On Salesforce & Sprout Social’s Partnership

There is something attractive about the new announcement by Salesforce and Sprout Social about Tableau. It is refreshing, to some extent, the whole discussion on Big Data.

In short, Sprout Social is now providing integration capabilities to Tableau, Salesforce’s analytics platform. This will make it easier to incorporate social data from Sprout Social into Tableau.

This is the thing.

The promises are enormous. For organizations using Salesforce and Tableau, this will undoubtedly increase the capabilities to leverage and unlock insights from their data collected across social media, blogs, and the like. The goal is to obtain a more complete view of their customers. They will be able to make more informed decisions in their strategy – at corporate, marketing, sales and service levels. 

We are talking Big Data here. Definitely.

This is still a long journey forward for most organizations though.

Obviously, better insights will bring greater value.  One question that remain is to understand whether organizations are ready to include social data into their strategy, yet.

This will probably impact how they work and think.

And central, here, is to understand their maturity level. Most will be moving from having too little information to potentially having too much data, arriving from too many sources.

How to select and prioritize the right use cases for business value?

Priority should be on business value, of course. In many cases, organizations are still struggling getting insights from their own internal “unstructured data” such as letters, emails, recordings of conversations in call centers, use of a website, old, archived contracts, and the like. This data is today spread all over the organization, often siloed.

So, selecting the right use cases, that combine internal and external data together, becomes critical.

We all have in mind several such as customer insights, segmentation of the customer base, churn prediction, multi-channel interaction analysis, and next best action. We may also talk sentiment analysis and social media analysis.

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However, this may probably be our future. It may just show how organisations may look like in the near future. Such a move by a market leading vendor like Salesforce can help move up this topic onto the top of the agenda of most executive. Quite quickly.

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About the Author

Didier Dessens

CRM and Digital Experience Advisory