This post was adapted from one of our CRM Snacktime Snippet videos that you can watch here.
Are you using a business-to-customer solution? If you are not, here is why you should: B2C (any sales process that sells directly to consumers) cuts out the agent and increases profit. If your company is selling goods or services over the internet, then capturing those transactions via your online website is essential marketing.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
People are buying more online now than ever before. Tons of companies sell goods and services online, the most prevalent being Amazon, a Salesforce Commerce Cloud client.
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a newer product in the last five or six years was very raw when it first came out as Demandware. Today it is owned and has become a separate technology from Salesforce. After Salesforce acquired it, they rebranded it as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It has taken some time to build in a lot of connections for B2C Commerce Cloud to Salesforce, and while it is owned by Salesforce, it’s a separate technology from what you think of as traditional Salesforce. Salesforce has dedicated an immense amount of time to making it very efficient and working cohesively with your Salesforce environment.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud permits you to create and coordinate the online experiences for your customers, featuring rich experiences from online stores to checkout by spreading out across multiple channels and devices, plus allowing you to interact with your customers via communication, via cases, and live products like a live agent. Salesforce Commerce Cloud lets you control multiple sites from a single place to ideally separate each brand’s site and geographic location.
Also, if you are just starting or if you have been around for a while and are somewhat established, you may want to get up and running quickly. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has so many templates that are already built that you can quickly get your website and whole e-commerce platform up and running with Salesforce Commerce Cloud out-of-the-box. Or if you are a new company, if you are a more recognized sophisticated company, or you have been using something like Magento for a while for your website and you have some established processes, now might be a good time to transition to a more efficient, robust solution, like a Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is used in more than 50 countries by thousands of websites; online sales via B2C commerce surpass $21 billion per year. Fortunately, there are some good Salesforce Commerce Cloud partners out there, like XTIVIA, where we have done a number of these e-commerce implementations. You need somebody that has been through it because there are so many nuances to how you can do it. Salesforce, in lots of ways, leaves it open-ended for the customer to collaborate with the partner on how they want things to interact between the eCommerce platform and your Salesforce backend.
What is B2C Commerce and How Does it Work?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Features
Order Management
Salesforce has come out with an order management product recently inside your Salesforce environment, that once the order gets placed on your e-commerce site, it comes directly into Salesforce for order management. Separately, you have a live agent, which is functionality in Salesforce.
Live Chat
Anytime you have an e-commerce site, you will want to be able to answer questions quickly for your customers that are visiting. You need to have Live Chat available, so when a customer goes to enter a chat question on your front-end it creates a case in Salesforce immediately and triggers an open dialogue where a service/order rep can chat back and forth to answer questions quickly.
Einstein Automation
Incorporating Einstein automation within the live agent allows the customer to open a chat box on your website, start typing questions, and they will get some pre-canned responses. Salesforce allows you to build that out with the questions you want to ask the customer within the chat, and how they answer that question depends on the next series of questions you might want to ask. Results are the customer had their answers or is then handed off to a live agent.
Case Management
The Salesforce Service Cloud is all focused-on case management, which is anytime a live agent chat comes in, or there is a customer request, concern, or return. This comes in as a support case tied to your order. It is really easy to manage inside the Salesforce Service Cloud and is super-efficient and effective at managing operational support processes. Having a B2C Commerce Cloud platform in place and tied directly into Salesforce is a seamlessly real benefit of going with B2C Commerce Cloud.
Creating Phone Orders on B2C Platform
There are also some new packages where a company will get phone orders, and even though you have a website, some people prefer calling to place an order. They will call a 1-800 number, which comes into your call center or service department. That order can then still be placed on your B2C platform, creating the order on behalf of the customer.
Conclusion
Salesforce Commerce Cloud has come a long way within the last few years, has worked out many kinks, and made a lot more functionality and automation for developers where it can be less daunting of an endeavor than it was six months ago. It is a solid polished product with more customers asking us about it and clients adopting it.
XTIVIA is excited about its future, and we are here with the experience and knowledge you will need to successfully implement the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution. If you have any questions about Salesforce Commerce Cloud and how we can help you, please do not hesitate to reach out.