King Salesforce B2C Solution Architect's Handbook

Design scalable and cohesive business-to-consumer experiences with Salesforce Customer 360
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80181-130-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 458 Seiten

There's a huge demand on the market for Salesforce professionals who can create a single view of the customer across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform and leverage data into actionable insights. With Salesforce B2C Solution Architect's Handbook, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the integration options and products that help you deliver value for organizations. While this book will help you prepare for the B2C Solution Architect exam, its true value lies in setting you up for success afterwards.
The first few chapters will help you develop a solid understanding of the capabilities of each component in the Customer 360 ecosystem, their data models, and governance.
As you progress, you'll explore the role of a B2C solution architect in planning critical requirements and implementation sequences to avoid costly reworks and unnecessary delays. You'll learn about the available options for integrating products with the Salesforce ecosystem and demonstrate best practices for data modeling across Salesforce products and beyond.
Once you've mastered the core knowledge, you'll also learn about tools, techniques, and certification scenarios in preparation for the B2C Solution Architect exam.
By the end of this book, you'll have the skills to design scalable, secure, and future-proof solutions supporting critical business demands.

Autoren/Hrsg.

King, Mike

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Business Application Unternehmenssoftware
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Software Engineering

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents - Demystifying Salesforce, Customer 360, and Digital 360
- Supporting Your Customers with Service Cloud
- Direct-to-Consumer Selling with Commerce Cloud B2C
- Engaging Customers with Marketing Cloud
- Salesforce Ecosystem – Building a Complete Solution
- Role of a Solution Architect

- Integration Architecture Options
- Creating a 360° View of the Customer
- Supporting Key Business Scenarios
- Enterprise Integration Strategies
- Exam Preparation Tools and Techniques
- Prerequisite Certifications
- Commerce and Integration
- Certification Scenarios

Leseproben

Preface

Salesforce B2C solution architecture focuses on delivering business-to-consumer experiences using Salesforce products. This capability, and the Salesforce B2C Solution Architect certification, is in high demand because it truly takes a unified viewpoint and a broad understanding to get the most out of your Salesforce investment. You need to know the capabilities of the Salesforce products at a technical level, how they integrate, what their data model is, and how they fit into a larger enterprise technology landscape.

As a B2C Solution Architect, you need business domain knowledge, as well as strong organizational and communication skills, combined with deep technical expertise in a variety of areas. Make no mistake, this is challenging to achieve, but the rewards for an organization that truly understands their customer and provides them with a seamless experience are great.

A properly designed Customer 360 solution spanning B2C Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud on the Salesforce Platform provides the foundation for a single view of the customer, unique insight, and transformational capabilities. Incorporating products such as Order Management, Salesforce CDP, and MuleSoft can build a richer experience, while products such as Sales Cloud, B2B Commerce, and Pardot can stretch into the B2B solution world.

Who this book is for

This book is primarily aimed at Salesforce technical audiences familiar with one or more of the products in the Customer 360 suite (especially B2C Commerce, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud). With this book, you'll learn more about the capabilities of the complementary products in the tool suite and expand your capabilities.

For enterprise architects looking to learn more about the Salesforce ecosystem of products or for technology leaders in B2C organizations, this book will provide a valuable reference to help cut through the noise and form a solution. Here, you will learn how these products fit into your overall enterprise technology strategy, including data and integration.

Finally, if you're evaluating Salesforce for your organization, this book will serve as a roadmap for what you'll need to achieve your goals and how it all fits together. We're focused on the architect's viewpoint; we don't get into code-level detail or administration tasks.

What this book covers

, , explains the core terminology used in the Salesforce space, including the difference between products, clouds, and platforms, as the first step in your journey. From there, we'll provide a foundational understanding of the Salesforce Platform on which so much of the solution is built.

, , covers Service Cloud's core functionality and goes deeper into the integration options and data model supported by the underlying Salesforce Platform.

, , covers the strengths and limitations, core data model, and integration capabilities of B2C Commerce, which is the enterprise commerce engine used to power thousands of websites through the busiest shopping days of the year.

, , sets out how Marketing Cloud's core messaging and journeys platform supports marketing and transactional communications across a variety of channels, as well as marketing journey creation and more. We cover its capabilities, component products, data model, and integration options.

, , focuses on a high-level review of additional Salesforce products, beyond the three pillars of the B2C solution architecture (B2C Commerce, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud), and where these products will have advantages in your solution.

, , teaches you how to assemble an appropriate team, how to structure a discovery, organize a project, and what the essential deliverables are for the B2C Solution Architect exam.

, , goes into more detail about both point-to-point and middleware-based integration options. We'll also review cross-cloud development life cycles to help structure a team that can deliver on more than one workstream.

, , explains how the heart of a successful B2C solution architecture is a complete and consistent picture of the customer. This means tying together commerce, marketing, service, and other experiences. We'll cover what a customer means in each system and how they all relate to one another.

, , explores the Salesforce-provided solution kits that serve as a jumping-off point and then customizes and extends them for our fictional organization.

, , tackles topics such as multiple Salesforce orgs, B2C Commerce realms, and Marketing Cloud business units as we explore integration with other enterprise systems.

, , serves as a quick reference for essential topics, study materials, and recommendations for how to get hands-on experience in these areas for those interested in the Salesforce B2C Solution Architect certification.

, , details how, before qualifying for the B2C Solution Architect exam, you'll need to achieve the three prerequisite certifications covered in this chapter. We'll provide a review of the topics, with an emphasis on the recommended order and which sections of this book to review for a refresher.

, , covers some essential topics and provides study recommendations for those interested in B2C Commerce technical architecture given that, although the Salesforce B2C Architect certification is not a prerequisite for the B2C Architect certification, there are a lot of topics that will transfer across.

, , concludes by bringing everything together with four realistic example scenarios using our fictional Packt Enterprises company. For each scenario, we'll review possible options, shape a solution, and provide a recommended approach to help establish good habits that will transfer to the exam or real life.

To get the most out of this book

You should already have an understanding of concepts such as APIs, file exchanges, databases, and cloud software models. You should also understand high-level concepts in the business-to-consumer (B2C) domain, including customers, products, orders, marketing journeys, customer service cases, and order management. This book is a roadmap with links to a huge and ever-evolving set of Salesforce resources. You should get into the habit of using the links, bookmarking things, and reading further on your own..

While reading this book, it's helpful if you re-work the examples in a context that's meaningful to you. Think about your own organization or a client that you're working with. How is your situation similar or different? How would that impact your architectural decisions? What might you do differently and what questions would you ask to understand the situation?

This book is intended to be a roadmap to a way of thinking about architecture. It's a snapshot of the features and functionality available in a variety of software products at a point in time. That stuff will change, but the overall approach does not. Ask the right questions, figure out what tools you need and how they will work together, document your solution, and iterate.

Do not expect to use this book as a shortcut to pass the exam. There's no substitute for learning the materials and understanding how to apply them in various situations. Focus on the process, experiment, take your time, and only when you've truly locked in the information should you move on to certification.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781801817035_ColorImages.pdf

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In addition to access_token, the authentication response also supplies the REST API and SOAP API access URLs and the token expiration time, which can be used to construct additional requests and to recreate the token before it expires."

A block of code is set as follows:

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

Über Autor(innen)

King Mike :

Mike King has worked on complex Salesforce customer implementations, including multiple brands and geographies worldwide. Mike is also a certified Salesforce instructor for the B2C Technical Architect certification preparation course. In 2019, Mike participated in the inaugural Salesforce cross-cloud academy. He has since worked with Salesforce on the B2C Solution Architect exam development team and in real-world B2C solution architecture implementations. Mike has also presented numerous times with Salesforce on the topic of B2C solution architecture, including at TrailheaDX and Dreamforce. When not obsessing about Salesforce and software architecture, Mike enjoys hiking, camping, and woodworking.