On June 10, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Tableau Software. This move adds the “Grand Old Lady” of data visualization and insights to the Salesforce Customer Success Platform and moves Salesforce beyond its sales and marketing roots.
The acquisition also acts as a concrete recognition of the importance and business value that analytics and insights bring to businesses and their customer experience development and optimization.
Of course, this value does not come automatically. The only way this equation works is for all that data to be accessible to all organizations and processes in the company – sales, marketing, customer service, customer support, field service, etc. to enable them to make better decisions in real time.
Many of us are familiar with the key role of data visualization and exploration to uncover insights, identify business opportunities, spot market trends and directions, predict customer churn, and drive high-quality decisions. In the context of customer experience, it is really about supporting data-driven customer engagements whether that relates to sales, marketing, or customer service. Therefore, it is critical to understand how Tableau’s data visualization and insights capabilities can be used for better customer insights, as well as to better engage with customers at the various stages of their journey with data-driven, differentiated decisions, actions, experiences, and outcomes:
- You gain deeper insights into marketing program and campaign performance, customer behaviour, website and digital commerce engagement, and the impact of offers to optimize marketing activities.
- You gain increased confidence in key sales pipeline metrics, seller performance, and forecasting. You understand your sales funnel and can better identify and implement needed actions. You also gain increased productivity with automated KPI tracking.
- You get detailed visibility into burning and emerging issues, customer health and satisfaction, customer service bottlenecks, and customer service personnel performance to optimize customer service processes and cost structures and deliver outstanding customer service experiences.
All in all, it was very interesting to read about some of the visionary thinking behind this acquisition which is - not surprisingly - very much aligned with our core beliefs and thinking around data-driven marketing, sales, and customer service. To turn data-driven customer experience into a reality, you need to see and understand data (Tableau augmenting human capabilities), and you need to understand and engage your customers (Salesforce).
As a long-time Salesforce partner, we see a lot of interesting opportunities that this acquisition brings to our customers and ourselves.
Visit our site to learn more about our Salesforce offering and contact us for a solution that fits your business.
Marko Saarinen is a principal consultant and head of marketing science at Tieto's Customer Experience Management. As a customer insight and data-driven marketing professional, Marko has studied and influenced the effects of data utilization and emerging phenomena and technologies on business, sales, marketing, and customer experience optimization.