Converge
Whenever you use email or look at a website, it’s data infrastructure that makes it possible. Those point-to-point basics have been in place for years....
<b>Converge
Bring it all together with data infrastructure
<b>Presented by Slalom, Salesforce, Tableau, and Snowflake.
Welcome to Converge.
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
Clifford Stoll, Astronomer
<b>Overview: Infrastructure, the great enabler
Why a smart investment in data is essential to the success of any future-facing organization.
What is data infrastructure?
Whenever you use email or look at a website, it’s data infrastructure that makes it possible. Those point-to-point basics have been in place for years. The internet itself is data infrastructure. What's relatively new—and a lot more complex—is the increased variety, volume, and sources of data, and the increasingly powerful ways to mine, visualize, and gain insights from it.
Data is not an end in itself
The point is to convert it into intelligence, act on that intelligence, and drive better outcomes. For most organizations, that capability is a work in progress, if not an outright mess.
The cost of poor infrastructure
When people in your organization have to scrounge for the information they need—toggling between email attachments, spreadsheets, and other disconnected islands of information—that's rickety infrastructure at work. If they can't easily access insights—whether they're trying to win the next big deal, servicing an irate customer, or gathering social media metrics for a campaign—that's also an infrastructure problem. Sure, your system might sort of work, at least for now. But without an investment in the emerging systems that are powering the successes of your competitors, you will be left behind.
Good infrastructure, the basis of success
The Romans didn't invent roads. They didn't invent aqueducts. But they invested in these things on an unprecedented scale. Roads straight as an arrow connected their territories, facilitating the flow of people, ideas, and commerce. Clean water flowed to cities and farms. Infrastructure made the Roman Empire possible.
The good news
Unlike massive Roman building projects, powerful infrastructure is a lot more scalable—and accessible. New tools have lowered the bar to entry, even as their ability to harness the power of data has grown exponentially. We believe that the convergence of Tableau, Snowflake, and Salesforce provides the best, most robust and flexible infrastructure solutions for creating a data pipeline, providing value-added insights, and engaging and delighting your customer. Snowflake's cloud-based data architecture fuels insights via embedded Tableau dashboards, and in turn provides a more intelligent experience within Salesforce CRM.
Learn more from Slalom experts by starting here:
Salesforce, Snowflake, and aqueducts
Then dig into these industry specific insights:
Healthcare
Retail
Financial services
Nonprofit
Media & entertainment
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<b>The combined power of Salesforce, Tableau, and Snowflake
<b>Salesforce, Snowflake, and aqueducts
Data can transform your entire business. But how? Let's dig into some specifics.
Salesforce, Snowflake, and aqueducts
By Dave Dixon, Slalom Director of Salesforce Analytics
Are you failing to leverage the very data that can ensure your survival in today’s rapidly changing retail landscape? Even an incremental investment in data infrastructure has the potential to transform your business.
Astute observers of the CRM and analytics space probably noticed Salesforce’s recent interest and investment in Snowflake. Investment both in terms of capital—$250 million to date, and in Salesforce’s focus on integrating the Snowflake Data Cloud more tightly with Tableau CRM and Tableau. These efforts continue a trend of large resource commitments in the data and analytics space by Salesforce that has been going on for the last several years. In addition to the funding of Snowflake, Salesforce purchased Tableau for over $15 billion in 2019 and paid a reported $800 million for the marketing analytics firm Datorama in 2018. That same year, Salesforce paid $6.5 billion for integration powerhouse Mulesoft. But why the huge investment in data and analytics, and why Snowflake in particular? Interestingly, I think Ancient Rome provides a useful analog for what Salesforce is trying to achieve.
Most people recognize the enormous impact the Roman empire has had on western civilization. The impact of the Roman legacy is evident today in countless ways in the areas of philosophy, law, politics, and art. What may be less recognized, however, is the importance of Roman advances in infrastructure that allowed the city state to grow to a thriving empire during a period of immense competition and adversity. Roman advances in road building allowed Rome to create a network to greatly expedite commerce and connect its growing empire. These roads provided important conduits for goods and troops, but also for the exchange of information and ideas. The invention of the aqueduct provided the fresh water required for the city of Rome’s massive growth. The benefits of improved roads and aqueducts is that they enabled a much more efficient means of transporting critical resources such as water, food, and people. These Roman architectural and infrastructure advancements were not a by-product of Roman success, but a key to it.
Fast forward 2,000 years and we see similar imperatives in the data, analytics, and CRM systems space. Just as advanced and well thought out infrastructure was critical for Rome’s growth and survival, having an advanced and well-planned data infrastructure is critical to modern businesses ability to survive and thrive. Instead of food, water and people, the critical resource being transported is information. Salesforce understands this, and that is why they are investing so heavily in the data and analytics space, and specifically in Snowflake. Snowflakes’ unique features such as the Data Cloud make it a great complement to existing Salesforce and Tableau capabilities and a natural choice for those wanting to accelerate their CRM and analytics projects. A few examples of how Snowflake can help enhance your Salesforce and Tableau capabilities include:
Snowflake Data Marketplace
Snowflake’s data marketplace makes it easy to subscribe and access hundreds of different data sets from third party providers. This data can be combined with your existing company data to provide a deeper view of customers and the business landscape. Given Tableau CRMs and Tableau’s native data connectors and direct query access to Snowflake, it becomes nearly frictionless to create a more wholistic view than internal data alone could provide. This feature can be extremely useful for both traditional and predictive analytic use cases and can significantly upscale Customer 360 programs.
Snowflake Data
Exchange
Snowflake’s data exchange makes it easier for firms to share information with one another. For instance, distributers can publish sales data, and suppliers can share data with manufacturers. Having a "common" platform that allows for the easy grooming, publishing, and sharing of data sets has numerous potential benefits for CRM and analytics focused scenarios, including driving a better understanding of customer activity, forecasts, and channel sales.
Cloud Scale/Cloud management
Snowflake’s high-performance query and data engine can run on AWS, Azure, or GCP and provides many of the same benefits users have come to expect from cloud-based architecture. Snowflake was the first cloud data warehouse to be built from the ground up for the cloud, and ingeniously designed to separate compute from storage. With the ability to scale elastically and no need to tune, configure or patch hardware, Snowflake allows users to focus on higher value activities and spend less time on server and hardware administration functions.
Superior connectivity options
Snowflake makes it easy to consolidate data from many different sources with its wide variety of connectivity options. Salesforce has extended these functions even further in their Tableau CRM product by creating multiple bidirectional connectivity options. This makes it possible to write CRM data into Snowflake, and query data out, accelerating enterprise data warehousing and analytics efforts. Furthermore, Snowflake’s decision to leverage industry standard SQL enables users and administrators to quickly leverage and use the platform. The seamless integration of Salesforce, Tableau and Snowflake allow data driven insights, including predictions and traditional analytics to be surfaced within CRM workflows in Salesforce, regardless of the data’s original source.
Ultimately, Salesforce is investing in and partnering with Snowflake because they understand the importance of a modern data infrastructure and they recognize data is the fuel for ML/AI, analytics, and a more intelligent CRM user experience. Just as aqueducts and roads provided the necessary infrastructure for moving vital resources to fuel the growth of ancient Rome, Snowflake can provide the infrastructure needed to serve up data driven insights vital to decision making, fueling company growth. Coupled with Salesforce’s best-in-class sales and service platform, and Tableau’s superior analytics and predictive capabilities, there are clear synergies of making Snowflake an integral part of your analytics and CRM systems infrastructure.
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<b>Dive into your industry
Click the contents tab in the top left corner to find your industry focus.
<b>Retail
Here’s why it’s essential for retailers to optimize the data they already have.
Retailers, here’s why it’s essential to optimize the data you already have
By Jess Minton, Slalom Principal
Are you failing to leverage the very data that can ensure your survival in today’s rapidly changing retail landscape? Even an incremental investment in data infrastructure has the potential to transform a retail business.
In 59 BC the Romans published the Acta Diurna, or “Daily Public Record,” AKA the first newspaper. It shared news of military victories, public gatherings, and other events. The Romans knew the power of information and getting it into the right hands.
Two millennia later, getting the right information into the right hands at the right time is still an issue. Not because we lack information—we have more pure data than our ancient forebears could have imagined. But given the speed of modern business, the window to take advantage of it is smaller than ever. Untimely information is like getting your copy of today’s Acta Diurna next week.
This challenge is keenly felt in retail, which experienced sustained and direct harm in 2020. Brick and mortar stores shut down as customers flocked to the internet in greater numbers than ever. Some retailers saw entire sectors evaporate. But others grew. Outdoor gear and fitness retailers like REI, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Peloton reported surging sales. And some retailers were able to deftly pivot to online. Abercrombie & Fitch reported a 43% increase in sales, with almost half of all their sales made online. Others were not, many of them suffering from a lack of visibility into their supply chain, reducing their ability to process online sales.
Supply chain management requires synthesizing data feeds from multiple sources—vendors, manufacturers, distributors, and internal product teams. But your speed to market is determined not only by access to that data, but also by your ability to synthesize and get insights from it. And your ability to confidently make predictions based on it. How can you not only react to what’s already happened, but also be proactive and anticipate what’s about to happen? To do all that and more, you need a better handle on your data.
Retailers often use data from Salesforce, visualized in Tableau, as a first stop for supply chain data insight. While integrating data into Salesforce is easier than ever, it does still require effort and process updates. And shifting from reactionary data analytics to more automated predictive insights (think Machine Learning) usually requires data that doesn’t properly reside in Salesforce. Bringing in data sets in addition to your core operational data—especially when you leverage a flexible platform like Snowflake—gives you the full context of all your business operations, and a more holistic view than you can get from data sets isolated for individual analysis.
Supply chain management requires synthesizing data feeds from multiple sources—vendors, manufacturers, distributors, and internal product teams
Slalom Consultant
This integration has become far less daunting than it used to be. Adding data to a Snowflake environment is simple, even if the data isn’t formatted for Salesforce. And since this platform is built for querying big data, the large volumes of data necessary to answer your most complex questions aren’t a bottleneck.
An REI general manager recently told the Washington Post that demand for equipment that can be used outside and close to home was “off the charts” in January 2021, citing specifically a sixfold increase in fire pit sales. What if sales weren’t actually “off the charts”?
Imagine that these charts updated frequently with data from Snowflake that encompassed supply chain data, data from Salesforce, along with sales and market data. Imagine a flexible, efficient, and intuitive interface that lets your business continuously absorb insights from data, and that you can easily pinpoint what sectors are growing in real time.
You don’t need to imagine. With the right combination of predictive analytics and supply chain information, there’s no reason to be caught in “off the charts” territory anymore. You can avail yourself of insights to drive supply chain decisions and meet future demand. You can move directly from insights to engagement and sales activation, leveraging the data in Salesforce with Campaigns and Social Studio. You can save precious resources—from marketing dollars to analysts’ time—while bringing top-selling products to market quickly.
This might sound like additional technology spend, one that comes with risk to a traditional retail brand with an established way of doing business. But it’s actually an opportunity to optimize the tech investments you’ve already made. Stepping up to a more comprehensive analytics strategy lets you to go further with less, and to differentiate yourself from your competition. Incremental improvements to your technology, rather than a total overhaul, can yield a return that’s far beyond incremental. And since retailers are focused on efficiencies (also known as “saving money”), the most strategic brands will invest a little more to enhance their decision-making and responsiveness to trends. These brands will be first to market, the least surprised by changing circumstances, and the most differentiated from their competitors.
Whether it’s this season’s virtual runway collection, a new way to sell and deliver products, retaining your top talent, or introducing new tech platforms, the ability to optimize existing resources isn’t just a best practice, it’s a means of survival. The retail landscape in the last year has changed, probably forever. Take the time to reflect on your readiness for this new normal. You don’t want to be one of the brands that leave up to 73% of data unanalyzed and as useless as an unread copy of Acta Diurna.
If you’re ready for a conversation about your future—and the strategic tools our team can bring to help you transform your operations and get you back to thriving and growing—let’s talk.
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<b>Healthcare
The volume of data in the healthcare industry is extraordinary. So is the value it can unlock for both providers and patients.
Better healthcare requires better data infrastructure
By Laurie Rugemer, Slalom Data Scientist
Roads, aqueducts, bridges, and walls—the Roman Empire built serious infrastructure. And infrastructure in turn built the Roman Empire, enabling the free flow of commerce, ideas, and information.
As my colleague Dave Dixon, pointed out in the previous article in this flipbook, Salesforce data infrastructure basically performs the same function now.
To extend my colleague’s analogy, just as Roman aqueducts, sewage systems, and public baths increased hygiene and disease prevention in ancient times, data is powering better outcomes in healthcare today. But while healthcare is incredibly rich in data, it’s also in urgent need of straight, paved roads to clear out the clutter for both patients and caregivers.
Electronic health records, medical insurance claims, genetic sequencing, remote patient monitoring, and patient engagement platforms—data inputs in healthcare are endless. And the data is only getting bigger. Researchers at Seagate forecast that healthcare will see a 36% annualized growth rate in data captured by 2025, more than any other industry.
The right data to the right people
The ecosystem of people who need access to data is also daunting, including not just primary care providers, but care managers, clinicians, hospital systems, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical companies. And they can all benefit from a holistic view of data for individuals and populations at large.
The issue isn’t the data itself; it’s getting it to the right people in the right way. We need a better way to orchestrate data in a way that drives insights, improves patient outcomes, facilitates medical decision-making, and cuts inefficiencies.
Salesforce has strengthened its investment in this space by acquiring data visualization leader Tableau and investing in the Snowflake Data Cloud. These three now work together to provide organizations with a sane and sturdy infrastructure that powers the secure sharing of data and analysis within and between organizations. Data infrastructure is one of those things that might not sound exciting, but the potential impact on people’s lives is tremendous.
Supercharging patient care
Imagine a care manager in charge of creating a patient’s individualized care plan. With the right infrastructure in place, she can open the patient’s record in the Salesforce Health Cloud platform and see everything she needs, including their medical history, doctor notes, and prescriptions. She sees an embedded Tableau dashboard with both Salesforce data and externally sourced data housed in Snowflake. Electronic health record (EHR) data, wearable device data, patient preferences and engagement data, analytics of care plans for patients with similar histories, and diagnoses based on large-scale third-party data—all of this is presented cleanly and clearly, without the need to wade through thickets of irrelevant screens or manually switch between data sources. Tedium and clutter are removed, and time—always a precious commodity in healthcare—can be focused on the needs of the patient.
Note that the combination of patient data and large-scale third-party data is crucial. The goal is not to look at what happens on average for people’s health, but to combine individual patient data with data from comparable populations. The ideal state is the ability to relate clinical data (e.g., study results) with individual health data (e.g., individual patient traits and history).
To be clear, this won’t remove all uncertainty, or diminish the need for professional judgment on the part of our hypothetical care manager making use of all these tools. But it will give her access to vital information at the touch of a button so she can do what she does best and not waste time tracking information she needs from countless disparate sources.
Bringing it all together—securely
Let’s take a closer look at the need to combine data from multiple sources in a coherent, consumable way. We’ve found Snowflake is the key here. Snowflake provides a place to centralize healthcare data into a single entity that can be shared both internally and externally, with built-in security and governance that supports HIPAA, SOC1 and 2 Type II, PCI DSS and FedRAMP. Access to live datasets can be granted to the right people in a secure way, and analytics can be built to bring many sources into a unified view of healthcare data, for either an individual patient or a specific population.
Another key: Salesforce Health Cloud. In the pharmaceutical industry, companies using Salesforce Health Cloud for clinical trial management and patient support can combine various forms of patient and trial data. This results in insights on how to run smoother trials and identifies potential roadblocks, such as low patient enrollment. Medical device companies using Health Cloud to manage provider relationships and standardize sales processes can surface data from Snowflake on device effectiveness for patients and combine it with sales trends.
The promise of infrastructure
When we think of the power of Salesforce, Snowflake, and Tableau together as a way to build data infrastructure and deliver outcome-based analytics that drive action, there’s nearly limitless potential for improving the lives and outcomes of healthcare for providers, patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
Like the Romans laying a foundation for improved public health through their sweeping infrastructure projects, Salesforce, combined with the power of Snowflake and Tableau, is doing the same.
Credit someone here…
They’re paving straight, clear roads for data to come together with Snowflake, and lighting the way with Tableau-powered insights. The result, for those who get on board with the need to invest in data infrastructure, is better, faster decision-making, and better care for patients. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but digital infrastructure scales a lot more quickly.
We would love to learn about your unique organizational challenges.
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<b>Financial services
To keep up with the competition—and customer expectations—financial institutions need a robust data pipeline.
Modern Banking: Making a straight line from insights to action
By Dave Dixon, Slalom Director of Salesforce Analytics
During the early Roman Empire, temples were sometimes used to safely store assets and exchange currencies from other regions. Argentarii, money managers who belonged to guilds, provided currency exchange services, received deposits, made loans, and even facilitated an early form of checking.
Everything since then has changed except the basics: Today’s wealth managers and personal financial advisors are still concerned with finding and retaining customers, as well as protecting and growing assets. However, the competitive landscape for banking has intensified over the last few millennia, particularly in recent years.
To keep up, bankers need better insights into clients, markets, and competitors, and that requires a more robust data pipeline. Tools are also needed to help analyze, visualize and make sense of the information the data pipeline provides. Although, insights alone aren’t enough. Wealth managers need a way to proactively act on insights and engage clients and prospects. The combined power of Snowflake, Tableau, and Salesforce provides a complete solution to address these common challenges.
As I discussed earlier in this flipbook, Snowflake’s unique Data Cloud capabilities include features that are synergistic with Salesforce and Tableau CRM (TCRM), making it a natural choice for anyone who wants to accelerate their CRM and analytics projects. Specifically, Snowflake Data Marketplace and Snowflake Data Exchange allow users a clear path to external and partner data, including financial markets and other subject areas. Tableau CRM’s native connections to Snowflake accelerate data delivery, analysis, and predictive model creation. These predictive insights can be essential to wealth advisors seeking to better understand and serve their clients and prospects. TCRM’s native integration into Salesforce allows users to move frictionlessly from insight to action without ever leaving the Salesforce UI.
Some specific wealth management use cases that a Snowflake/Tableau/Salesforce solution can accelerate include:
Lead scoring and prioritization
Wealth managers can become overwhelmed by the number of leads they have to work, but this process can be greatly improved by scoring and ranking available leads. Using Tableau CRM’s predictive modeling, leads can be scored and ranked, allowing advisors to focus on the leads most likely to close, or that have the highest impact. The predictive capability of the models can be enhanced by adding data from sources outside of Salesforce, including Snowflake data warehouses and the Snowflake data market place. These scored leads can be prioritized and worked directly in Salesforce by adding the clients to marketing campaigns, engaging via email and meetings, and creating opportunities for related products and services.
Opportunities for existing clients
Financial advisors often offer a wide range of services to their clients. Customers that use more services tend to be more profitable, and less likely to leave. One way to proactively increase “share of wallet” (i.e., how much a customer spends with you) is to surface insights that signal an opportunity for additional services. For instance, if a client has a large increase in deposits to their checking account, they might be a good candidate for additional trust services, or an expansion of their investment portfolio. By leveraging Snowflake as a data mart or enterprise data warehouse, it becomes easier to surface and act on these insights in Salesforce via embedded Tableau CRM dashboards and visualizations.
Customer attrition
Another area where Tableau CRM’s predictive models can be useful is proactively identifying those customers in danger of leaving. By creating a model in Tableau CRM to score a customer’s likeliness to leave, you can identify the customers at greatest risk of churn. Again, data stored in Snowflake as part of an EDW (enterprise data warehouse) or Data Mart that includes deposit and/or transaction information can provide a useful signal to TCRM models used to predict attrition. Once identified, customers that are an attrition risk can be given the white glove treatment, customer service specialist teams can be engaged, and special offers can be created to help reduce the risk of churn, all directly in Salesforce. The path from insight to action is straight, clear, and well-lit.
While banking and investment management has become more complex and has evolved greatly from its humble origins in temples of the ancient world, at its core the business of banking remains unchanged. Wealth managers still need to find customers, take care of them by providing a positive experience, and productively manage their assets. The convergence of Salesforce, Snowflake and Tableau makes that journey a lot easier.
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<b>Nonprofit
How to build better campaigns and better connections with your donors.
Power your nonprofit's higher purpose with data
Written by Charmaine Burtak, Slalom Principal
As a consultant, I’ve always been drawn toward a bigger purpose, and am excited when a client is a nonprofit organization (NPO). Nonprofits lead the way towards the things we care about the most deeply. Whether you want to find a cure to an illness, improve the lives of children, fight hunger, make the planet healthier, or save animals, there’s an NPO already leading the way.
Just like private businesses, NPOs need money to do their work. Unlike private businesses, most of their income goes towards helping others. Every NPO has to answer two questions: “How can we best raise money?” and “Where should we allocate it?”
The combined power of Tableau CRM, Salesforce NPSP, Einstein, and Snowflake can answer these questions. This solution can give an NPO the power to leverage data and insights to inform strategy and decision making.
Using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), an NPO can start streamlining its data and processes. NPSP can help with the management of constituents, fundraising, marketing, campaigns, communication, and program management. NPSP provides a way for an NPO to structure and organize their data around constituent activities and fundraising activities.
Add Salesforce’s Tableau CRM to the mix and NPOs gain the ability visualize key performance indicators such as donor retention, attrition, and gains or losses in fundraising income. In addition, Tableau CRM provides the ability to embed Salesforce Actions within the dashboards. This can help streamline relationship and program management.
With Salesforce’s Einstein Discovery, an NPO can create predictive models using Salesforce Data combined with third party data. These predictions can then be ingested by Einstein’s Next Best Action to help employees determine their next steps.
When the Snowflake Data Cloud is added to the mix, NPO data becomes supercharged with access to a data marketplace. This gives an NPO access to third-party data in seconds, without costly ETL (extract, transform, load) tools and complex integration projects. This data is continuously kept updated. The NPO doesn’t have to do a thing.
Some use cases that can benefit from this combined solution include:
1. Successful campaign planning
Covid-19 made the already challenging task of fundraising even more challenging. Snowflake Data Marketplace has live Covid-19 vaccination data on vaccination rates in different geographical areas. An area with a higher vaccination rate can signal a greater likelihood of recovery from Covid-19 impacts. This data can be combined with historical campaign information residing in the NPSP that contains solid success and failure metrics. When fed into Einstein Discovery, this data can provide predictions on what types of campaigns in what locations are most likely to be successful. When a campaign manager creates a campaign, Einstein’s Next Best Action can use outputs from Einstein Discovery to recommend how a campaign should be configured.
2. Increase constituents with likelihood to donate
Salesforce NPSP contains current donor demographic data which can be considered success metrics for the NPO. Snowflake Marketplace has various data sets that contain demographic, wealth, and consumer behavior data. This data can be merged and processed in Einstein Discovery to predict possible new donors who match demographic profiles with current donors and who have consumer behavior that is aligned with the NPO’s cause. Knowing the profiles of these possible constituents, the NPO can take advantage of Tableau CRM’s new Bulk Action functionality to connect with them.
3. Support the right programs
NPSPs Program Management enables NPOs to track various metrics regarding programs they support. Say an NPO has the objective of improving students’ reading levels. Metrics such as the number of students that attended per session, or the number of volunteer tutor hours are helpful in quantifying success. However, the true measure of success sometimes cannot be obtained through simple metrics. Our hypothetical NPO can match their service areas with demographic consumer and zip code data from Snowflake’s Data Cloud to analyze historical trends in literacy rates and consumer behavior to further measure the impact of their programs. When NPOS can share the quantity and quality of their impact, the result is increased donor trust and donations.
4. Provide intelligent engagement plans
Relationship managers can log in to Salesforce and see a Tableau CRM dashboard that provides an overview of the quality of the relationships they manage. NPSP’s Engagement Plan can track all activities related to a constituent. Using a stable set of success parameters, Einstein Discovery can analyze historical activities—coupled with donor demographics — to predict which specific activities should be assigned to individual constituents in order to increase donations. Einstein Next Best Action can take these recommendations and directly assign them to specific constituent records.
With the right tools, data can give nonprofits the boost they need to fulfill their purpose. Data can help provide a louder voice to those that need to be heard and be helped. For those of us that are fortunate enough to help, data lets us hear.
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<b>Media & entertainment
Social media and the the shift to streaming mean more customer data than ever—and a smaller-than-ever window to react to it.
Why the ability to react to data quickly is everything
By Jessica Minton, Slalom Solution Principal
Media and entertainment has become a leader in data insights and data generation due to the tectonic shift to streaming of both music and video. As the industry continues to produce more data, the ability to manage and harness its value is more critical than ever.
All roads lead to Rome. The phrase refers to the road infrastructure consisting of 29 major roads that connected all the empire’s 113 provinces. That’s a lot of provinces!
Today, those roads are data, and Media and Entertainment (M&E) is the new Rome. Not only do all roads lead to data, the product itself is data, as is the customer’s interaction with the product. The rise of streaming content, combined with the explosion of social data, has generated a greater volume and variety of M&E data than in any other industry. Everything from liked photos to watched episodes contributes both to this volume, and has an inherently high value. But what exactly makes it valuable?
Roman roads were so valuable in part because they were conduits of news. All those roads that lead to Rome carried information from every corner of the empire.
Timeliness is everything
Data quality is usually assessed by things like accuracy, relevance, completeness, and timeliness. In today’s world of rapidly changing content trends (who could be bothered with Making a Murder after Tiger King?), timeliness is king. The window of opportunity is small for marketers and production teams to react to the of-the-moment emotions of their viewers. Retention of a customer could mean displaying the correct offer in front of them after they’ve just finished watching a dramatic series, are caught up in the moment, and want more. Even a day later, that emotion might be gone, taking the desire to sign up for another 30 days of service along with it.
When data quality attributes align, data is at its most valuable. However, preserving that value relies completely on maintaining a stable and flexible technology network, all while M&E data constantly evolves, accruing data by the second. With the right platforms in place, data can produce insights almost as quickly.
High-speed rail: The value of Snowflake
The power to take capitalize on the moment lies in the ability to seamlessly consume, analyze, derive insight, and take action. Where the Salesforce platform lets us easily maintain accurate data and use it to market to end consumers, the ability to build complete data—and bring it together rapidly—is where Snowflake really shines. It’s a massive advancement in maintaining data timeliness. If traditional data platforms are the solid stone roads of the Roman empire, Snowflake is a high-speed rail system. That’s why it’s so exciting that it’s become easier than ever to move data from Salesforce to Snowflake, and into Tableau (and Tableau CRM for analytic power).
The best data proves its value when visual insights drive action. In M&E, that can take the form of recognizing which taste makers are driving impressions for video content, and asking them to collaborate on a campaign. Or seeing on a dashboard that a new show is gaining a cult following, and getting the green light for season two.
Why the Tableau dashboard is a game changer
Tableau became a giant in this space with its peerless ability to deliver massive volumes of data, updated and analyzed, in an intuitive, visual format. With its ability to quickly aggregate data and provide interactivity, Tableau dashboards let anyone ask questions about the data and get answers almost instantaneously. If a media marketer wonders why a promotion garnered fewer impressions than anticipated, the dashboard might show that it’s not reaching its target audience on two specific social sites. With that insight, the marketer can ramp up media pushes to increase lagging impressions—which is just one of potentially dozens of critical actions that an M&E team might take every day with the clear insights from their dashboards.
From confusing jumble to clear action
When Salesforce, Tableau, and Snowflake are optimized to work together, they turn vast amounts of unwieldy media data from a jumble into a solid, reliable source of information. They make a line as straight as a Roman road from consumer behavior to data-driven decisions.
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