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According to the latest statistics, the number of companies using Salesforce has reached 150,000. And this looks impressive. Indeed, given the rich functionality, scalability, and convenience, this Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform has become one of the undisputed market leaders.
Below we will discuss a particular product of this CRM: Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a platform for creating an unparalleled e-commerce experience. If you’re still hesitant about choosing a specific Salesforce solution, please take a look at our Salesforce consulting services.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is among the world’s most popular B2C and B2B cloud CRMs. This enterprise-level CRM allows online businesses to get the most out of artificial intelligence and data-driven touchpoints on all existing digital channels (mobile, websites, social media, and online stores) when interacting with potential and existing customers and smoothly push them through the sales funnel. Currently, the solution is presented in four products: B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, D2C Commerce, and Order Management.
Specifically, with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, businesses benefit from the following:
Speaking of more global advantages, using Salesforce Commerce Cloud significantly reduces companies’ efforts to grow and scale their business activities. World-famous clients who have improved their key business indicators in the digital environment include Mercedes-Benz, IBM, Loreal, Unilever, Bentley, U.S. Bank, and many others.
Let’s find out the main features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Salesforce Einstein is an SFCC proprietary AI solution primarily for lead scoring and sales predictive analytics. This feature appeared in 2016 and here’s how it works: first, data is captured from all available sources. AI processes it, learns by itself, and performs predictive analysis. After that, business managers can use analytics when working with clients. For example, Einstein can provide all website visitors (even not just authenticated ones) personalized product recommendations, as well as product bundles, sets, and deals.
This concept is not new: Amazon’s machine learning tools like Alexa are great examples of AI working in the background. For Salesforce, its team has taken the same idea to the business.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows companies to go beyond the digital plane by moving customers through the sales funnel online and in the physical world. In particular, buyers can learn about the company by visiting its website, then read the reviews on social networks, proceed to place an order after contacting the call center representatives, and pick up the goods at an offline pickup point.
Also, this solution provides A/B testing of target segments based on customer behavior, traffic channel, and location. SFCC also maximizes website visibility, dealing with sites, products, categories, images, and metadata that rank with the ability to develop best SEO practices for SEO.
At the same time, Salesforce Commerce Cloud will cover all these processes, making the purchase process seamless, even if we are talking about companies of an international scale.
Regarding international companies in more detail, SFCC effectively handles the specifics of sales for all regions covered. Specifically, due to the difference in trading rules specific to each region, you may need to implement several websites simultaneously. In turn, Salesforce can take on the task of localizing your basic online store template, customizing it to the laws of each country where you will start your business.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides dozens of helpful marketing and merchandising tools—including AI-driven ones—to power merchandising insights, ensure end-to-end automation, syndicate products and pricing across categories and websites, and make your product promotion easier, no matter where your company operates.
Also, with their help, you can test several marketing strategies simultaneously and without any technical support to determine the most effective ones and implement them to the fullest. Thanks to this, you can spend a minimum amount of money and time to attract and retain customers.
Since more and more users use mobile devices to make purchases every year, SFCC supports this trend and adapts the user experience specifically for this interaction format. For instance, thanks to Salesforce, your website will have the same look and feel on both desktops and smartphones. At the same time, your customers will be able to quickly pay for their purchases through Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other mobile payment tools.
Although the main target audience of SFCC is enterprises, it’s also possible to create small online stores that will scale in the future. At the same time, the platform will provide you with all the resources necessary for scaling and automatically adapt to the workload required by users at a particular point in time. Thus, you can protect yourself from the need to change the CRM when the old one has ceased to satisfy your business needs with its functionality and performance.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud supports a bunch of third-party integrations like Twitter, Slack, Google Maps, LinkedIn, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, NetSuite, Workday, Amazon, and so on. You can find out more about Salesforce integration tools here.
SF Commerce Cloud (SFCC) has powerful functionality for managing orders, from order placement, payment, and delivery, to cancellations and returns. It covers a full order lifecycle management journey, providing easy allocation and fulfillment logic. Such automation of SFCC reduces overhead costs for companies that operate in several regions. Also, it increases efficiency by delivering real-time order data to Commerce Cloud Digital, ensuring instant order processing and streamlining order management.
SFCC comes with a Salesforce CMS (where files and media can be stored) and dozens of customizable templates, developer tools, and APIs that combine to help you build a full-featured online store of any size. Moreover, in most cases, you may not need programming skills since all the components of your future project can be added via drag-and-drop.
Now let’s highlight the key benefits that Salesforce Commerce Cloud users get.
Because of the colossal volumes of information users receive daily via the internet, their concentration on specific objects will be minimal if you do not take additional measures to keep them. This is exactly what Salesforce Commerce Cloud is good at.
In particular, this platform supports a mobile-first approach and provides instant content upload wherever your users are and whatever device they use. The platform also helps developers provide digital accessibility for websites, which means unhindered access through devices with an unstable internet connection. Finally, here, you will get all the tools you need to create effective and visually appealing product catalogs with a variety of filters and search options.
Above, we have already described the features of the proprietary Salesforce AI-driven tool Einstein AI, whose main task is to generate predictive analytics for online stores based on Commerce Cloud.
The use cases for these analytics are numerous: with its help, your future online store will be able to select personalized product recommendations, shorten the steps on the way to the sales funnel through search suggestions, and optimize the order of products in the catalog through Predictive Sort. Also, you can provide a unified user experience regardless of the device, collect customer data, generate search results for synonymous product names, reduce cart abandon rates, and so on.
SF Commerce Cloud uses internal algorithms and tools to help businesses identify market trends, monitor and optimize KPIs, improve user traffic quality, speed up the checkout process, optimize website design for devices of various sizes, implement cross-selling strategies, perform end-to-end visitor behavior analytics, and also simplify interaction with them at all stages of the funnel.
The built-in marketing tools of SFCC will ensure that your customers discover the products they need as quickly as possible. Specifically, you can deploy this process on all your localized websites, promote individual products through all available types of digital advertising, make promotions and special offers, run A/B testing, generate product assortment recommendations, automate merchandising tasks, etc.
One of the main features of SF Commerce Cloud is the abundance of tools for creating a personalized customer experience. This is achieved through AI-driven tools that can provide your online store’s visitors with smart recommendations for complementary products, personalized recommendations based on their search history, generation of relevant search results, quick access to product information, adding products to their wishlists, and much more.
Regardless of the device used by your website visitors, with SFCC, they will get an advanced user experience and will be able to deal with a unified design that will be the same and convenient for all its versions.
This platform will save your business from the problems associated with traffic bursts that are typical for seasonal sales and holidays. It also supports reverse scaling, reducing allocated resources when it is no longer needed. As for stock management, Salesforce will not leave you without support either: thanks to powerful auditing tools, your users will not face the ‘out of stock’ problem noticed after placing an order.
With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you will get a centralized access panel to all your online stores based on this platform. You can also set individual settings for each localized website according to individual online trading policies in a particular region.
In case of a problem or outage, SF Commerce Cloud customers can always get instant support from the Salesforce team. For example, you can use Trailblazer and the help portal. Salesforce also provides webinars and accelerators that will ensure the most efficient use of the platform. However, when you cooperate with an outsourcing Salesforce development team, all the tasks related to ensuring the smooth operation of SFCC become their responsibility, so you don’t need to worry about it.
SFCC provides several pricing models for its customers:
Most of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud customers are B2C and B2B organizations of any scale, aimed to provide their visitors with an advanced user experience regardless of how many users there are. At the same time, the platform is most often chosen by medium and large companies (50 employees or more). However, any business that needs to ensure a top-notch eCommerce experience in the easiest and most cost-effective way can also choose this solution.
As for specific business industries, Salesforce’s official website claims that their product can be used for different niches, including the following ones:
Salesforce definitely deserves your attention if you’re looking for a comprehensive solution for creating a scalable eCommerce platform. With it, you will get powerful tools for content management, automation, analytics, business process management, customer interaction, and much more. Also, this product supports dozens of third-party integrations available in AppExchange, which can be useful if the default features of Salesforce are not enough for you.
At the same time, migration and transferring of data to Salesforce from an old Customer Relationship Management (CMS) system can be quite a difficult task. Moreover, you also need to accurately assess your budget to ensure you can keep your updated online store up and running. So, if you want to get the most out of this migration without unnecessary expenses, feel free to contact us. We will estimate time and financial costs for this procedure and perform it safely and fast, with no downtime.
The Salesforce team has presented dozens of success stories on its website from world-renowned companies that have optimized the shopping experience through the capabilities of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Below, we’ll briefly review three of them.
U.S. Bank, a popular U.S. bank with 73,000 employees, has been using Salesforce since 2009. While many banks choose to interact with customers locally, this one decided to create a centralized, unified platform to provide a consistent customer experience no matter where these clients are located.
In practice, this implies introducing a single customer base, which must be extended through all available channels: mobile, desktop, offline, etc. The company currently has 3,000 branches in 25 states, and thanks to Salesforce, the conversion rate of potential customers has increased during the cooperation by 2.35 times.
Ovation Medical, which sells orthopedic products, has doubled its productivity and improved customer service in four weeks thanks to Salesforce’s choice. The main reason for using this platform was the COVID-19 pandemic, which shifted the focus of businesses to online sales. The company had over 12,000 customers across the US and needed a solution to accelerate the transition of B2B customers to online shopping.
As for Salesforce, this product was used to launch a digital commerce platform that automated and streamlined repetitive business operations and sales processes. As a result, since the launch of the new website in mid-2020, the processing time for repeat orders has been halved.
L’Oreal has partnered with SFCC to provide unique beauty experiences with a data-driven approach. Salesforce delivered these experiences, ensuring connecting data from each touchpoint into a single source of truth about each consumer while respecting their data privacy.
To get to know its customers better, L’Oreal implemented Salesforce Commerce Cloud to use throughout all the stages of the sales funnel real-time data. As a result, the company got the most out of the power of Beauty Tech to become more inclusive and sustainable for its consumers.
Now you know about all the benefits and features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and can make an informed choice for or against this decision. As for developing online stores based on this CRM system, you better turn to real pros. NIX offers you our services in Salesforce development and migration. We have implemented Salesforce success stories for different business niches helping our clients to achieve their goals, and now we are happy to apply our knowledge and experience to your business idea. Feel free to contact us to discuss your project in detail.
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