data Action Target

1. In Data Cloud, navigate to the Data Actions Target tab, and click New.
2. Enter the action target name.
   The Action Target API Name field is auto-filled.
3. Select Webhook.

4. Enter the URL where you want to publish the webhook events, and click Save.
5. Generate the secret key.
You can generate a secret key only for an active or inactive data action target.
6. Copy the secret key to configure your webhook system.

Click on the Standard Data action

Select you Data Action Target

Select what data you want to share {Calculted Insight or Data Model Object}

Select Primary Object

Select a rule when it triggers an action and set up the Action Rules Condition.

Save and Publish

Throughout your implementation, follow the best practices: 

• Allow customers to control how you use their data, either through terms and agreements or a customer preference center. This center stores the user’s data privacy preferences. 
• Ensure that customers receive the appropriate benefits in exchange for their data, such as an appealing customer experience and targeted offerings that make them feel valued. 
• Treat their data as sensitive information and collect only the data you need. 
• Choose partners carefully to maintain trust and data integrity. Know the post-data-consumption action of your partner. Whether they delete your customer data or store it. 

This is how you can implement your Data Cloud seamlessly. However, to deal with the technical intricacies of the process, you need to hire Salesforce expert.

How Salesforce Data Cloud Is Helping Businesses? Real-World Examples

Heathrow Airport 

One of the leading travel hubs across the globe, Heathrow Airport faced challenges in delivering seamless, personalized experiences for a diverse and ever-growing customer base. They operated 14 separate websites and 45 backend systems. It hindered their ability to adapt to changing passenger behavior and deliver personalized experiences to all. 

SFDC enabled Heathrow to capture passenger interactions across multiple channels. This data was seamlessly integrated with other Salesforce products and was accessible by their marketing, service, and commerce teams. By applying real-time analytics and AI capabilities it offered, Heathrow could quickly understand each traveler’s needs and deliver personalized support and experiences. 

Heathrow Realized: 

• 30% increase in digital revenue.
• 49% email open rate, leading to higher customer spending.
• 4,000 chatbot queries handled monthly, reducing call center workload.

Fisher and Paykel 

It is a premium appliance brand operating in 50 countries. It aimed at enhancing customer experiences by addressing inefficiencies caused by disconnected data systems. 

In order to achieve this, they implemented Salesforce Data Cloud to unify customer data and gain comprehensive insights. It consolidated data from various sources, providing sales, service, and marketing teams with a comprehensive history of customer interactions, purchases, and preferences. This integration enabled more personalized and efficient customer engagements. 

With Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud integration, Fisher and Paykel created hyper-personalized marketing segments for targeted marketing activities. They triggered automated journeys based on customers’ online behaviors, such as visits to specific product pages.

Benefits They Achieved: 

• They experienced a 206% increase in unique email opens.
• 112% increase in unique clicks, indicating enhanced customer interest and interaction.​

Not just these, but many other leading companies such as Ford, Formula 1, FedEx, and Air India are reaping the benefits of the SFDC. 

Salesforce Data Cloud Pricing 

Freemium Edition 

Data Cloud is available freely for Enterprise editions and above. Users get:

• 250,000 Data Services credits
• 1 TB of data storage
• 1 Data Cloud admin 
• 100 internal Data Cloud identity users
• 20,000 Data Cloud permission set licenses (PSL)
• 5 integration users

After your teams exhaust these credits, they can purchase additional credits to meet their requirements. 

Data Cloud For Sales 

Sales Cloud offers Data Cloud capabilities with the “Einstein 1 Sales” package at $500 USD per user per month. You get:

• Einstein Copilot powered by Generative AI
• Performance management
• Advanced forecasting
• Lead & opportunity management

Data Cloud For Service 

Service Cloud offers Data Cloud capabilities in the Einstein 1 Service package. You get:

Einstein copilot capabilities 

Data Cloud capabilities that unify customers’ preferences, purchases, and interaction history.

Data Cloud For Marketing 

There is a separate plan that Marketing Cloud offers for Data Cloud capabilities. It comes with: 

• Segmentations and Activations
• $1,800/TB of Data Storage 
• $1,000/100,000 credits for data services  
• $2,400/audience Ad Audiences

Data Cloud For Commerce 

B2B Commerce Cloud offers Data Cloud capabilities as per the following plan:

• Commerce Cloud Growth Plan: Charges 1% of gross merchandise value and offers 250K credits 
• Commerce Cloud Advanced Plan: Charged 2% of gross merchandise value and offers 500K credits

B2C Commerce Cloud offers Data Cloud capabilities in a B2C premium plan with 500K credits.

Final take 

Salesforce Data Cloud breaks down data silos and offers rich insights from your data reserves. Powered by Einstein AI’s capabilities and enhanced by Agentforce’s innovative approach, this platform can transform your business data into a strategic decision-making mechanism. 

Worrying about the intricacies it involves? Hire a Salesforce developer to handle all the technicalities of SFDC implementation. At Smart IT Staff, you get pre-vetted professionals who work for you on an immediate basis and integrate seamlessly with your existing teams.