Explore Use Cases for Zero Copy Data Federation
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify key use cases for data federation.
- Explain steps to set up a zero-copy connector in Data Cloud
Use Cases for Data Federation
Use data federation whenever you need to use external data in Salesforce. Here are some key use cases to help you brainstorm how your organization can use external data.
- Enrich CRM data about customer purchases from Commerce Cloud with transaction data from external systems.
- Enrich unified profiles and create insights in Data Cloud with transaction data stored in Google BigQuery.
- Create effective service agents in Agent Builder that have access to data stored in Snowflake, such as loyalty programs and transactions.
- Run targeted campaigns in Data Cloud based on customer purchasing data stored in Amazon Redshift.
- Use Einstein Studio to create an AI model to predict customer churn, with customer satisfaction data stored in Databricks.
Now look at an Agentforce use case more closely, featuring Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), an outdoor apparel retailing company.
NTO Uses Data Federation with Agentforce
Northern Trail Outfitters has 600M transactions daily across all stores and online sales. This transaction data includes which coupons a customer used. NTO needs a system to help the company use this data, in conjunction with its customer information in Salesforce, to create highly personalized coupons offerings. NTO also wants to use Agentforce to create service agents that can proactively offer these coupons to customers.
To achieve this, NTO creates a data federation connection to access these transactions from its Snowflake instance. Then NTO joins the transaction data with customer information in Data Cloud and creates a calculated insight to understand household-based coupon usage. NTO also creates a prompt template that takes the calculated insight result and generates a personalized coupon.
In Agent Builder, NTO creates a service agent with a custom action that uses the prompt template. Now the agent can offer personalized coupons based on the customer’s history.
Learn more about configuring agents in Agentforce Key Components: Quick Look.
Federate External Data into Data Cloud
To set up a data federation connection and federate external data into Data Cloud, follow these high-level steps. These steps assume you have access to Data Cloud setup.
Step 1: Plan Data Strategy
Define a use case that needs external data. For example, NTO needs transaction data to create personalized coupons and offer them using agents. Identify where that data is, such as Snowflake.
Step 2: Collect Information on External System
Collect information on the external system, such as the database name, connection URL, and credentials. You need this information to create the connector in the next step.
Step 3: Create a Data Federation Connection
In Data Cloud setup, create a connection to the external system. Depending on what the external system allows, choose a query federation or file federation connector.
Step 4: Create a Data Stream Using the Connection
By default, Data Cloud queries, or federates, external data when requested at runtime. This mode is called “live query.” Zero data is persisted.
If you select a query federation connector, you can choose to cache data in Data Cloud. This can lower latency when querying larger datasets, but impacts your costs. If you select a file federation connector, the data is always live-queried by Data Cloud.
Now you can access external data in Data Cloud. Put this data to action in agents, predictive models, segments, and more. Next, learn how to share data from Data Cloud to external systems.