Salesforce for Retail Industry – Automate Sales Processes to Improve Customer Experiences

Keeping customers’ loyalty is a challenging job for retailers. Social media platforms, marketing, and improved accessibility influence customer behavior. So, it’s essential to comprehend customer behavior for increased sales and revenue.

To understand customer preferences and buying patterns, retailers, whether for online or physical stores, opt for Customer Relationship Management systems that provide effective and efficient customer experiences per their requirements. 

Among numerous CRMs available worldwide, Salesforce for Retail is mainly picked by enterprises. Ruling the CRM software market, Salesforce’s market share reached 23.8%, leading the closest competitors, like Oracle and Microsoft. 

Is your retail business failing to attain better customer retention, automate mundane jobs, improve customer loyalty, and boost sales? You are on the right page. We will scan every detail about Salesforce to know how it can benefit the retail industry. 

Let’s get the ball rolling!

Understanding Salesforce Retail Solutions

A cloud-based platform, Salesforce Retail Solutions allows retail brands to have a 360-degree view of their customers and track customer interactions and sales data, managing contacts, opportunities, leads, and cases. Be it in-store or e-commerce shopping, with retail CRM, you will get the best of both worlds.

Retailers are adopting the Salesforce CRM platform to create a unified experience across mobile, web, brick-and-mortar, and almost every channel to optimize customer engagement and marketing initiatives.

The Impacts Of Salesforce In The Retail Industry: Facts & Figures

Words don’t make sense until showcased with proofs. Here, we will uncover market statistics illustrating how retailers benefit from using Salesforce.

• Per 2023 reports, smaller markets, like Latin America (LAM) and the Middle East and Africa (MEA), witnessed robust digital commerce growth at 7% and 21% annually.
• Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), in 2022, experienced a rebalancing of in-store sales and digital marketing.
• Around 80% of Fortune 500 brands use Salesforce to boost customer relationships and expand their businesses.
• An organization’s multiple departments use Salesforce with approximate usage percentage: 40% by the sales department, 20% by marketing, 10% by IT, 20% by customer service, and 5% by HR and finance.

Role Of Salesforce In Revolutionizing Retail

When talking about Salesforce for retail stores, we have read it’s very helpful. But how?

In this section, we will get deeper into how Salesforce is gaining traction in the retail industry.

1. Targeted Campaign

Salesforce is best at providing insights into customer behavior, insights, and interests. Also, by leveraging its advanced segmentation tools, marketers consider varied criteria and target campaigns. Salesforce campaigns give a push to businesses in varied processes of the marketing cycle, helping them organize assets and marketing plans.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a Salesforce product, helps retailers create targeted marketing campaigns across varied channels that, in turn, boost customer acquisition.

2. Personalize Path-to-Purchase

One of the essential CRM components is personalization; if your business lags in satisfying customers with a personalized shopping experience, the chances of switching are quite high.

As stated by McKinsey & Company, by offering personalization, companies grow faster by up to 40%.

Customers expect a high-quality buying experience across every channel. Here, retailers must ensure a fully integrated and hassle-free buying experience for their customers whether they visit their website, retail outlet, or e-commerce app.

Salesforce for the retail industry helps retailers personalize every path-to-purchase with targeted campaigns, real conversations, scalable journeys, and leveraging data and insights to create personalized customer experiences to boost customer engagement, improve conversions, and drive repeat purchases.

3. Conduct Real Conversation

Sufficient customer communication may lead to robust trust, ultimate satisfaction, and increased customer loyalty. Also, by connecting with them, retailers will understand how to meet their custom needs and demands, ultimately resulting in elevated sales.

Salesforce helps retailers in conducting real conversations by providing several features:

• Salesforce Live Chat: By integrating this support solution into your apps and websites, you can communicate with your customers and send automated chat invitations.
• Messaging: By harnessing the power of messaging web, apps, or in-app chat, you can deliver a consistent customer experience. You can even access the message you post on your company’s Facebook page from Salesforce.
• Chat Buttons: On your web pages, you can add chat buttons and send automatic invitations. Or, using the Chat Buttons option, you can create a chat button.
• Digital Engagement: At the same time, you can turn on multiple channels, including messaging apps, in-app, or web chat.

3. Purchase & Order Procurement

Inventory management, customer orders management, and a seamless procurement process are essential in the retail industry.

Salesforce helps in this part by offering various platforms and applications, specifically through Salesforce Order Management. This system eases and unifies how retailers handle their purchase and order procurement process through real-time inventory visibility, centralized order management, automated procurement processes, etc.

4. Integrate with Invoicing

Integrating your retail business with invoice processing solutions can benefit you in many ways, like streamlining business processes, reducing manual errors, saving valuable time, and enhancing customer experience.

Salesforce provides an automated billing and invoicing platform, Salesforce Billing, that helps retail businesses transform their revenue by automating subscription billing, milestone billing, product billing, and custom billing with recurring invoices.

5. Loyalty Management

In the retail industry, foundation, and sustainability is customer loyalty. By forming robust relationships with your customers and rewarding their loyalty, you bestow a base to a loyal customer base. It makes them come back, become brand advocates, and spend more, driving word-of-mouth.

The loyalty management platform of Salesforce acts as a helping hand for retailers to create loyalty programs for customers that include tools, strategies, and tactics for engaging, acquiring, and retaining customers.

6. Omnichannel Marketing

An omnichannel in retail is a method of fusing the benefits of in-store shopping with the ease of online to deliver enhanced customer experiences. It lets the customers interact with multiple sales and media channels simultaneously while moving between outlets and websites in a single go.

Omnichannel retailing allows customers to interact with various sales and media channels, from desktop through mobile to in-store. Ahead, its tools track and accumulate customer activity across various channels by digitally unifying a wide range of shopping preferences for better understanding. Further, this helps in improving shopping experiences.

7. Customer Analytics

Customer analytics is one of the best elements to improve customer experience, make better decisions, and craft better products. It’s the process of gathering and analyzing customer data. The data comes from apps, websites, feedback surveys, and social media.

With Salesforce, businesses gain valuable customer insights into customer behavior and preferences. It helps seamlessly understand customer behavior, identify trends, track performance metrics, optimize marketing strategies, drive better customer outcomes, and improve customer service.

8. Single Intelligent Platform

Salesforce is a complete suite of apps and products contributing to each step of the customer journey, from lead generation to loyalty. You will find everything on a single platform easily. Whatever the business size or industry type, this solution will emerge best for you.

Identifying Retail Industry Challenges

Let’s dig out some of the biggest challenges that come to sight in the retail landscape.

1. Evolving Customer Expectations

Today, with the revolutionizing retail industry, consumers’ expectations are morphing and surfacing with changing buying patterns, seamless omnichannel and personal experiences, and more.

Expected Solution: Here, a suitable CRM platform with the power of trending technologies, like AI and ML, can help retailers analyze customer behavior and purchasing patterns, personalize their marketing strategies, and deliver custom shopping experiences across varied channels.

2. Supply Chain Disruptions

Different factors, like trade disputes, transportation delays, and natural disasters, hit the supply chain management, leaving retailers lagging.

Expected Solution: For retail success, resilient network development and diversifying supply chains can help. This includes collaborating with suppliers, leveraging predictive analytics to foresee potential disruptions, and emerging with alternative options.

3. Data Privacy and Security

The increasing data collection and technology use has elevated security breaches and privacy concerns.

Expected Solution: Retailers should ensure compliance with suitable regulations and prioritize data security. Besides, it’s essential to conduct regular audits, implement strong cybersecurity measures, and train employees in data privacy best practices.

4. Elevating E-Commerce Competition

The growth of eCommerce has increased competition, with giants expanding and winning a huge chunk of consumer spending.

Expected Solution: A robust online presence and improved e-commerce solutions would be of great help. It includes building user-friendly websites, providing seamless online shopping experiences, and mobile device optimization.

Salesforce Retail Solutions: Addressing Industry Challenges

Retailers target three chief objectives: attract, acquire, and retain consumers; reach buyers everywhere regardless of location; and embrace the store’s functionality and employees’ capabilities.

For the same, they harness the powerful solutions and tools from Salesforce. Here, we will unbox the solutions that help attain these goals.

Commerce Cloud

The cloud-based e-commerce platform Salesforce Commerce Cloud helps retailers manage online stores, smoothens connections with consumers, and boosts sales. With this platform, retail enterprises can pace up customer order delivery worldwide, automate payment processes, and keep track of returns and order cancellations.

Marketing Cloud

One more product of Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, appears beneficial for retailers to create personalized marketing campaigns for varied channels, like email, social media, and mobile. Also, it arrives with analytics tools that measure campaigns’ effectiveness and make data-driven decisions.

Sales Cloud

This cloud-based CRM platform supports marketing, sales, and customers in business-to-customer and business-to-business contexts. Businesses leverage the power of this Salesforce product for sales process management and improving sales performance. The sales department of organizations manages end-to-end operations, like creating salesforce campaigns, logging product information, triggering emails, managing customer contacts, etc.

Service Cloud

When you seek to provide service and support to your business customers with no hassle, Salesforce Service Cloud will help you meet your goal. This Salesforce CRM product is picked by sales professionals to automate business processes and streamline workflows. The aim is to build one-to-one marketing relationships with each consumer across multiple devices and channels.

Community Cloud

Leveraging the power of Salesforce Community Cloud, retailers can improve customer service and leave consumers satisfied by creating online communities for them and the organization’s members. This way, customers can easily interact with each other and even access the support material.

Einstein

Salesforce surfaced with a well-integrated set of artificial intelligence technologies for the Salesforce CRM platform, Salesforce Einstein. It is available for a comprehensive suite of Salesforce products, Customer 360. When infused with CRM and data, Einstein brushes up Salesforce Customer 360 and helps companies perform everything from resolving service issues and expecting new sales opportunities to crafting predictive journeys and personalized customer experiences.

Mulesoft

Retailers ease their IT teams into getting data from systems like CRM, ERP, commerce, marketing, and MDM (master data management), harnessing the strength of the MuleSoft Accelerator to activate digital projects rapidly. It benefits the team with pre-built APIs, implementation templates, reference architecture, and connectors to create custom 360 profiles.

Tableau

A free platform, Tableau Public lets retailers explore, create, and share online data visualizations with the public. Besides, this product lets you connect, collaborate, and share tips and tricks with data enthusiasts worldwide. Here, everyone can find deep inspiration and learn from each other.

Salesforce AppExchange

A cloud marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange comes with solutions, apps, and consultants. Retailers find it beneficial for improving efficiencies, boosting sales, and optimizing customer experience. Salesforce partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) developed Salesforce AppExchange solutions, like components, apps, flow solutions, bolt solutions, apps, and consultants.

Advantages Of Implementing Salesforce In Retail

With the Salesforce retail solution, you can manage your customers by tracking and understanding their behavior and buying patterns. This way, you can provide a better customer experience throughout their journey.

This is not enough; let’s explore more of the chief benefits of Salesforce for retail stores.

1. Improved Customer Service

You can offer the expected services and support by keeping in touch with your consumers, listening to their needs, creating robust relationships, and quickly responding to their requests with a CRM.

2. Boost Customer Retention

Salesforce allows retailers to reach their customers directly by offering personalized content. With improved targeting, retail businesses drive more conversions. While working with a CRM, the users can choose preferable communication channels for their customers separately and connect with them accordingly.

3. Elevate Sales

By harnessing the power of Customer Relationship Management solutions, businesses streamline their sales cycle, leading to more closed deals and boosting sales revenue. Also, CRMs automate admin jobs and data organization and reduce product costs.

4. Improve Profitability

Retail businesses can diminish spending on ineffective marketing using CRMs and make successful marketing campaigns with an increased ROI.

5. Enhance Internal Communication

Retail businesses can make the best use of CRMs to improve communications to ease everyone with every lead and consumer on the same page.

6. Better Customer Interaction

CRMs help retailers get important details about their customers to enhance customer interaction. This way, customers are influenced by businesses’ capability to answer every question without cross-questioning.

Leveraging AI In Retail With Salesforce

With a constant urge to improve customer experience, enhance efficiency, and drive sales, the advancements have chosen AI integration into retail operations.

The inclusion of AI helps retailers streamline processes, gain valuable insights, and offer personalized experiences to their consumers. And when it comes to infusing AI in the retail industry, Salesforce has always been at the forefront.

1. Enhanced Customer Service

AI integration in Salesforce improves customer service. AI-powered Chatbots handle customer inquiries, offer product recommendations, and allow transactions.

Benefits

• Frees up staff to let them focus on other complex issues.
• Ensures prompt and accurate customer assistance at any time.

2. AI-powered Predictive Analytics

Through predictive analytics in Salesforce, AI helps the retail industry in many ways. It makes the platform analyze huge data volumes and identify the trends and patterns that again save the cost of hiring human analysts.

Benefits

• Retailers can make informed decisions about pricing strategies, inventory management, and customer engagement.
• Predict customer behavior and preferences, leveraging which retailers can customize their product offerings and marketing efforts.

3. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

As we have read, AI eases retailers in creating targeted marketing campaigns by using customer data and behavior analysis. Ahead, AI-powered Salesforce lets users segment their customer base and provide personalized content, recommendations, and offerings.

Benefits

• Frees up staff to let them focus on other complex issues.
• Ensures prompt and accurate customer assistance at any time.

4. AI-powered Predictive Analytics

Through predictive analytics in Salesforce, AI helps the retail industry in many ways. It makes the platform analyze huge data volumes and identify the trends and patterns that again save the cost of hiring human analysts.

Benefits

• Retailers can make informed decisions about pricing strategies, inventory management, and customer engagement.
• Predict customer behavior and preferences, leveraging which retailers can customize their product offerings and marketing efforts.

5. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

As we have read, AI eases retailers in creating targeted marketing campaigns by using customer data and behavior analysis. Ahead, AI-powered Salesforce lets users segment their customer base and provide personalized content, recommendations, and offerings.

Benefits

• Increase customer engagement
• Drive Sales
• Optimize time and delivery channels of marketing campaigns.

6. Fraud Detection and Prevention

With the help of AI, retailers can identify and avoid fraudulent activities. In Salesforce, businesses analyze real-time transaction data and detect suspicious patterns and anomalies.

Benefits

• Take immediate action to ward off potential fraud, protecting businesses and customers.

7. Inventory Management and Demand Forecasting

Retailers always need effective inventory management to reduce stockouts and overstock scenarios. In Salesforce, AI plays a major role in inventory level optimization by analyzing past sales data, the latest market trends, and external factors like economic indicators.

Benefits

• Make precise demand forecasts that help adjust inventory levels.
• Diminish carrying costs.

8. Pricing Strategies Optimization

With the power of AI, retailers determine the optimal pricing strategies for the products they sell. AI in Salesforce lets businesses analyze varied factors, like demand elasticity, competitor pricing, and customer behavior, to suggest pricing adjustments that boost profitability while being competitive.

Benefits

• Increase or decrease product pricing that boosts customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty.

Case Studies: Salesforce Success In Retail

Numerous companies succeeded with Salesforce. Let’s check a few:

TOMS

Established Year: 2006

Requirements:

Build robust and long-term relationships with customers and connect their employees.

Obviously, businesses are launched with the aim of increasing sales. But here, TOMS gives equal importance to charity, too. It works on the One for One business model, which states it gives a pair of shoes for free on every product it sells.

“TOMS was built on a movement, a sense of community, and caring for needy people. We grew fast, and it became increasingly difficult to keep deep connections with customers beyond a grassroots level,” said Hilda Fontana, Global Vice President of Digital Technologies. 

“We turned to Salesforce to build even stronger and longer-lasting customer relationships and connect our employees.” 

“We aren’t measuring ourselves by the traditional service metrics of call volume or resolution times,” explained Fontana. “We care about customer happiness, satisfaction, and long-term relationships.” 

“Salesforce will give us a view of every facet of our customer interactions. It’s key to continuing to grow and nurture all of our relationships and deliver on our movement and mission,” said Fontana.

Solution:

The company started with a Service Cloud implementation service to help the US and European call centers manage inquiries and phone calls on social media. With the growing company, TOMS uses Salesforce to maintain personal customer connections.

DUNKIN’ BRANDS

Requirements:

Participate and monitor conversations about their brand to effectively drive word-of-mouth, increase fan loyalty, and create brand awareness for repeat business and referrals.

A leader in leveraging social technologies for long-term customer connection.

John Costello, President, Global Marketing and Innovation, explains, “Being social is not just about winning fans and influencing followers. It’s about sharing content that inspires our customers (and their friends), and giving them the opportunity to engage with us.”

Solution:

Dunkin’ Brands harnesses the power of Social Studio from Marketing Cloud to participate in brand conversations.

Choosing The Right Salesforce Partner For Retail Solutions

Various Salesforce companies are thriving worldwide, offering clients the best Salesforce retail solutions by helping them boost their advertising revenue, optimize campaign performance, and scale media operations.

If you are also looking to improve your customer experience, improve efficiency, and elevate sales, you should connect with a leading Salesforce development company, Emizentech, now!

Why? Get an answer to this.

Key Highlights of Emizentech

• Dedicated and Certified Salesforce Consultants
• End-to-End Salesforce Services
• Impressive Service Portfolio
• Follow Proven Methodologies
• Robust Industry Expertise

Final Thoughts

While wrapping up, we acknowledge that Salesforce for Retail always has a CRM solution that goes perfectly with specific business needs. With Salesforce, you can conduct real conversations with your clients, personalize path-to-purchase, create targeted campaigns, build and manage loyalty programs, etc.

Connect with a Salesforce consultant to learn about the Salesforce retail solutions and get assistance on how to set up a suitable strategy to connect with your customers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)