Supercharge Agentforce Implementations With Historical Data

Unlock the full potential of your historical, time-series backup data through fast analytics, actionable insights, and Agentforce initiatives.

Highlights

• Connect time-series data to BI tools and Data Cloud and expose trend data to your users.
• Supercharge your Agentforce initiatives with historical, time-series data from all your Salesforce objects and fields.
• Increase efficiency by quickly unlocking trend insights and patterns across all your data.
• Optimize data management with a built-in data warehouse.

Traditional backups are essential for protection, but as daily snapshots of your org they contain valuable history about your organization’s evolution. Your historical data is too important to only be used for data loss or corruption scenarios. By analyzing patterns, trends, and behaviors from past events, you can make more informed decisions for the future.

Own Discover is the latest product in Own Company’s offering. Discover transforms your backups from Own Recover into time-series data, eliminating the effort and time to obtain actionable trend insights. While you may already be collecting and storing some of this data for trend analysis, Own creates time-series datasets across your entire Salesforce org – without a lengthy implementation.

By leveraging your backups for protection and innovation, you get more out of your Recover implementation, along with other products in your tech stack such as Tableau, Data Cloud – even Agentforce.

This in-depth review will showcase the main features of Own Discover, ideal use cases, and setup effort showing you how. It’ll also touch on how fast your users can (and will) enjoy this new functionality.

Features

Discover’s main goal is to provide immediate access to your org’s historical data in a time-series format. Ultimately, this includes all fields and objects available in your Salesforce backups.

While this post will be focused on Discover, the product currently works with backed up data obtained through Own’s backup and recovery product, Recover. You can find out more about Recover in the article below.

Built-In Data Warehouse

Your production org reflects the current state of your operations. But the real power in your data lies in capturing the changes and updates made over time, allowing you to track progression and uncover patterns.

For example, we can understand our current pipeline forecast. But what about our projected forecast at the beginning of the quarter? How does this compare with what we were projecting this time last year? Are we getting more and more accurate with our pipeline forecasting? These are the types of questions Discover helps you easily answer across all of your objects and records.

Building an in-house solution to collect the data required to answer these questions is possible, but it requires identifying the necessary data, obtaining the headcount and expertise– not to mention ongoing maintenance. Doesn’t sound like the simplest path now does it? Probably not.

Discover, on the other hand, provides you and your team with a centralized platform to manage everything effortlessly – all you have to do is tap into the data. While Recover handles daily snapshots of every object and field in your Salesforce instance, Discover serves as the data warehouse where all your information is easily accessible, without cumbersome processes or hidden costs. As mentioned, everything is presented in a time-series format, allowing you to access data from any point in time and create comprehensive historical trend views from your backups.

Using SQL or REST API (OData) endpoints, all your data can be seamlessly integrated with your BI tool of choice, such as Tableau or PowerBI, or used for other processes and integrations. This allows you to fully leverage your backups to drive business initiatives.

Additionally, if you already have a data warehouse, you can simplify your current workflows by extracting data directly from Discover rather than relying on Salesforce snapshots with limited object coverage. This way, Discover enhances and complements your existing tech stack.

Point-and-Click Experience

Making the most of your data doesn’t have to be difficult or only available to data scientists and developers. Own Discover makes it possible for admins to conduct these tasks. The only prerequisite is for admins to know what they’re looking forward to retrieving from the backups.

With the option to create up to three separate data services, admins can determine the backups that are to be taken into consideration, as well as the objects within them. Of course, there’s always the option to select all depending on the use case at hand.

For added flexibility, admins can easily revisit and modify data services after they’ve been created. They can add additional data as needed or review the existing data used by the specific data service under review.

Once the data service is ready, the banner will turn green, and the endpoints can be easily shared for off-platform analysis.

Scheduler

Creating the data service and manually selecting backups is great, but not entirely scalable considering every day there are new backups. Of course, Discover accounts for this scenario as well, with the built-in scheduling functionality available for each of the data services.

You can select the frequency of augmentation – daily, weekly, or monthly – determining how often the latest available backup is added to the data service scope. For example, setting the frequency to weekly on Wednesday at 10 am means the most recent backup from the seven days before will be included.

When reviewing the status of a data service, all scheduled augmentations will become visible as they occur, showing the number of tables processed during the automation. As shown in the image below, any GDPR-related requests made through Recover will also be applied to Discover.

A New World of Analytics

Having source data for historical trending reports readily available can transform your entire reporting strategy and execution. It significantly reduces the time spent building meaningful analytics and accelerates how quickly users can benefit from the insights.

No matter which BI tool you use or where end users access the information, the ability to merge current CRM data with historical data provided by Discover, along with other sources, unlocks new possibilities for what can be achieved in a dashboard.

For the sales team, having a complete picture during forecasting calls is essential for strategic
planning and prioritization, aligned with the company’s revenue goals. Sales leaders, for example, can instantly compare current performance with past trends and make more accurate forecasts powered by historical data fed into AI models. This allows them to guide their team to success with greater confidence and precision.

Before diving into the detailed capabilities mentioned earlier, especially if your organization has only recently started backing up data, Discover can alleviate the reporting burden from your Salesforce org by shifting it into your preferred BI tool. Over time, as more historical data accumulates, the depths of insights will grow. This will make it simply a matter of time before you can fully benefit from richer analytics and trends.

Make Decisions Faster

Actionable analytics are not just for sales teams; they can be customized for any part of the organization that relies on Salesforce data. For instance, in the support realm, leaders can gain a bird’s-eye view of case performance and volume fluctuations over time. This insight enables them to adjust agent coverage or delve into specific subsets of the data to analyze the reasons behind case escalations.

Ultimately, historical data empowers teams across the organization to make faster decisions, provided they have easy access to the right information at the right time.

Use Cases

Given the potential of historical data, the utility ultimately lies in your specific use cases. Whether you need accurate forecasting for sales teams or insights into product consumption trends, Discover can help you achieve your organization’s objectives.

Data Cloud is a significant innovation from Salesforce, designed to help customers unify all their company and customer data. It’s no surprise that Discover can serve as one of many sources from which information can be retrieved, enriching your data landscape by incorporating historical data to create a comprehensive view.

By integrating Discover with Data Cloud, users gain access to actionable insights in one place, providing valuable context to improve customer experiences. For example, while a static engagement rate of 71% is interesting, it lacks meaning without context. To truly understand whether it’s good or bad, you need context – something Discover offers by transforming daily backup snapshots into time-series data, allowing you to visualize the evolution of engagement rates. The graph below, showing this evolution, is displayed in Salesforce via a Tableau dashboard. The underlying data is sourced from Data Cloud and retrieved from the Discover Data Service. Handy, right?

With Discover, you can eliminate the time spent extracting and preparing data in the necessary time-series format, as this is done automatically for you. This frees you up to dream up new use cases for any Agentforce initiatives. Grounded in your time-series data, Agentforce now has the context needed to drive even better customer actions and outcomes.

Ultimately, backups should not merely be the fallback option in case of production data loss; instead, they should be leveraged for innovation across your organization.

Setup

Getting started with Discover is quick and straightforward, especially if you already have backups available. If you’re initiating both Own Recover and Discover simultaneously, you can decide when to start analyzing the backups. Typically, this is done once you feel confident that you’ve accumulated enough historical data for it to be meaningful. If you’ve been a Recover customer for a while, you can essentially go back in time to access the full history of your Salesforce org, even if you’re just implementing Discover today.

In the meantime, you can set up the data service(s) and configure the schedules, knowing that the time-series formatted information will be ready for deeper analysis when you’re ready to dive in.

Additionally, you’ll need to manage user access by creating users and generating tokens as needed. Keep in mind that tokens expire after 180 days, so an admin will need to regenerate them once they expire.

Support

While a comprehensive user guide is available to walk you through all the options and settings in Discover, you can always reach out to support by creating a ticket for any specific questions you may have.

Pricing

As always, Own maintains transparent pricing that’s accessible on their website. Discover starts at $8.50 per Salesforce license per month when billed annually. Additionally, there are optional add-ons available, such as the customer success premier plan and a dedicated technical account manager for an additional cost.

Summary

In summary, your backed up data holds critical insights waiting to be discovered, and Own Discover is designed to help you unlock them quickly! With a thoughtfully designed setup experience and a built-in data warehouse, Discover allows you to manipulate and present your data in ways that benefit your entire organization, regardless of team or data model.

If this app piqued your interest and you’d like to learn more, request a demo tailored specifically to your use case and processes.