It’s exhilarating when you pick a winner. When you do it with software, you have to be a bit more circumspect. But underneath the muted exterior is a certain smugness. After all, pundits affirmed your choice. Well, those of you who have chosen Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud no doubt went through these emotions as they were named a leader in The Forrester WaveTM: B2B Commerce Suites, Q2 2020.
Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud was introduced last year after Salesforce purchased Cloud Craze. According to the report, “Salesforce offers its clients an unparalleled ecosystem of apps and advocates (“Trailblazers”) for innovating omnichannel experiences with low-code agility.[1]”
The tool now allows Salesforce to offer an end-to-end solution to B2B eCommerce providers.
Need to know customer history? Tie Commerce together with Salesforce’s CRM solution. Want to augment product information with video how-tos, documentation, and other supporting content? Connect it to Salesforce’s Knowledge Base. What about reviews? Loop in Salesforce’s Community offering.
For the past several years, the industry has been moving toward and embracing the notion of “headless vendors.” For some time now the industry has been shunning behemoth systems that ostensibly do everything – but in reality, tend to be too brittle for fickle public and volatile economy. Instead B2B eCommerce organizations have been moving toward constructing an archipelago of best of breed solutions.
With some canny shopping excursions themselves, Salesforce has come up with a sizable offering that is indeed best-of-breed. (Will they go after ERP systems next??!)
How Do You Personalize the Customer UX?
Now how do you personalize this customer experience? The overburdened collective You needs to normalize all the data, piece together a unified index across data models and formats. As anyone who has ever worked with databases will tell you – no one inputs data the same way. Doesn’t matter how much training, how many sticks, nor how many carrots, data in these systems tend to be incomplete at best.
And what about hyper-personalization? As you strive to build a complete view of your customer, are you having to unlock each customer’s data in individual channels? Are you stuck creating endless personas hoping that your customer mirrors one of them? Of the products that your buyers are interested in, can you (dynamically of course) boost those with the best margins? What about type ahead, autocomplete, and autosuggest? Are you stuck pouring through log files trying to figure out all the permutations that customers look for products? And how do you manage entitlements and pricing tiers?
The simple answer: You and an army of data cleansers just can’t do it alone. Your customers have been trained by the Netflixes and the Amazons of the world. There is no more faking personalization.
Fortunately, Salesforce came up with a solution to that too. For several years, Coveo, the cloud-based, AI-powered search and intelligence platform, has been a Salesforce AppExchange partner. And that partnership was acknowledged by Forrester.
The Forrester WaveTM: B2B Commerce Suites writes that, “Salesforce made big strides in search through its AppExchange partnership with Coveo. It seamlessly integrates these leading third-party capabilities into the business user.[2]”
Seamlessly Integrate and Personalize Your Salesforce Ecosystem
Indeed, this native connection means that you can bridge all of your disparate cloud offerings together in one universal index. And Coveo’s machine learning and analytics provide the added intelligence for predictive merchandising and hyper-personalization that every buyer is demanding.
“The Coveo platform looks beyond simple catalog search and enables all customer touch points to be informed, intelligent, and frictionless,” says Brian McGlynn, VP of Commerce for Coveo. “All of these are even more heightened in B2B where search, recommendation, and personalization have new levels of complexities.”
Echoing McGlynn’s sentiment, Sawan Deshpande, VP, Coveo for Salesforce adds, “Coveo has invested heavily in providing solutions for Salesforce customers. Being a valuable extension of the Salesforce B2B Commerce experience furthers our reach in providing an end-to-end, intelligent customer experience.”
So if you haven’t yet made the decision to switch to Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud, Salesforce and Coveo would still love to talk to you. There’s still time to pick a winner.
Dig Deeper
To learn more about how to personalize your Salesforce Ecosystem, watch our Coveo for Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud Demo.
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[1] The Forrester WaveTM: B2B Commerce Suites, Forrester Research, Inc., Q2 2020.
[2] ibid.