Customer service is king in today’s business world. Making sure they have a good experience with you is essential to building a relationship with your customers. Ensuring customer satisfaction will eventually help you retain them. This makes the customer experience of utmost importance.
Customer experience (CX) management takes care of the entire process from start to finish. Ensuring a good customer experience demands businesses be keen on details right from the beginning, which is the purchase.
The entire process includes making targeted content to catch the customer’s attention, providing a good e-commerce shopping experience, and offering post-sale services to keep your customers engaged with your business. Salesforce helps you throughout this process.
How do customers interact with the business?
Nowadays, customers use multiple channels to interact with businesses. They can use any platform to browse through your product or service catalogue and make a purchase. As a business, you need to ensure that the customer has a good experience, no matter what their point of contact with the business is. When a customer chooses to interact with the business offline, your staff can ensure they have a good experience, but the same is not possible online. For that, you have to employ different tools. Salesforce customer experience tools help you build a model that is suitable for your business to efficiently interact with your customers and keep them engaged, using the insights offered by the Salesforce platform and Salesforce commerce cloud.
What is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Formerly known as Demandware, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an e-commerce platform designed to help businesses interact with customers more effectively. It is a user-friendly platform that helps businesses grow their brand, find new business opportunities, make more sales, and convert customers in an efficient and simple manner.
This cloud-based commerce platform is an ideal fit for any growing business that is looking to create memorable customer experiences, irrespective of the channels of interaction.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers many features that allow businesses to connect with customers at every stage of their shopping journey. The Commerce Cloud facilitates smooth transitioning between two channels of business. In this way, the business is connected across any platform and any phase of engagement with its customers.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud does not just serve as a way to run your business online; it also helps them create a good shopping experience for their customers. It is a cloud-based e-commerce platform loaded with useful features for the business to create a stimulating shopping experience for its customers regardless of the channels such as mobile, web, store, social, etc.
How can Salesforce Commerce Cloud help a business?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud helps with coordinating orders and managing them, maintaining the online store, predictive intelligence to enhance customer experience, etc. It helps a business make the shopping experience more memorable, engaging, and customised for each customer on every digital channel.
There are three main service categories in Salesforce Commerce Cloud: intelligence, experience, and operations. They work in harmony to enforce every stage of cross-channel commerce. With all the changes in technology and shifts in consumer buying behaviour, the seamless Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform gives a business more control over its operations and helps them learn more through the data collected on engagement and transactions. It also helps with customer service, building lasting customer relationships, analytics, and developing a community of customers.
How can Salesforce Commerce Cloud be used to enhance the customer experience?
A business can use the following Salesforce Commerce Cloud features to improve a customer’s experience with them:
1. Commerce Cloud digital
SFCC provides you with the tools and mobile frameworks required to create a fully responsive website. With the help of Commerce Cloud Digital, a business can present its storefront online on various social media platforms to reach its target audience.
Not only can you create an interactive online store, but you can also improve search functions, improve mobile payment, diminish cases of cart abandonment, and build your own app to further enhance the customer’s experience on mobile.
2. Commerce portals
This feature helps a business track customer behaviour on the online store and curate loyalty programmes to attract and retain them. It helps build long-lasting customer relationships with customised content and programmes for customers.
It also helps you create content that guides the customer throughout the process of shopping in the online store. You can deliver targeted content and updates through newsletters, forums, and social media platforms.
3. Storefront reference architecture
This feature allows a business to create a custom website for its brand using its advanced framework. It provides pre-made wireframes, embedded digital technologies, and other integrations for further customizations that allow you to maintain a professional website.
4. Commerce platform
SFCC has a variety of templates, commerce APIs, developer tools, etc. for people with no training in coding languages. This helps them build an e-commerce website. It makes it possible to use data from all digital channels to get specific insights into customer experience feedback in SFCC itself.
5. Commerce Cloud endless aisle
SFCC allows a business to combine its shopping channels to make the process of purchasing much easier for the customers and also for the store team. You can create a personalised customer experience and give access to the customer database to your team members.
This also allows them to access information on the inventory online. With this feature, your customers can make their wishlists in your online store. You can use this to reduce offline sales by providing special offers on the brands in the online store.
6. Order management
SFCC helps you improve the order fulfilment process and allows you to seamlessly deliver orders to customers anywhere in the world. It also helps you automate the process of payments and take care of returned and cancelled orders.
How can you benefit from using the Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
1. Improved scalability
E-commerce platforms must be scalable as the business keeps expanding. With huge brands comes huge traffic. Your website should be scalable enough to handle this traffic.
It should be able to offer a smooth customer experience, regardless of the volume of traffic. SFCC offers tools that help businesses deal with traffic surges, automate scaling, load pages faster, provide secure transactions, etc.
2. Omnichannel capabilities
SFCC can merge multiple aspects of a business into one SaaS solution. This includes e-commerce, managing orders, supporting offline store operations, etc. SFCC’s main goal is to empower retailers to operate their businesses across many channels on one platform. It is used to streamline functions like operations, sales, and fulfilment on a large scale.
3. Better marketing tools
Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables you to connect your customers with what they’re looking for. You can connect them to the right product, price, variety, offers, and content. It allows you to cater to your customers at the right time to improve the conversion rate and the average value of orders placed.
It gives you complete control over managing and sharing information about the products, such as images, catalogues, categories, etc. Combining these things across various websites with different languages and currencies is possible through SFCC. It offers you an all-in-one solution to manage marketing tools like advertising, email marketing, social media outreach, etc.
4. Intelligent platform
As your business grows, you will collect more data that will need segregation and thorough analysis. But it is a time-consuming process as there is a huge set of data that needs to be analysed to provide useful insights and outcomes for decision-making purposes. Salesforce created Einstein AI for this purpose.
It simplifies things by using artificial intelligence. The Einstein AI platform removes the need for manual analysis of data and the use of third-party extensions. It allows you to automate processes by integrating third-party AI tools.
5. Free to customise
SFCC allows you to freely decide how you want to build your brand’s customer experience. You can design a unique, user-friendly e-commerce website using SFCC.
6. Mobile-Friendly
Nowadays, mobile devices account for the majority of online traffic for websites. So, it is important that you optimise your website to be mobile-friendly. With SFCC, you can do so by creating an interactive and responsive website. It allows you to design an interface that works smoothly on mobiles and makes the shopping experience smooth for customers.
7. Internationalisation
SFCC allows businesses to manage multiple storefronts present in different locations around the world from a single platform. You can manage your product data for different stores on one platform. It also allows you to oversee functions like bill generation, product pricing and availability, etc.
8. Better customer support
SFCC provides customer support services 24/7. They cover issues like fixing codes, enhancing security, and resolving many other issues. This enables a business to be prompt with its customers and fix any hiccups with ease to provide a smooth experience.
Final thoughts
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a supercharged, scalable e-commerce platform that allows businesses to look after various aspects of the customer experience. SFCC is capable of taking care of merchandising, managing multiple stores, etc. through a single platform.
The decision to use Salesforce Commerce Cloud depends on the nature of your business, your needs and priorities, the level of customization needed, etc. Nevertheless, it simplifies the process of offering a smooth customer experience to ensure customer conversion and retention. Cloud Odyssey is a reputed Salesforce consulting firm with the most experienced SFCC team. We can help you with your e-commerce success goals by customising Salesforce Commerce Cloud features, and running your business can instantly turn into a cakewalk for you.
