What is Salesforce Genie? The first real-time CRM?

If you’ve been following the Salesforce^® world lately, you’ll have seen one word popping up all the time: “Genie”. Salesforce Genie has been making big waves, and it could be the most important new innovation of recent times. But what is Salesforce Genie? Is this the world’s first real-time CRM – and what can it do for your business? 

In this article, I’ll answer all those questions and more. 

A revolutionary new data platform

First of all, let’s review what Salesforce themselves have said. Genie was announced at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, which took place in September 2022 in San Francisco. Salesforce called it “a hyperscale real-time data platform that powers the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform”.

They added: “With Genie, every company can turn data into customer magic, delivering seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real time.”

Ok, but what does that mean? What’s so genius about Genie is that it allows you to collect and harness data from different systems, in real time. It does this using a wide range of connectors that bring in data from Salesforce apps, mobile and web, legacy systems (via MuleSoft) and more. This real-time data is then used to create a single, comprehensive customer profile — a “customer graph” — which can be used across the entire Customer 360 platform. That includes Sales Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and others.

All of this means that your employees and partners can gain a real-time view of the customer and their needs and act with greater responsiveness and accuracy than ever before. Let’s look at how. 

Giving sales reps a fuller picture of the customer 

Let’s imagine a business-to-business (B2B) sales representative is conducting a sales call with a prospective customer. With the power of the Salesforce Genie platform and Sales Cloud, the rep can easily and immediately see up-to-date details of not only any previous conversations with their organization, but also all kinds of interactions with the brand. So, if they’ve just watched a demo video or downloaded a .PDF content asset, the rep will know — and the nature of the prospect’s engagement, and the areas they’ve shown interest in, can inform their conversation during the call. 

With Sales Cloud Genie, the rep can also get details of any social media interactions with the brand that the prospect has made (e.g., questions they’ve asked about a product or service). Using an integrated LinkedIn component, the rep can even see details on the prospect’s job role and their organization, preparing them to ask the right questions about how they can help the prospect, and provide the right answers when prompted. 

More targeted customer experience in eCommerce

Salesforce Genie combines with Commerce Cloud to allow organizations to personalize commerce experiences in even more targeted, relevant ways. Using Commerce Cloud Genie, real-time shopping data is made immediately available, including up-to-the-minute purchase history, abandoned shopping carts and other interactions with your eCommerce website or mobile app. You can also receive AI-powered recommended “next best actions”, provided by Salesforce Einstein.

There’s more. Because Commerce Cloud Genie enables real-time alerts, businesses are also equipped to help customers if their payment cards are lost or stolen. For instance, if they lose their credit card, and someone tries to make a purchase five minutes later, that purchase can be blocked immediately, because the merchant has already been notified that the card should not be accepted. 

Personalizing your marketing in real time

Marketers can now bring a new kind of real-time personalization to their efforts. Adding the power of Genie to Marketing Cloud means you can deliver tailored and targeted messages to customers in every channel — adapted according to their very latest engagement with your brand. For instance, a customer browsing your website sees a personalized offer that instantly adapts after they interact with an element of a marketing email, e.g, they show interest in a particular product. They are provided with a far more relevant path to purchase, and as a result they’re much more likely to buy. 

As well as offering new real-time capabilities to personalize and automate advertising,Marketing Cloud Genie also enables marketers to enrich customer profiles much more responsively. With the new addition of real-time CRM data, audience segmentation can be swifter — up to 30x faster, according to Salesforce — and more accurate. All of this helps you to ensure the right people are seeing the right messages at the right times. 

Enabling connected, up-to-date service

The combination of Genie and Service Cloud allows organizations to keep service teams better connected and informed than ever before, from call-center agents to field service reps and external parties such as partners. By providing them with real-time alerts and status/issue information, everyone involved can be kept in the loop, knowing everything they need to know and when they need to act. 

With the power of Service Cloud Genie expediting service cases and providing a fuller picture of the customer and their issue, cases can be resolved more smoothly and quickly, boosting customer satisfaction. It helps you to avoid losing customers to frustration from explaining their issue repeatedly to multiple people, or waiting too long for a resolution.

What is Salesforce Genie going to do for your organization?

Now we’ve explored some of the valuable new capabilities that Genie presents, it’s time to ask — what is Salesforce Genie going to help you achieve? 
If you’re still a little overcome by the wealth of possibilities Genie offers, or you just need some assistance bringing them into reality, we want to help. VRP Consulting is an award-winning, global, full-service Salesforce Partner, experienced in all the clouds we’ve covered here and more. We can help you unify your data, employees and operations and improve sales, commerce, marketing, service and more. Let’s discuss what we can do for you.

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About the Author

Mitesh Mistry

Chief Technology Office (Asia Pacific), VRP Consulting

Mitesh is CTO of VRP Consulting in Asia Pacific. He is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) and Technical Delivery Manager, specializing in cloud computing, business intelligence and solution architecture.