New feature CDP Direct provides customer insights—without moving any data

Editor’s Note: Tableau CRM is now CRM Analytics.

Collecting data and surfacing insights are essential to meeting customer expectations. The ability to combine data generated by customer interactions helps organizations better anticipate needs and deliver more integrated and personalized experiences. Businesses meet their customer needs every day using Salesforce CDP and Tableau CRM (TCRM). Salesforce CDP creates holistic customer views by pulling data from internal and external databases and building unified customer profiles. From there, Tableau CRM provides actionable insights and AI-driven analytics empowering people to make the best decisions for their customers. 

We’re excited to introduce CDP Direct, a new feature that will make working in Salesforce CDP and TCRM even more seamless. The new TCRM feature allows you to query Salesforce CDP directly without moving any data, then build and embed insights directly into the flow of work. CDP Direct removes the difficult and time-consuming act of moving high volumes of data and brings the power of TCRM directly into Salesforce Customer 360. 

The CDP Direct feature allows you to: 

• Accelerate data prep without a connector.
• Reduce password fatigue with a single sign-on to access Tableau CRM and Salesforce CDP.
• Centralize control as queries run on the logged-in profile and sharing rules are automatically applied.
• Simplify data mapping with reusable CDP object and field labels to build analytical assets.

Getting started with CDP Direct

To access the new feature, organizations need to set up Salesforce CDP and Tableau CRM. Admins can grant access to users who want to view and build insights within the tools. 

Establishing a customer-centric data strategy in Salesforce CDP is the first step in setting the foundation to unlock customer insights throughout Salesforce. Tableau CRM can then build and  deploy insights to empower organizations.

With CDP Direct, you can build rich, interactive, analytical experiences that incorporate insights from Salesforce CDP. Within TCRM’s dashboard designer, you can use three object types to create visualizations:

• Data lake objects provide access to data ingested from various connected data sources. These allow you to build dashboards that profile, analyze, and monitor data coming into Salesforce CDP.
• Data models take data from data streams and map them to a standard or custom Cloud Information Model. They contain data such as product, order, engagement, and user journey that can be used to build actionable dashboards with Customer 360 insights.
• Calculated insights define and calculate multidimensional metrics from your Salesforce CDP. Examples of calculated insights include customer lifetime value, customer spend buckets, channel engagement, and CSAT. Because these are pre-calculated, they are quick to query in dashboards.

Turning customer insights into action

With CDP Direct, you can quickly operationalize Customer 360 data for all Salesforce users and become more customer-centric. The synergy of Tableau CRM and Salesforce CDP benefit everyone in your company. Sales reps know their accounts and prospects better. Service reps equipped with customer order and engagement history resolve customer cases faster. Marketers analyze and understand user engagement across different channels. Use Tableau CRM’s action framework to act on one or more records directly from the dashboard. You can open a Salesforce record or add a list of filtered contacts to a campaign with a single click. 

Ready to learn more?

We hope you are as excited as we are about this new feature! To learn more about CDP Direct, check out all the details in the latest Spring ‘22 Release Notes. Stay on the lookout as help pages will be coming soon.