Connected Store & Omnichannel Retail: The Future of Retail. Become a pioneer with digital strategies now – we’ll show you how.
Retail: A fast-moving industry in which digitization has played a major role for years. Now is the time to switch to new, adaptable business models and to fully exploit your potential. Connected store and omnichannel retail should no longer be foreign words. The digital networking of all channels and also of the local store are a must-have for future success. Offer your customers a seamless shopping experience, from the online shop to the newsletter and social shopping to your centerpiece, the store. Whether you have already started the step into the digital future with, for example, an online shop, or this step is still ahead of you: We support you with Salesforce by Salesfive for retail.
Customer loyalty & seamless shopping experiences
What does the future of retail look like? So much in advance: It is digital. Due to rising customer expectations and new market participants, retail is increasingly being forced to digitize. The Covid 19 crisis gave the final impetus. Click & Collect, digital loyalty programs, personalized shopping and a new, improved omnichannel strategy are now on the agenda for retailers.
Use cases in service
Loyalty programs for long-term customer relationships
Say goodbye to classic customer cards that hardly provide any insights: In addition to digital advantages for your customers and new insights into their behavior, digital loyalty programs offer one thing above all – building a long-term customer relationship.
With the digital programs, you can offer personalized discount campaigns or points-collecting campaigns via app as well as product recommendations based on shopping and search behavior. With the link to the store, you offer a loyalty program along the various channels and thus unconsciously and happily bind your customers to your company.
Chatbots relieve your employees of work
By automating and answering “simple inquiries” like “When will my order be delivered?” service employees have more time to take care of building long-term customer relationships instead of being overwhelmed by simple inquiries. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the chatbots act like your own employees. If the request becomes too complex, a service employee is automatically called in, depending on availability and internal regulations.
One portal for all your customers’ concerns, surveys and much more
A portal for your customers: FAQs, knowledge management, an overview of news and direct access to your service staff. Thanks to fast response times, you can sustainably increase customer satisfaction. Furthermore, portals also offer a platform for customer surveys. For example, you can send this via newsletter and have it answered directly in the mail or in the portal.
Expand your loalty program with an individual customer portal – the possibilities are endless and can be flexibly adapted to your target group.
Excellent customer service thanks to a 360-degree view of all information
In today’s world, excellent customer service is the be-all and end-all in retail. To support this and process the service digitally, give your employees a system in which they can work efficiently. With an intuitive ticket system, requests / tasks are easily distributed. Thanks to the clear division, the time-per-case is reduced and internal traceability of the performance of the employees is made possible. By connecting different channels such as e-mail, SMS, online chat or telephone, all inquiries can be processed in one system. The 360-degree view of individual customers, including order status, payment methods, order history and interactions with the various channels, enables your employees to respond precisely to customers. In this way you increase service quality and customer satisfaction in the long term.
Mood of your customers
Sentiment analyzes provide information on questions such as “Do customers like your company, your products, your service?” Sentiment means the feeling or the sensation – in this case of your customers. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can therefore better assess the mood of your customers.
Social media serve one field of application. Thanks to AI, positive comments can be recognized as an upselling opportunity for further products. More effective customer communication and, in the course of this, long-term customer loyalty through intelligent, smooth service are the result.
The use case for service
Terra Canis success story
Traceability and transparency: documentation of all service activities in one system. With the new ticket system and the clearly structured customer history, service cases can be resolved more quickly. The quality of service has also increased, as all employees can respond to specific needs and know immediately what the customer’s history is. In combination with the e-commerce system, all inquiries are received in one system and are automatically assigned to the responsible employee.
Purchasing & Supplier Management
Give your employees a portal for all KPIs, personas and information
Important KPIs, findings from analyzes and buying personas should be shared with all relevant departments and employees. From purchase to sale (online & store), to merchandising and marketing. Say goodbye to long update appointments and distributed presentations. Use a portal in which all important reports, personas and news are shared in real time in accordance with CI. Thanks to various role and access concepts, you can determine exactly who is allowed to see, edit or share which content. Use the power of your data and let your employees work in one system!
Management of all orders and orders linked with all necessary information about customers
In omnichannel retail, it is important to know which orders were triggered when and where and how they are processed.
Management of all customer orders in one system: processing, checking and processing – adapted to the respective regulations and specifications.
If you work with service providers for logistics and shipping, you can manage all information here. If all order and delivery processes are in your hand, they can be clearly mapped in Salesforce.
With a view to sustainability, too, it is important to have an overview of the life cycle of your products and orders. Different reports and views say goodbye to long lists and data sets. You can view your data from different perspectives: customer, order or delivery view.
B2B: Process orders on site, with a digital product catalog
Do you sell to dealers and bulk buyers? Say goodbye to classic product catalogs and analog order forms. Give your salespeople a mobile device with an app as a virtual product catalog. All collections, product variants and individual products can be shown on site. The order is also processed directly via the app. Here you can do “online shopping” with your customers and complete the order: Everything digitally and without paper. The order is sent directly to your ERP or data warehouse and processed.
Cooperation with suppliers made easy: One portal for all concerns
Manage suppliers and deliveries – whether raw materials or products that are ready for sale. With a transparent system, you can manage purchasing and the various relationships with suppliers and partners and see the order history and agreed conditions at a glance. You can also send offers and contracts directly from the CRM system. Through the link to your ERP system, the orders are received automatically.
Supplier management rethought: One portal for all partners, suppliers and service providers. Here the parties can independently enter orders and view all the necessary information.
Planning and monitoring your product stocks
Management and tracking of product stocks at different locations and storage locations: A clear documentation of the inventory levels is essential, especially in the case of distributed business locations. Give stores the ability to transparently share inventory and thus request product supplies from other stores. Your store managers can communicate with each other through a uniform system – also via app.
Include your various warehouses and follow the routes of your products.
Use case in purchasing & supplier management
mydays success story
Harmonization of the processes and database of mydays and Jochen Schweizer on one platform. Partner and customer data from both brands in one central system led to a significant streamlining of purchasing and sales processes.
Sale – in store & online
Link online & store for an all-round personalized shopping experience
Connect Commerce Everywhere: As a retailer, offer intelligent, seamless experiences across all trading channels. Help customers find what they are looking for faster – with a mobile-first approach, buy-in channels, personalized product recommendations and an excellent, visual search function. The Covid-19 crisis has forced retailers to digitize. Click & Collect or Click & Meet are no longer “nice-to-have”, but a must-have.
By linking your channels and the digital equipment of your stores, you will become an omichannel retailer. That means an online shop – mobile & on the desktop – linked to newsletters, social media and your salespeople in the store. In this way you guarantee a seamless shopping experience for your customers.
E-commerce for B2B and B2C – integrated and intuitive
An online shop – whether for B2B or B2C customers – must be intuitive to use and guarantee a secure ordering process. In addition to the technical requirements and user-friendliness, a CI-compliant e-commerce experience is essential, as is a mobile-first approach. Create online shops easily and intuitively: There are numerous providers for this. How about a shop system that you can create and flexibly change directly from your marketing department and paired with information from purchasing and sales using drag & drop? We offer you this! In addition to the easy handling of the system, you can also enable your employees to offer personalized offers for the respective visitors to the e-commerce website.
Linking online shop & store: digital end device to support sales staff
A seamless shopping experience is the constant goal of retailers. The digitization of the store is often a major challenge. The solution can be an integrated system in which all employees work on the same data. For your store (s), this means: Salespeople and sales managers have a mobile device with which they can provide excellent advice to customers. With the link to the Loalty Program, personalized product suggestions are displayed directly, based on order and search history.
Click & Collect / Click & Meet: Take registrations and orders directly on your tablet. The customer acts via their own smartphone. This makes contact-free handover of the order or entry to the store possible without any problems.
Process everything digitally: from the customer card to payment to invoicing
Now your employees are digitally equipped with a tablet. What is missing now is the digital processing of payments, invoices and the link to the customer account. View and edit the customer account on site and integrate the current discounts or promotions into the payment process – that is the next step. Customers can pay directly via the app or process the order via the online shop together with the employee and pay with one click. Paper bills? They are a thing of the past! By registering the customer card and the data on site, you can send the invoice by email or upload it to the customer account: seamless, digital, innovative!
An app for your merchandising: on the go, with all the important information
Whether it is a shop-in-shop system, a franchise or several small stores that should be equipped and checked by merchandising employees: give them a mobile device in which all information is displayed. From the route for this day to the stocks of the current products to the necessary innovations – all in one system. Your merchandisers can act transparently and take over the design together with the employees on site.
This also supports the back office and the planning of the merchandising employees. Resources and employees can be planned intuitively and also partially automated with the help of artificial intelligence.
The use case for sales
Schöffel Success Story
B2B sales as easy as online shopping: With the development of the B2B order mask as a web application, we networked the company processes of sales, warehouse and ordering. The presentation of the products runs via the order mask, as does the entry and initiation of the order with customers. The data is then automatically transferred to Salesforce and the ERP system.
Marketing
Create consistent customer experiences
Rethinking is the order of the day: Goodbye one-time purchases – focus on loyal customer relationships! Use your data from networked channels and identify, for example, the preferred channels of your customers. Thanks to the combination of your own data and external studies, targeted personas are created that help you create a uniform customer journey. With targeted marketing campaigns, using defined personas and the ability to react to real-time activities, you not only achieve faster sales, but much more importantly: a long-term customer relationship.
Also important: personalized product recommendations! Use loyalty programs and show your customers personalized product suggestions based on order and search history – in the newsletter, on social media, in the online shop or by the employees in the store.
Automate your emails for more individuality and efficiency
Newsletter – one of the most important media in retail. Most retail companies use newsletters and emails as their main marketing channel to communicate with customers. Now is the time to make newslettering automated, personalized and dynamic! With defined e-mail journeys, you can automatically send e-mails along the entire customer journey based on real-time activities such as leaving the shopping cart without shopping.
Automated e-mail journeys are ideal for measures or situations such as an “abandoned cart”, a newsletter registration, an opt-in process, or for customer recovery.
Use KPIs and customer insights: personalized customer approach across all channels
With dynamic content, you can send your customers personalized content or offers – via a wide variety of channels such as email, SMS, social media or online shop.
The dynamic content automatically adapts to the specific customer group and thus increases a faster completion rate. The best: automatic language adaptation! Always communicate with your customers in the right language
Social shopping instead of social distancing
The opinions, experiences and feedback of the end users can be a sustainable competitive advantage for you. Social listening allows your marketing team to see what is being said about your business on social media. With comments, postings and mentions, you can find out whether your end users are satisfied and can get in touch with them if necessary. Use these insights to optimize products, services and much more.
Marketing and sales combined for a long-term customer relationship
Offering personalized offers based on search results and order history: This is only possible if marketing and sales work together. Thanks to the continuous generation of user data via the website, social media or newsletter, as well as the use of existing data from studies, marketing and sales can adapt all activities – whether in the online shop, on social media, or on site in the store – to the needs. In this way you not only increase sales in the long term, but also the duration of the customer relationship and their loyalty.
The use case for marketing
Terra Canis success story
Marketing automation for increased customer loyalty. Thanks to personalized addressing and individual content – adapted to the respective point in the customer journey – the engagement with new and existing customers is sustainably increased. The different email journeys not only save your employees time, but also improve direct communication with all customers.
