Measure the Value of Data Cloud

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the value of Data Cloud across your business.
Consider the features that can help you achieve your goals.
Identify a use case and gather business requirements.

Before You Start

This badge is part of the Data Cloud: Unlock the Value of Your Data trail. The content is designed to be completed in order. In this badge, you explore the value and return on investment Data Cloud can provide your business. The goal is to bridge the gap between Data Cloud's capabilities and the tangible business value it delivers.

Transform Your Business with Data Cloud

Better data leads to better outcomes–whether you’re a small nonprofit that needs to identify new donors or a large company that needs to communicate a product recall. If you rely on old, disparate data to accomplish these tasks, you’re at a disadvantage.

Data Cloud helps businesses turn raw business data into actionable intelligence. Whether you want to use that intelligence in sales, service, marketing, or through AI-driven automation, Data Cloud helps you achieve your business goals.

Think about your own organization. Maybe you’ve heard your colleagues say something like the following.

“I’m giving a presentation to my boss about how we’re increasing revenue and productivity, but I only have access to my team’s data.”
“Our sales team is always running into outdated data, and it’s slowing them down.”
“I didn’t know my upsell opportunity was having support issues.”
“Manual work is slowing us down.”

If these sound familiar, Data Cloud can help.

Explore Data Cloud Functionality

Let’s check out some Data Cloud features and how they can help you achieve your desired business outcomes.

Capability and Description	Goal	What’s in It for Me (WIFM)?	Possible Metrics
Data Streams A mechanism to connect data sources with Data Cloud.	Connect any data (structured or unstructured) into Data Cloud quickly and automatically.	Access up-to-date information about your customers and business. Make decisions and act on data from any source regardless of where it’s stored.	Reduce data latency. Improve efficiency. Eliminate manual data entry. Reduce friction between crossfunctional teams with improved access to data.
Identity Resolution Rulesets that match and reconcile data into comprehensive views, called unified profiles.	Create unified profiles to have a single comprehensive profile based on disparate data.	View a 360-view of all the information you need about your customers and accounts. Understand your customers better.	Improve customer engagement. Improve targeted lead campaigns. Increase sales. Improve personalization.
Data Governance A framework of groupings, features, policies, tags, and classifications assigned to data.	Secure and manage data access.	Control over who has access to your data.	Improve operational efficiency. Improve trust. Improves data governance.
Real-Time Activation Set up triggered events and notifications based on real-time data signals.	React to real-time data.	Respond to business-critical events quickly. Know your customers’ activities in real time.	Improve sales. Follow-up more quickly. Improve average contract value (ACV) and conversion.
Segmentation A tool to filter and create audience segments for sales, service, and marketing campaigns.	Create smarter and more accurate audiences for your campaigns.	Build better and more impactful campaigns. Less work for you to build manual segments. Scale email campaigns and loyalty programs to larger and new audiences.	Increase marketing lead revenue. Improve return on advertising spend. Improve contract value per lead. Improve email open rates. Reduce customer comms. Increase engagement.
Zero Copy Capabilities Connectors and integrations that allow you to connect data sources to Data Cloud without physical movement or duplication.	Use existing investments in data warehouses and data lakes.	No need to convince teams to move to different systems. Shorter implementation times.	Reduce costs. Accelerate time to value. Enhance security.
Search Index and Chunking In Data Cloud, create searchable vector embeddings from your unstructured and structured data.	Improve search functionality and agent responses based on grounded unified data.	Feel more confident about the accuracy of answers and agentic action. Reduce manual work.	Improve efficiency. Improve resolution rates. Reduce customer service hours.

Identify Objectives and Requirements

Now that you have a better idea of how Data Cloud can help you achieve your business goals, it’s time to define your goals, business requirements, and reasons for adopting Data Cloud.

Start by getting your team together and answering some key questions.

What's our business vision and strategy?
What are the business problems we’re looking to solve?
What’s the priority of this business problem? Is it a pain point or a blocker?
How do we currently measure success?
What are some of our business requirements?
Any data residency or compliance concerns?

Maybe you want to increase the number of marketing campaigns your team delivers, while managing a restricted headcount budget. Or you have a support team that wants to reduce the number of tier one tickets by using AI, but you aren’t sure where to start. Or maybe your team has a business requirement that all data has to be HIPAA compliant.

Your company might have multiple problems to solve, and that’s OK—write them down.

Need a place to record your plans? Download this implementation planning worksheet.

Craft a Use Case

After you’ve identified your goals and requirements, it’s time to narrow down a use case. The key to tracking ROI and seeing value is by starting small and selecting an actionable use case that can show value quickly. After you’ve had success, your pathway to larger use cases becomes easier.

Here are some questions to think about as you select your first use case:

What are the outcomes we’d like to achieve?
What does success look like in the short- ‌and long-term?
Who benefits from this use case in my company? A specific role? Multiple teams?
What’s the business scenario for this use case?
What’s the data-driven activity or action that needs to be performed?
What data is needed for your use case? Is it easily accessible?
What’s the ideal time frame for this use case to be completed?
Who needs to be involved to make the implementation successful?

What’s Next

In the next unit, you learn more about consumption costs and identifying the value of implementing Data Cloud by defining specific KPIs.

Time Estimate

Topics

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