How to Take Salesforce Customer 360 Beyond Just 360 Degrees: Creating the Full Sphere of Information

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In previous roles, I managed a Salesforce instance for a couple small business — simple stuff like managing page layouts, connected apps, workflows, and other simple-to-mildly-complex admin tasks. Now this was about ten years ago, and lots has changed with the platform. While I haven’t functioned in a Salesforce admin role for many years, I’ve followed their tremendous progress — the marketing cloud, mobile app, Lightning, the acquisition of over 60 companies.

So, when I first heard the term Salesforce Customer 360, I thought it was maybe another native app or an evolution of the Service Cloud. Not so. It’s a catch-all. It’s the whole thing. It’s the aggregate of the Salesforce ecosystem, with a focus on putting the customer at the fulcrum of everything they do. Bravo.

Customer 360 Product Marketing Director, Jody Farrar, sums it up pretty nicely in a promo video:

“The best way to answer, ‘What is the Customer 360?’ is just by answering the question, ‘What does Salesforce do?’ The Customer 360 really is the breadth of all of our technology that enables our customers to put their customer at the center of everything they do.”

And who doesn’t want to serve customers better? It’s a noble mission and one that Salesforce is truly rallying around. In fact, at their annual conference Dreamforce, they put significant emphasis on Customer 360 Truth, which offers a single representation of customer data from across orgs, clouds and third-party systems.

They call it the single source of truth for your customers.

The phrase is familiar to us at M-Files; it’s a common mantra around these parts to call the M-Files information management environment a single source of truth. No more messy versioning issues, with eight different iterations of a document strewn in email inboxes and on laptops. No more wondering where a document resides. M-Files is the single source of truth for company information.

Beyond 360 Degrees — The Full Sphere of Company Data & Information

So, while Customer 360 Truth aggregates customer data from disparate sources, what about all that unstructured information that does not fit nicely into a table or database? (For more on structured vs. unstructured information, check out this article What is Structured Data vs. Unstructured Data?)

What about those project plans stored in Larry’s Google Drive as a Word document?

What about the service claim that’s being processed by the engineering team in their preferred line-of-business application?

What about those schematics which outline a small change to the manufacturing process for a specific customer?

What about the information in that PowerPoint presentation Janet used to upsell the client?

The answer: Unless users are feverishly dropping files and documents from other systems of record into the Salesforce environment — “death by a thousand forks” data migration — there’s a gap in visibility and access. It creates problems:

  1. Navigating from one system to another to another takes time and drains productivity
  2. The inability to see all documents and files related to an Opportunity, Contact or Account can lead to a clunky experience if you’re not careful.

There are more, but these two challenges are paramount. As M-Files’ SVP Greg Milliken says in his article on the Salesforce AppExchange Accelerating Digital Transformation with a Hybrid Approach:

“The old days of trying to consolidate everything in one repository seem almost quaint nowadays. Information seems almost everywhere today, in documents, emails, chats, videos, tweets, etc. Increasingly, it’s in the cloud, in business applications and repositories, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, SharePoint Online, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Workday, Zuora, but it’s also still on company servers, in on-premises SharePoint libraries, network file shares, ECM systems, and so on, as well as individual PCs and mobile devices. The cloud, mobile, collaboration, security and automation are all part of the increasingly complex mix.”

M-Files intelligent information management solution allows Salesforce users to manage information “in place” without destabilizing existing systems and processes. From a practical standpoint, users have the full breadth of documents and files related to Salesforce objects, regardless of where they are stored — whether that’s in NetSuite, network drives, file-storage applications, SharePoint (on-premise or online), Google Drive… doesn’t matter. M-Files is a metadata-driven solution that presents information in context with an emphasis on WHAT it is rather than WHERE it is.

It’s apropos then that the M-Files app for Salesforce really expands the mission of Customer 360 to transform Salesforce into a true one-stop-shop for all company information — a true single source of truth. M-Files lends dimension to Customer 360 — creating a full sphere for company information. To our knowledge, no one else can link project or case-related information from another structured system (SAP, Dynamics, NetSuite) to their Salesforce data. This ability to create relationships, not only in repositories, but in other structured data systems is a game-changer for overall company continuity and productivity.

There are solutions like the native Files Connect within Salesforce, but it’s largely unidirectional. If a user changes the file name or moves it to another library, the link often becomes broken. M-Files boasts a fully bidirectional connection between the Salesforce environment users know and love and the vast array of files and documents that live outside of Salesforce. And all of that comes with the full feature set of M-Files — all of the cool, magnificently useful features that contribute to maximum efficiency and productivity. Features like:

  • AI to enhance classification of information by queueing up metadata suggestions
  • Customized, flexible permissions and access control to reduce risk and ensure that only the right people can access certain documents
  • Workflow capabilities to kick off critical business processes — like learning requirements, document approval and signature and more

If you’d like to see a quick 3-minute demo of M-Files for Salesforce in action, check out this recent Demo Jam event hosted by the AppExchange where Greg Milliken demos the solution in a game show style format (which we won… clap, clap):

And with that, we should probably close with a quote that really sums up a mission of ours here at M-Files and one which is material to the concepts in this article — from former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy:

“There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.”

Garrett Hollander

About Garrett Hollander

Garrett serves M-Files as Content Marketing Manager, feeding the information management community with impactful, valuable content, unraveling the challenges and solutions businesses face in managing their ever-growing store of documents, files, data and enterprise information.

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