The retail industry is experiencing tremendous disruption. The advent and fast growth of e-commerce, and the rise of mobile have changed the game for all retailers, including brick-and-mortar stores. And this isn’t just happening in the U.S., it’s happening all around the world.
While many retailers are struggling to keep their heads above water, there are some who are thriving despite these challenges and changing consumer trends. These companies are innovating at a rapid pace, adapting to new realities, and reaching new customers.
As consumer expectations continue to evolve, retailers are finding that they need to re-evaluate their strategies in order to stay relevant. They're looking at new ways of marketing, selling, and interacting with customers — whether through social media or chatbots — and the technology they use to do so.
This shift presents both an opportunity and a challenge for retailers. Salesforce offers a powerful platform that helps retailers to address these challenges head-on.
Also Read: Salesforce for Retail - Drive Customer Experience & Loyalty
Salesforce retail CRM for retail is a powerful, easy-to-use platform that offers flexible, enterprise-grade functionality and a wide range of customer-facing applications. It provides you with the tools to manage your entire business from one place, including your customer relationships, sales processes, and inventory.
Retail companies use Salesforce cloud for retail to drive revenue growth by improving their customer experiences across multiple channels. The solution helps retailers close more deals faster by providing them with insights into customer behavior that they can use to personalize their interactions with shoppers.
At the heart of retail execution is the ability to deliver the right product to the right customer, at the right time and place. Whether it's a new product launch or an unexpected surge in demand, retailers need a way to manage inventory and replenish stores in real-time.
Salesforce helps retailers execute on these critical elements by providing a single platform for order management, fulfillment, and supply chain management.
With Salesforce, retailers can:
o Manage inventory across channels — from physical stores to eCommerce websites
o Centralize product data across all channels for improved visibility into sales trends
o Gain insight into customer purchase behavior across multiple channels to drive more personalized marketing activities
1. Customer Insights: Salesforce provides retailers with deep customer insights through a single view of their customer data across all channels, devices, and relationships. By combining this information with their own data, retailers can identify key trends in consumer spending habits and preferences — so they can better align their marketing activities with what matters most to their customers.
2. Unified data architecture: Salesforce has built its own Customer 360 capability, which allows retailers to view all of their customers' relationships in one place. This enables retailers to make more informed decisions about how best to engage with each individual customer — whether it's through email marketing or direct mail, for example. Unified data architecture builds upon this by bringing together all of the different systems that retailers use into one single system so that they can share information across departments and teams. This helps them better understand their customers, which in turn leads to more targeted marketing campaigns that actually work because they know exactly who they're targeting.
3. Personalization: Personalized shopping experiences are the future of retail. The ability to customize a shopping experience for every single customer is critical to building better relationships with them and ultimately driving more sales. It’s also incredibly challenging to achieve. If you want to take personalization beyond just knowing who your customers are, if you want to know what they want and when they want it, then you need a data platform that can handle all of this information and more. That’s where Salesforce comes in!
4. In-store engagement: One-way retailers can improve their in-store experience is by using Salesforce to give shoppers what they want: a personalized shopping experience that helps them find exactly what they're looking for. With Salesforce, retailers have access to predictive insights that can help them anticipate customer needs and offer relevant recommendations — such as where to place products or even how much inventory they should order. This lets retailers improve their product display and placement, while also increasing sales.
5. Omni-channel experience: Retailers have a unique set of challenges. They need to provide customers with an easy shopping experience across all channels, including mobile apps and websites, social media, and more. And they need to do it while managing inventory, orders, customer data, and more in real-time. Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers solutions for every step of the customer journey — from e-commerce to fulfillment. It helps retailers create personalized offerings that meet customer needs while also building trust through personalized recommendations and reviews.
6. Real-time visibility: Salesforce Retail provides you with real-time visibility into your business through its intuitive yet powerful interface. You can view reports on-demand or create custom reports on any aspect of your business by integrating with other apps.
7. Better decision making: With Salesforce Retail, you’ll have access to rich insights about your customers so you can make better decisions about how to engage them and retain them over time. This empowers you to understand what they want from your brand so that you can give it to them – which in turn will help increase sales and customer satisfaction both today and in the future!
AppShark is a Salesforce Gold Consulting & Product Development Partner that has been in business for more than 10 years. We provide Salesforce services to many of the largest retailers in the world. Our Salesforce services for retailers include Salesforce implementation, customization, integration, support, and staffing. Feel free to contact us, or mail us at sales@appshark.com