At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce unveiled Salesforce Genie (the rabbit) – which promises to turn your data into real-time customer magic.
Sounds promising. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from hit films Aladdin and Kazaam, it’s that when it comes to genies – you have to be careful what you wish for.
If Salesforce has its way, you’ll wish for the following:
- Harmonize: Genie’s “real-time customer graph” is built on the Salesforce metadata model. This is not the same thing as the metadata model for your business. When your sales, marketing, CS and finance leaders disagree on what data means and whose data is correct – it’s because you haven’t defined and aligned on your business data model. Mapping everything to Salesforce’s metadata world view doesn’t help with this – it actually makes the problem worse.
- Engage: Genie’s “real-time Customer 360” is great IF you’re all-in on the Salesforce platform across sales, marketing, service, and commerce. If you’ve gone best-of-breed though (e.g. Hubspot, Marketo, Outreach, Jira, Zendesk), good luck! Distributing that Customer 360 to the apps where people who aren’t in Salesforce actually work is hard. Keeping them in sync with accurate data as things evolve in real-time isn’t possible (without Syncari). And out-of-sync systems = bad customer engagements.
- Experience: Using real-time data to trigger actions automatically sounds like magic. The problem: If you don’t have controls for data integrity and authority between all the systems that are required to orchestrate the end-to-end customer journey – flow automations will eventually run amok and stomp all over one another. Chaotic automations = broken experiences.
- Connect: And the kicker – connecting real-time data streams and historical data with Salesforce sounds great, but where does that data live? How expensive is it to store? Who’s responsible for data unification and quality management?
There’s one other missing piece here, and that’s product data. The momentum of PLG and the various ways business are leveraging product data to drive revenue are both trending and exciting, as well as nuanced and often complex. Whether a B2C product schema or actual app user activity, Salesforce Genie seems to miss this story entirely.
Honestly, we’re excited to see Salesforce presenting this vision because it’s very well aligned with ours. We’d just recommend you put Salesforce Genie back in its bottle and come take a look at Syncari instead. Our data automation platform was actually designed for this.
