CNX19 - Key takeaways for Multi-Product Owners in Retail

Salesforce Connections in Chicago a month ago really lived up to its names in connecting the dots on Salesforce's product strategy. Here's a value framework (personal POV) on what retailers, especially in digital product management (across commerce, marketing, and service) could pick up as key takeaways from all the flood of product announcements.

Design Productivity

One of the core value propositions of Salesforce has always been about productivity for developers to enable the element of speed in digital transformation. Page Designer, a new capability on our Commerce Cloud platform enables eCommerce developers to "quickly design rich, engaging ecommerce experiences without code" (image below).

The productivity value here is especially critical to consider for new campaigns, ad hoc promotions, or flash sales where the commerce team expects to be in front of customers immediately.

In our Marketing Cloud platform, Einstein Content Tagging is a true productivity play for marketers who constantly struggle to swiftly find appropriate product/campaign images in their folders (image below).

It uses the power of image recognition to automatically and accurately tag thousands of images within a content library (not to mention there is integration to all content apps such as Dropbox and Sitecore), helping marketers save time and locate the best image.

Einstein Map View and Exact Match is a productivity play designed for ChatBot developers. The new map view, in developing chatbot conversations, gives admins a visual guide (image below) to help design conversations, ensuring customers won’t get stuck in a dead-end during a service interaction due to overlooked coding error.

The new exact match capability lets admins quickly create intent models that train Einstein Bots to quickly recognize what customers are asking for and help them instantly. Building such models usually take many weeks, if not months.

Optimization

Optimization, i.e. the ability to deliver ROI whether through improving conversion rates, reducing resolution rates, etc. has never been more important for our commitment to Customer Success. This time, the ROI of email marketing with our Marketing Cloud platform has a stronger story through our Einstein Engagement Frequency and Einstein Send Optimization introduction.

Einstein Engagement Frequency "evaluates your email activities and identifies the optimum number of email messages to send", and Einstein Send Time Optimization "allows marketers to use a Journey Builder activity to select the best send time for each individual email subscriber, based on engagement" therefore focused on improving the Open/Click Rate KPI. Ofcourse, Salesforce has not forgotten about the ROI on Service Cloud with Einstein Bots - with the new dynamic routing capability, the chatbots direct customers to a specific queue based on their conversation, ensuring customers are on the best path to quick resolution with the right agents whereby impacting case resolution time.

Agility

Providing the future-integrated value of agility has been the center of Salesforce's core corporate value: Innovation. "Future-integrated" for retailers nowadays often mean the freedom on how to choose their front-end architecture in eCommerce & shopper apps, especially with trends to go headless (see How Do You Define Headless?). Salesforce understands that we must enable retailers, with minimum complexity, pair their online ecommerce experience with other customer touchpoints, such as mobile/app experiences, in-store experiences, social media, and user-generated content, or even with product experiences.

The answer to which we gave (for the time being) are Heroku Solution Kit for Commerce and Mulesoft Accelerator for Commerce Cloud. Heroku Solution Kit for Commerce (see image example below for Orsay's loyalty app) enables developers, in any coding language to build effective shopper mobile apps, including API-driven experiences, using Heroku.

Moreover, the launched SDK includes detailed steps on how to provide store associates with a branded clienteling application directly integrated with the shopper's online profile stored within Commerce Cloud. In essence, it allows retailers agility to test out apps (whether for shoppers or store associates) supporting a microservices architecture to run the PDCA cycle faster.

On the integration forefront, Mulesoft Accelerator for Commerce Cloud "codifies integration best practices for the most critical commerce APIs such as inventory, product, customer, order, payment, and notification and distills them into pre-built integration templates". The value the accelerator provides is that it directly alleviates the major disadvantage of headless commerce where additional layers of systems (and vendors) for a single site adds integration complexity. As a result, retailers can still minimize total cost of ownership despite having a system with many custom-build systems & apps and accelerate faster project delivery. See how ASICS delivered an eCommerce project 2.5x faster than original estimation.

X-Channel

The nirvana of any clicks and bricks retailers is delivering that unified, consistent, channel independent, domain agnostic customer journey (wow, that's many adjectives..). Considering today's customer uses an average of 10 different channels to contact their retailers, the Channel Menu capability on Service Cloud is a timely one as it can provide shoppers an effortless experience to access the retailer's service by integrating their preferred messaging channels (e.g. SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp) in communities, portals and websites (see image below).

It can be embedded anywhere in a website including "high traffic areas like checkout or home page, making it easily discoverable and accessible". In addition, now with the new WhatsApp and WeChat integration, Einstein Bots can now be deployed on multiple new messaging channels including SMS, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp.

The newly introduced next generation of Customer 360 which highlighted the conference was a manifesto from Salesforce in promising a true single view of the shopper. Our latest State of the Connected Customer Report found that 78% of customers expect consistent interactions with a company, yet only 50 percent of companies tailor their engagement based on a customer’s past interactions. Given this reality, Salesforce's answer to the market for CDP was only a logical extension of our CRM but with a consumer-scalable, data management and activation platform that can deliver a unified x-channel customer experience.

The new Customer 360 features include..

Scalable profile store: Master system of reference for all customer data from Salesforce apps, MuleSoft APIs, website and media interaction data, and any other data sources — including anonymous and first party data:

Segmentation tools: Segmentation tools will provide retailers to identify cohorts of shoppers to engage with, based on demographics, past interactions, and all other customer data in the above profile store:

X-channel activation tools: Once audience segments with the attributed profile have been identified, marketers can deliver personalized engagements across marketing, commerce and service from relevant email campaigns, customer service, ad impressions, based on a shopper’s previous interactions with a brand:

AI-powered insights: Retailers can now have deeper and wider insights to better understand customer preferences, their path to conversion and overall campaign performance:

Does this sound interesting to you? Which of the 4 values resonate with you the most? Should you are interested in joining the pilot program this fall, make sure you contact your Salesforce counterpart.