The biggest challenges of data analysis

Salesforce Vice President Patrick Stokes talks to Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic on Dreamforce 2019 about data strategy, data collection, data silos and data privacy.

The biggest challenges of data analysis
Salesforce Vice President Patrick Stokes talks to Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic on Dreamforce 2019 about data strategy, data collection, data silos and data privacy.

At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic spoke with Patrick Stokes, executive vice president of product management at Salesforce, about data analysis. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Bill Detwiler: As companies collect more and more data about their customers, about their products, and about the processes – but that data is spread over dozens and dozens of applications or repository systems – it can be difficult to come to one version of the truth. That is why I am delighted to be here with Dreamforce and to talk to someone about how Salesforce helps its customers come to one version of the truth.

Let’s talk about Salesforce’s data strategy. Mark has talked a lot about this in connection with Customer 360 and about helping customers to go beyond this term of one version of the truth. Talk about how that relates to how Salesforce thinks about data and strategy.

SEE: 10 things that companies store in their own data centers (TechRepublic download)

Patrick Stokes: There are certainly a number of things happening in the industry with regard to data right now. The first is that consumers really demand more and more connected experiences. When you call a call center, they want the call center agent to know what they have purchased; they don’t want to have to answer a million questions. They want everything connected.

At the same time, people in IT – it has become easier and easier to bring new technologies into your business. Cloud model combined with software as a service model has made it super easy to go outside, wipe your credit card and bring in a new system, but that is creating a new data silo.

Finally, consumers are demanding more and more control over that data, so there is now a huge emphasis for companies to really take control of all that data, bring it together and link it back to their applications. In our opinion, Salesforce CRM is uniquely positioned to have the feeling that we have a responsibility to do this for our customers, because we have had such success in sales and service and marketing and commerce. As we combine all those things, the demand for us to truly deliver that connected experience for our client and for their client has become a real key, a primary part of our strategy.

Bill Detwiler: What is unique about Salesforce in collecting that data and helping companies search that data and make good decisions based on that data?

Patrick Stokes: I think the first thing that is unique is that our customers really trust us. It is something that we take very, very seriously. We tend to lean towards this core value of trust. We will enter that data for us. We are going to handle it. It is your data. It is not shared with anyone else. It is not a reduction of tenants to try to enrich the data of other people. It is your data and we treat it very, very holy.

The second part is, again, I think we are uniquely positioned. If you look at what happens, people really buy best-in-class applications for sales and for service and for marketing and commerce, and they opt for a hybrid approach to the applications they have. What’s cool about Salesforce is that a hybrid approach is often a lot of Salesforce, so we have this unique ability to not only connect the data, but actually bring it back into the applications that they must use and make usable. Unlike an independent enterprise data warehouse from ten years ago, or a CDP, or just a data link technology where you spend all this money to put your data in one place and then you actually forget that you have to connect it back to your applications. We are uniquely positioned to do both, and we take that very seriously.

Bill Detwiler: What are the biggest challenges for your customers – or for a company nowadays – with regard to data analysis? Around taking all those different data repositories, bringing them together and then synthesizing them into something that is useful, that is useful.

Patrick Stokes: I think the hardest part is having a position on how they want to use the data in a series of use cases about how they want to use them. Without that point of view, it is very difficult to develop the technology that is tailored to that. You end up with just one database that is the least common denominator and actually serves no purpose, so that is challenge number one.

The number two challenge – it is very interesting from a staff perspective – is that even when you bring all that data together, you may have organizational challenges in your company. First of all, your organizations may not want to bring all data together; they can compete internally in some ways. You look at some large multinationals, or your CPG companies, where each brand competes very aggressively with the other brand. This idea to bring it all together, it’s not just about getting the data there and solving the technology, it’s how you then open your organization to use and share all that data in a way that everyone attaches good comes.

Bill Detwiler: I imagine that is more of a human challenge. It is a challenge to change the belief about sharing that data.

Patrick Stokes: That’s right.

Bill Detwiler: Talk a little bit about that. I would really like to know how companies can break down silos, remove institutional barriers to sharing that information – whether it’s about teams or even different companies in a large multinational – that you might have.

Patrick Stokes: We look at it by focusing on the end customer, the end customer, and really focusing on that. Almost every time you just sit down and think about yourself, how does my customer want to experience my brand or my products? Silos no longer exist. The business units or the functional silos that you find really important in an organization and in a large company – even at Salesforce we have – suddenly do not become important at all. If you only think about the experience and how we achieve the experience that our consumer wants and really emphasize, we think you will succeed.

Bill Detwiler: I would like to hear your opinion – privacy is a big issue when it comes to data and the amount of data that companies collect about their customers, their employees, and their processes. Talk a bit about Salesforce’s philosophy of privacy, and to a larger point, data privacy in general for your customers.

Patrick Stokes: This is an area that I am most excited about when it comes to this topic. As I said before, we really rely on this idea of ​​trust and we treat all data from our customers as if they were sacred. We are now moving into a world where we help our customers to treat their customer data in the same way and impose that trust on them.

Consumers ask for more control. They say we want to know how our data is used. They say we want to know where our data is. We want permission to use that data. Governments agree; they create legislation. We see GDPR; we see CCPA; there will be more. The way Salesforce approaches this is because we bring all this data together, let’s really look at it at the field level and make a graph of where all this customer data is located. Let’s go field by field and let the customer decide, how is this data used? Is it important data? Is it PII data? What policy should we put around this data? Really treat that as a platform.

On top of that platform we can build some really great things. If you look at the way in which consumer privacy is dealt with nowadays, you come in as a consumer and say: “I want to be forgotten.” That probably goes to a team of lawyers who have spent a week – actually probably several weeks – just trying to figure out where that data is. If we can produce that, we can begin to take some of those people out of the comparison, which ultimately creates a much, much safer environment. Never pass on CSV files containing consumer data again, that is the kind where we see every violation happening, if someone has left a file somewhere on a server, and so we want to produce it.

Bill Detwiler: Or keep them on a laptop that someone can leave in a taxi.

Patrick Stokes: Exactly. That’s exactly right. So this Customer 360 capability that we have really makes that chart of where all that data is, and we don’t need that anymore. We can just go in and say, “Pass these requests on to these systems” and say, “Get rid of this data” or “Change the permission model” or “Don’t move it primarily because of the field level settings we put on it have put. ‘It is really an area that we are super excited about. I think there is enormous potential there. I think that we, Salesforce, not only have a unique opportunity to tackle it, but again, we really think it is our responsibility to tackle it.

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