Microsoft and Salesforce want to rethink customer data, but there are big challenges

(L-R) Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO; Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO; and Bill McDermott, SAP CEO / Photo credit: Microsoft press release

Let’s say I buy a pair of headphones online. I love the brand. I’ve shopped on their site for years. So why is it that when I go into their actual store, I’m a complete unknown?

And when I call customer service, why do I have to start from scratch? Why do they keep showing me ads for headphones when I just bought the exact pair?

We live in an era when AI-assisted technology is literally driving cars, performing instantaneous translation, and outsmarting Go grandmasters. But when it comes to understanding simple customer history, the planet’s smartest software can feel downright dumb.

One simple, unsexy, yet supremely frustrating reason for that is data silos.

Getting a 360-degree view of the customer journey

Brands use different software systems that speak different languages and store data in separate ways. This means a store’s point-of-sale software may not integrate with the website, the marketing suite serving social media ads probably doesn’t sync with your purchase history, and customer service platforms may not know that any other system exists.

And we haven’t even touched on the challenges of integrating real-life data from IoT devices, or the sticky challenge of weaving together mobile and desktop info.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software has, ostensibly, existed for decades. Major software platforms offer different, competing versions, but the real challenge is that these platforms tend to be designed for—and driven by—the needs of sales teams.

Far from capturing a complete view of the customer—from early interactions on social media, marketing initiatives, customer service calls, to in-store visits—they generally just track a narrow slice of sales efforts.

So, an initiative to actually unify all this disparate data and make it usable across distinct platforms would be revolutionary.

Redefining the “customer relationship platform”

One exciting example is a project from Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe called the Open Data Initiative. The idea is that data will, one day, be stored centrally and be able to flow smoothly between different systems run by each of these software giants.

Salesforce has also unveiled its Customer 360 ID at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The new offering assigns a universal ID to customers of brands that use the platform, allowing companies to access info on customers across Salesforce’s various proprietary cloud suites.

On a deeper level, this is a move that lets companies find and extract more value from their customers. A business with customer marketing data stored on one platform could bring in corresponding sales data from another and operational data from a third source, for example.

This unified view will not only present a fuller picture of each customer, but also unleash AI’s real potential to find patterns and optimize product offerings on a person-by-person basis.

Challenges ahead