Leveraging Salesforce to Create a Unified Commerce Experience for Retail Customers

At this point, the idea that technology and the internet have transformed the way we live our lives is much closer to cliche than clever. While we might take technology for granted as end consumers, delivering the kind of seamless digital experience that we’ve come to expect from companies is a much heftier task for the businesses that provide it.

There are few industries where this is more evident than in retail. Increasingly, customers expect web connectedness in their retail stores–from buy online, pick up in store (BOPUS), to personalized customer service and more. Crucially, they also expect to move among these channels seamlessly, without having to restart their shopping experience or restate their information. The data infrastructure required to maintain this unified customer experience can be complicated to implement, particularly for established businesses with entrenched back-end data systems. Luckily, Salesforce provides an entire suite of products designed to track a 360-degree view of your customers without having to start from scratch.

“Unified Commerce” is the modern term for utilizing one platform to cover all points of customer engagement, from marketing to shopping to customer service and back again. What follows is a breakdown of which Salesforce offerings to use and how to use them in order to reach a point of unified commerce in a retail business.

Marketing Cloud to Intelligently Reach and Engage

Personalization and omnichannel are the key concepts when it comes to almost any customer interaction, and for good reason. Customers want to feel like the businesses that they’re interacting with know and care about them, and they want to be able to interact with those businesses through any means available to them. This includes over the phone, texting, live chat, or even social media. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a variety of tools to help you reach out to the right customers in the right way to ensure maximum ROI on all of your marketing initiatives:

• Email Studio and Ad Studio allow you to optimize your email and ad campaigns to display only relevant content to users based on their profile.
• Mobile Studio allows you to interact with customers on their mobile devices in a variety of ways. You can send order confirmations and updates via SMS to customers that have already purchased your merchandise, or you can send push notifications to potential customers entering one of your stores. You can also push relevant customer data to apps used by your sales associates in store to provide personalized insights and recommendations to customers.
• Social Studio allows you to perform social listening to gather customer sentiment about your brand, as well as routing customer activity to your marketing, sales, or service teams when appropriate.
• With Journey Builder, you can use data gathered from your mobile app, in-store kiosks, and online behavior to develop personalized multi-touch buyer journeys based on customer preferences.
• By leveraging Salesforce Data Management Platform (DMP) you are able to put together all the data gathered from all of your channels, stitch it together to gain a complete view of your ideal buyer, and use that data to create new audiences for more targeted Ads and higher ROI on marketing investments.

Commerce Cloud for Omni-Channel eCommerce

Now that you’ve engaged your potential new and returning customers with the help of Marketing Cloud, you can use Commerce Cloud’s B2C capabilities to create and manage an e-commerce site for your brand to customize online shopping experiences for your customers. The B2C Commerce capabilities provide some useful tools to quickly set up, manage, and gain insights from e-commerce sites:

• The Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) is an out-of-the-box framework that enables you to quickly set up both web and mobile sites with inherent best practices built in for design, merchandising, and architecture, while still allowing for customization that maintains the uniqueness of your brand.
• Multi Site Management is available for global brands that need multiple sites specific to different geographical areas with different languages, currencies, and cultures.
• Salesforce’s Einstein is directly embedded in Commerce Cloud’s B2C capabilities, with a host of functionalities that include personalized product recommendations, predictive sorting, and smart search for customers, as well as automatic insight gathering for merchandisers to drill into their customers’ purchasing trends.
• Order Management provides tools to easily perform otherwise labor intensive and error prone processes like determining total inventory across all selling and service channels, or tracking and fulfillment of both online and cross channel orders (e.g. BOPUS and in-store returns of online orders).

Service Cloud for Personalized Customer Support

You’ve got great tools so far to engage your target customers and then conveniently sell to them, but even in a near-perfect system, there will be a need for customer service and support due to incorrect orders, items mishandled during shipping, or any other mistakes that might occur. Salesforce Service Cloud is a powerful app that will streamline your service processes for service agents, allowing them to meet the growing demands in customer service and ultimately build a strong reputation for customer loyalty. Without retreading past posts too much, here are some of the features that comprise the customer service for retail panacea that is Salesforce Service Cloud:

• Service Cloud provides multiple channels for support, including web forms, email, phone, and Live Agent, and Omni-Channel Routing ensures that all requests are promptly dealt with by the most qualified agent.
• The Service Console puts all the information your agents need on one screen, including all the relevant data on individual customers they interact with, such as products they own and any past, closed, or open service cases with them. This way, a customer will never feel like they need to repeat themselves or that their issues are being lost in the wind.
• Salesforce Knowledge Base aggregates all of the collected wisdom within your company in an easily searchable interface. Relevant knowledge articles will also be automatically suggested on new cases in the Service Console, and agents can quickly and easily transform unique cases into new knowledge articles for posterity.

Salesforce Customer 360 to Tie the Bow

The three cloud products above are related but are ultimately separate platforms. By utilizing Salesforce Customer 360, a “cross-cloud technology”, they can tie the three together to more easily track and visualize customers throughout the many stages of interaction in the retail experience. This will fully realize the unified commerce experience, and enable high-level processes like triggering Marketing Cloud journeys for shoppers that abandon carts on your Commerce Cloud site or allowing your Service Cloud Agents to see and modify Commerce Cloud orders for customers that might have questions during the shopping process.

In an age where our options as consumers are seemingly unlimited, “customer obsession” is of the utmost importance for a retail brand to differentiate itself, and offering a unified commerce experience is the only way to reach it. Salesforce, with its powerful out-of-the-box functionality combined with easy customization options, is one of the best choices a brand can make to efficiently reach the technical infrastructure necessary to provide unified commerce.