Salesforce for retail: features, success stories & payoffs
June 7, 2024
Salesforce equips retailers with industry-specific tools and generic CRM functionality to streamline their ecommerce and in-store operations, offer omnichannel, personalized buying journeys, and build long-term customer relationships.
Relying on our extensive Salesforce expertise, we provide an overview of Commerce Cloud and other useful products for both online retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses, along with real-life examples and benefits of Salesforce adoption in this sector.
Retail-oriented Salesforce products
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce offers an industry-specific solution Commerce Cloud that streamlines ecommerce CRM processes. Commerce Cloud includes products focusing on specific aspects of ecommerce that companies can access through various licensing plans for different types of retail businesses, including B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, and D2C Commerce. You can take a look at all the plans and respective pricing options on the Salesforce website.
Digital storefronts
Setting up online stores with ready-made templates and building storefronts as progressive web apps for a smoother browsing experience. Connecting your storefront with other buying channels using headless APIs and enhancing it with Einstein (Salesforce’s built-in AI) for personalized product recommendations.
Customer Acquisition & Loyalty
Aggregating customer data into unified profiles and analyzing captured information to create personalized buying experiences. Integrating your CRM with social media or ad networks to engage customers across multiple channels and drive traffic to your website.
Commerce AI
Delivering personalized product offers and promotions, generating storefront webpages and SEO-optimized product descriptions, analyzing buying behavior and purchase trends, and serving customers with virtual shopping assistants.
Order management
Centralizing order history, payment terms, and other relevant data, configuring automated workflows for order summary creation and fulfillment via out-of-the-box flow templates, and automating payment creation, invoice generation, and refund processing.
Inventory Management
Monitoring current stock levels to verify product availability, planning promotions based on product availability data, and reserving specific product quantities for orders while automatically adjusting the availability accordingly.
Embedded Commerce Apps
Embedding ecommerce apps and online services into your CRM and sales channels to expand their capabilities, including reordering portals, order support features (service consoles, customer support chatbots, etc.), and the pay now functionality (such as payment links embedded into an invoice PDF).
Reporting & Insights
Monitoring KPIs like site traffic, volume of orders, sales amount by channel, and top-selling promotions through customizable dashboards to optimize your business strategy.
Additional tools
Salesforce also offers retail-specific services to integrate the CRM platform with other systems and extend its out-of-the-box capabilities. Furthermore, Salesforce provides a specialized Cloud for consumer goods companies. As for other branches of retail, Salesforce does not offer dedicated tools but suggests certain combinations of generic products for each retail store type (fashion, grocery, etc.).
MuleSoft Accelerator for Retail
Streamlining integration between Salesforce and other third-party tools (ERP software, order management systems, customer data platforms, PIM software, etc.) via pre-built APIs and connectors to sync customer profiles, sales orders, and inventory data in real time.
Retail apps on AppExchange
Expanding and customizing Salesforce functionality with pre-built and pre-integrated apps available on Salesforce’s marketplace.
Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud’s Retail Execution
Establishing product assortments and placement at each store, managing in-store promotions, and planning sales rep visits and related tasks (such as inventory checks) at specific locations.
Implement your retail Salesforce solution with Itransition’s guidance
Industry-agnostic Salesforce functionality for retailers
Aside from retail-specific capabilities, Salesforce has a broad offering of generic, feature-rich solutions that can be a valuable addition to the CRM toolkit of any retailer. Here are some examples of key Salesforce products for marketing, sales, and customer service.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Marketing Cloud Personalization
Personalizing web pages, marketing campaigns, or in-app experiences in real time with the help of content and interactions that are tailored to customers’ browsing behavior and historical data.
- Marketing Cloud Engagement
Building web and in-app customer journeys via drag-and-drop tools and personalizing each shopping journey with content and multichannel messages (emails, in-app push messaging, etc.) triggered in real time based on customer data.
- Marketing Cloud Intelligence
Integrating your CRM solution with multiple advertising channels or platforms through pre-built connectors for monitoring marketing campaign performance, receiving AI-powered suggestions on media plan improvements, and optimizing budget allocation.
- Customer Loyalty
Establishing B2B or B2C loyalty programs, defining loyalty tiers and related benefits (coupons, discounts, etc.) based on qualifying points, registering loyalty program members, and rewarding them with personalized promotions based on member data.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Revenue Lifecycle Management
Generating more accurate quotes for configured products via CPQ features, syncing shopping carts between your app and website to create a unified shopping experience, and automating payments and respective notifications for timely collection.
- Sales Engagement
Making your engagement strategies more effective with the help of lead ranking and prioritization, automated email follow-ups, and virtual buyer assistants integrated into your website.
- Sales Team Productivity
Supporting your sales reps with real-time deal alerts to track sales pipeline progress, pre-built templates for easier account planning, and sales dashboards to gain full visibility into accounts and opportunities.
- Revenue Intelligence
Predicting sales based on historical data from comparable periods, identifying opportunities to grow sales in new segments, monitoring sales team and individual sales rep performance, and getting recommendations on the best next actions to close a deal.
Salesforce Service Cloud
- Agent & Mobile Worker Productivity
Automating the distribution of support cases among available service agents and providing them with relevant customer data and knowledge articles selected by Einstein to facilitate case resolution.
- Einstein Bots
Implementing multi-channel (in-app, web, etc.) bots to provide customers with automated intelligent assistance, including addressing password reset requests, providing order status updates, or answering questions on store locations and hours.
- Intelligent Service Operations
Maximizing visibility into your support operations via AI-based data analytics and customer feedback tools, including conversation mining to identify common contact reasons or analytical dashboards to track service performance KPIs (CSAT, total escalated cases, etc.), along with survey tools that dynamically adjust questions based on customer responses.
- Contact Center
Setting up contact centers featuring embedded telephony and live chat and messaging, self-service help centers providing customers with a knowledge base of articles to address commonly asked questions, and customer communities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
Real-life examples of Salesforce adoption in retail
Salesforce adoption benefits for the retail industry
Data-driven decision-making
Combining excellent integration capabilities with AI-powered customer and sales data analytics, Salesforce can help retailers optimize their operations based on actionable insights, including prioritizing the right leads and fine-tuning product assortments.
Enhanced efficiency
From AI-powered online content generation and customer service chatbots to triggered actions throughout customer journeys, Salesforce offers multiple automation opportunities to minimize manual efforts and make your CRM processes more efficient.
Increased profits
With its comprehensive marketing and sales functionality to segment leads, rank them, and target them with personalized offers and product recommendations, Salesforce can maximize your conversion rates and boost sales.
Long-term customer loyalty
Salesforce offers a wide range of features to deliver a better customer experience and strengthen relationships with clients via personalized buying journeys, efficient customer support, and enticing loyalty programs.
Our Salesforce services for retail businesses
As a certified Salesforce Partner with extensive experience in retail software development, Itransition can help enterprises and small businesses implement Salesforce solutions tailored to their unique goals while factoring in broader, industry-specific requirements.
- Audit of your existing CRM solution, if any
- Definition of a CRM solution’s functional and non-functional requirements
- Salesforce edition and feature set selection
- Implementation roadmapping and budgeting
- Configuration and customization consultancy
- User training and ongoing support
- Salesforce retail CRM configuration and customization
- Salesforce integration with your software ecosystem
- QA and user acceptance testing
- Salesforce deployment to the company’s environment
- Data migration from your legacy CRM to Salesforce
Turn to Itransition's team for seamless Salesforce adoption
Making retail customer-centric with Salesforce
With increasingly diverse audiences and growing demand for tailored buyer's journeys, retailers have turned to CRM solutions that centralize customer data and help them address the specific needs of each client. Salesforce adopters can tap into a vast range of tools to provide each prospective or existing client with personalized experiences at each stage of the customer journey, from awareness to onboarding and long-term retention.
To make the most of this popular CRM platform through suitable customizations and integrations, consider relying on an experienced Salesforce partner like Itransition.
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