MuleSoft Salesforce integration: Best practices and use cases

In today’s experience-driven era, user experiences should not only be personalized but omnichannel and connected. Now more than ever, it is important for a business to seamlessly connect their core systems with external tools and applications, to fulfill the equation of a connected UX. And when it comes to integrating systems and breaking down data silos, MuleSoft Salesforce integration bridges the gap between your internal and external systems and allows businesses to provide seamless, scalable, and well-integrated experiences. MuleSoft has been a part of Salesforce for the past two years, empowering enterprises to leverage this powerful combination to boost system performance and operational efficiency.

Here we will discuss the MuleSoft Salesforce integration, its benefits, best practices, and use cases.

Introducing the powerful platforms: Salesforce & MuleSoft

Salesforce is one of the most efficient CRM software with dedicated cloud-based solutions for all your enterprise activities- sales, marketing, customer service, commerce, and other functional departments. Its competitive offerings of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Order Management System, Salesforce Community Cloud, Salesforce Einstein and other external systems and tools acts as a complete package to accelerate business transformation, automate mundane tasks, improve user experiences, and allow seamless collaboration between teams.

As powerful as Salesforce as a core system is, it still requires a seamless integration with other third-party tools and systems to deliver an unmatched performance and meet customer demands throughout. This can only be possible with an API-led connectivity that unifies valuable data sources, and systems, while empowering users and employees with a seamless transition between these tools. And this is where an agile platform like MuleSoft comes into play. With MuleSoft, enterprise owners can integrate their business-critical internal and external systems and create consistent experiences faster.

MuleSoft is a platform that gives IT teams the tools to integrate data and systems, automating workflows and processes and help create seamless omnichannel experiences with security, governance, and compliance. With that said, MuleSoft fulfills the following objectives for enterprises:

• Unlock systems and data with integration
• Drive production and efficiency with automation
• Create engaging digital experiences

MuleSoft and its Anypoint integration platform allow connecting applications, systems, and tools without any codebase changes, making system-to-system integration easy, effortless, and cost-effective.

What can Salesforce MuleSoft integration do for you?

Now before you invest into Salesforce MuleSoft integration, the probable question is what difference can it make to my business ROI?

• Salesforce integration with MuleSoft brings all your internal and external systems together, meaning you don’t have to switch between tools and can leverage a 360-degree view of all your business data on a common/single dashboard – cloud or on-premises, utilizing pre-built connectors.
• With all systems integrated, you can implement better analytics , derive higher insights, and boost processes for faster and smarter decision-making.
• Leverage the power of combined data to develop scalable integration frameworks and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences faster.

Does your business need a Salesforce MuleSoft integration?

Companies need the connectivity to provide customers with real-time and relevant experiences. With disjointed or poorly integrated systems, enterprises find it hard to unify business processes and deliver connected solutions throughout. Subsequently, they rely on legacy systems or siloed data sources, none of which help them achieve the desired operational goals. MuleSoft Salesforce integration benefits enables organizations to unlock, analyze and act on data to innovate and adapt to change faster, creating well-knit experiences for their employers and customers.

The following are some reasons why your business requires a Salesforce MuleSoft integration:

#1. Want to accelerate digital transformation

In today’s economy, companies are under tremendous pressure to meet customers’ expectations of personalized, integrated, and connected experiences across multiple channels. Most companies are already on their digital transformation journey, modernizing legacy systems and automating business processes. Organizations can bring change when they bring disparate internal and external systems together, draw insights from it, and drive operational performance status. With Salesforce MuleSoft integration, enterprises achieve seamless connectivity to boost their system’s functionality securely and scalably across the enterprise for different users, such as customers, suppliers, and employees.

#2. Break down data silos for better information exchange

To keep up with business demands and unlock the real power of data for improved business ROI, a scalable and strategic approach for integrating both internal and third-party systems is required. Salesforce integration with MuleSoft allows enterprises to integrate and unify data with an API-led approach, where businesses can easily compose connected experiences while maintaining security and data safety. Business owners can reuse their existing APIs and microservices across the organizations rather than building from scratch, while establishing a complete control over the process.

#3. Reduce manual efforts and effectively automate them

Salesforce MuleSoft integration helps you get rid of the time-consuming and error-prone manual workflows and instead automate these steps for higher efficiency and productivity. This powerful integration between two platforms provides a highly customized no-coding approach to integrate tools and applications, thus saving time and boosting the agility of business processes.

#4. Reduce the risk security threats and revenue spend in rectifying them

Undoubtedly, enterprises today generate vast amounts of data across channels and systems. However, often they either cannot bring it together onto a single platform, effectively study and derive actionable insights from it, or enforce stringent data safety protocols to prevent data loss, leaks and associated security threats. Hence, to safeguard your data, MuleSoft Salesforce integration benefits provide you with robust security features ensuring that data is protected as it flows through the integration solution.

#5. Seamless coordination across the organization

Business requires seamless communication and coordination between teams owing to interdependent tasks, which often isn’t a possible solution due to existing data silos, resulting in poor visibility of activities, adversely affecting the ability to make decisions. Enterprises with diverse service portfolios must connect their IT department tools with Salesforce via MuleSoft to meet specific data and reporting requirements.

What are the Salesforce MuleSoft integration best practices?

Salesforce MuleSoft integration empowers enterprises to build strongly connected systems. If as a business you’re looking to explore more around combined solutioning, here are some of the MuleSoft Salesforce integration best practices recommendations:

#1. Understand end-to-end business requirements: Before starting the integration or connectivity, both Salesforce and MuleSoft must have a basic understanding of business use cases, data elements,, orchestration and transformation is needed.

#2. Segregate responsibilities: MuleSoft and Salesforce need to segregate the tasks between them to define the workflow and data transformation. For example – MuleSoft is automating the data which Salesforce must save on its CRM.

#3. Security: A business has to choose the right technology before integrating Salesforce and MuleSoft. The connector must be secure, reliable, and authenticated in the highest possible way.

#4. Environment Mapping: Illustrate with a diagram about workflows clarifying data flow between MuleSoft environments and Salesforce systems exposing potential issues in connectivity. So mapping out how the strategies will work and interact with each other.

#5. Property Mapping: Mapping external systems data with Salesforce is one of the most important steps. We have to document all external data systems with Salesforce properties so that it will ensure the completeness and quality of the data.

Salesforce MuleSoft integration use cases

The power of connected data is required across all industries, and with the robust integration between Salesforce and MuleSoft, businesses can transform their operational productivity for higher success. Here are some of the use cases for applications connectivity, MuleSoft Salesforce integration patterns and the technology used behind it:

#1. Aggregation of data

Enterprises collect huge customer data from multiple channels for semantic purposes. This data needs to be aggregated on a single system for efficient data analysis and processing for further use. The data is aggregated in data warehouses, data lakes, or dashboards, and automated via MuleSoft Salesforce integration patterns, thus saving time and eliminating human errors. Some of the MuleSoft Salesforce integration example where businesses can use data aggregation are:

• To create highly personalized customer journeys
• Aggregate data from first-party data sources to stay competitive
• Create comprehensive reports building a single view of the customer
• Collecting sensor data and ERP data for advanced analytics
• Preparation of executive sales dashboards
• Data migration from on-premises applications to cloud-based data warehouses

#2. Streaming data ingestion

Every industry relies on streaming data, to establish a continuous flow of data generated by various sources. This data can further be processed, analyzed, stored, and acted upon for delivering personalized content for multiple devices. Salesforce MuleSoft integration helps by bringing in real-time data from connected devices to businesses and provides simple reports. Some of the business scenarios where MuleSoft Salesforce integration can help are:

• Sensors in vehicles
• Finance industries where you can track stock prices and compute risk
• Retail industries can combine user click data

#3. Data sync between multiple applications

Data integration tools are used to bridge information silos and leverage leading technologies in the middleware. MuleSoft Salesforce integration ensures the building of business applications that provide real-time insights. For real-time sync, it can further be classified into two patterns:

Synchronized data transfers: When the receiver of the information requests data transfer and waits until the sender transmits the information. For example, checking a prepaid balance for your SIM card. Some of the business scenarios where synchronized data is used are:

• Generating sales reports from the CRM system
• Searching for a customers invoice within the ERP system
• Patient’s record

Asynchronous data transfers: The target gets the information without acknowledgment in integrating asynchronous data. The source sends the data and does not experience any wait time. Also known as the fire and forget pattern, where you can integrate large amounts of data with the help of MuleSoft. Salesforce MuleSoft integration ensures the messages are processed correctly. Some of the business use cases where it is used are:

• To send promotional texts or emails to customers
• Processing insurance claim receipts

#4. Sharing data with external partners

Data sharing with your external business partners, such as suppliers, contractors, and the government, is necessary for efficiency in transactions. MuleSoft Salesforce integration makes it easy for organizations to securely share huge data, eliminating data silos for internal and external partners. Some of the MuleSoft Salesforce integration example are:

• Purchase order data shared with suppliers
• Invoices for payment data purposes with your suppliers
• Sending tax information to government agencies

#5. Bulk data movement

In bulk/ batch data, the data is collected and processed to create batch results. The data is drawn from the systems and organizational data stores to process large data efficiently. It works well in scenarios where real-time data processing is not required, and data can be analyzed historically. It optimizes and provides better utilization of resources as no constant processing is required. Salesforce MuleSoft integration helps in processing your bulk data easily, securely, and cost-effectively. Some of the business scenarios are :

• Migration of invoices from ERP to payment systems
• Reconciliation and analysis of financial transactions such as ATM or banking transactions
• Summarization of shipping and tracking data

#6. Orchestration and data processing

Orchestration is the process of breaking siloed data from multiple sources, combining, organizing, and making it available for data processing. With MuleSoft Salesforce integration, you can easily process your data, maintain compliance with data privacy laws, remove data bottlenecks and enforce data governance. Some of the business use cases are:

• Activating new customer bank account- background verification, employment verification, credit score check
• New hiring in the company – salary account setup, work locations, IT assets delivery, etc.

#7. User interface integration and mashups

MuleSoft Salesforce integration aggregates content in one place for human consumption, which enhances the user interface. It works as an aggregator of services for multiple functionalities. Some of the common examples of business use cases are :

• Mobile applications
• Websites
• Intranets

#8. Broadcasting events

Events like new hires, expense approvals, payment process, website traffic, etc. MuleSoft Salesforce integration identifies, captures, and notifies events to downstream consumers and uses this data for further analysis. Some of the use cases for broadcasting events are :

• Tracking shipments
• Sending notifications to customer
• Promotional notifications
• Inventory updates
• Website traffic surge user clicks or downtime

Partner with us to unleash the power of Salesforce MuleSoft integration

Salesforce MuleSoft integration is the best choice when dealing with complex systems to improve siloed environments and prioritize the customer experience. We can help you with digital transformation, drive innovation, and create a connected customer experience. With our certified experts, you can leverage Salesforce MuleSoft integration services to boost productivity and help businesses build an integrated approach that is reliable and scalable.