Have you been paying attention to the release notes? Did you find the “Customer 360 Guides”? This exciting feature triggered my attention!
Customer 360 Guides provide a toolkit to accelerate Salesforce improvements; from customer stories, playbooks, industry specific blueprints, architecture references, solutions kits, and more!
Source: Navigate Your Journey To Customer 360 Success
What’s Included in Customer 360 Guides?
Each Customer 360 Guide is a collection of assets that help you create a connected customer experience by integrating Salesforce products.
There are various guides available, each slightly different, but they include some standard assets:
- Trailblazer Stories: How other customers are approaching the subject at hand.
- Thought Leadership: Tips, trends, and insights.
- Change Management: Best practices to help you implement process changes.
- Industry Blueprint: Key product and industry-specific outline.
- Architecture Diagrams: High-level visual representations of solution/concept.
- Business Scenarios: Common scenarios with related technology and processes.
- Solution Kits: Implementation guides for common scenarios.
- MuleSoft Accelerators: Prebuilt integration solutions (see here)
That all sounds great, but what do some of these assets look like in reality? Let’s take a closer look at Industry Blueprints and Architecture Diagrams.
Industry Blueprint
Blueprints are key to helping you plan where and how to most effectively connect with your customer. Below, you can see an example of an industry specific blueprint for Retail:
The retail blueprint comes complete with seven clear phases of a customer life cycle. It also highlights key areas that should be taken into consideration when designing solutions such as selling channels, inventory management, point of sale, pricing strategies, and promotions.
Architecture Diagrams
Architecture Diagrams help you visualise your system design. For example, the image below on the left shows the separate layers you need to think about. The image on the right then shows how these layers and considerations can be mapped to specific Salesforce Platform Capabilities.
You can then flip and translate it to a systems map diagram:
Using the assets in the Customer 360 Guides we can generate very clear solution designs.
Summary
Unlike physical products, which we can see, smell, and touch, software is in a sense intangible. There is more room for variety and creativity, but it’s harder to imagine what the final outcome will look like. Oftentimes, we only realise what we want and what we don’t want after we see the final product.
Customer 360 Guides can help you plan and visualise the outcome, giving you a head start when creating your solutions. Find out more here.