The News: Salesforce announced on July 25 several new features and enhancements to its Commerce Cloud, which are designed to integrate digital commerce experiences into sales, service, and marketing channels. The new features, which include Pay Now, Snapchat for Commerce, Reorder Portal, and Order Support, will let customers more efficiently create purchasing experiences and drive additional revenue via AI, data, and CRM tools and applications.
According to Salesforce, Reorder Portal, Pay Now, and Order Support are generally available now, while Snapchat for Commerce is currently in pilot testing and will be generally available later in 2023.
Read the Press Release on Salesforce’s website.
Salesforce Announces New Commerce Cloud Features
Analyst Take: Acknowledging and supporting the trend for customers to use multiple channels when engaging with a company, brand, or service, Salesforce announced support for new digital commerce experiences within Commerce Cloud. Companies will be able to support payment transactions directly within a digital channel via a new Pay Now feature. Utilizing AI, customers can also transform service interactions into buying opportunities using a self-service Reorder Portal, which leverages next-best actions powered by Einstein AI, and lets buyers access all past orders and easily reorder without having to call their sales representative.
With Order Support, organizations can leverage agents, bots, self-service actions, and knowledge articles to surface sales opportunities during service interactions by recommending relevant products. Finally, the forthcoming Snapchat for Commerce will enable organizations to create ads on the platform, increasing product discoverability and directing Snapchat users back to the storefront or allowing them to complete their purchasing experiences directly in the app.
Meeting Customers in Their Preferred Channels
The emergence of digital channels and mobile apps has led to a significant percentage of customers who consume content, interact with others, and seek out products and services from within a specific channel or application, rather than visiting a mobile or desktop-based website. As these channels and applications have incorporated more functionality, companies and brands have realized the value of meeting customers within these channels, instead of trying to drive traffic back to a separate app or site.
Salesforce’s integration of a Pay Now feature extends this functionality to make it easier for field agents to create purchasing experiences within these preferred digital channels, instead of needing to use a separate physical payment capture device or sending a link to a website-based payment mechanism. Using Pay Now, a field service agent can send a payment link to the customer as a text, email, or report directly from their app as they complete the service request, and then ensure payment is completed before leaving the job site. This capability will provide Salesforce customers with even more options for delivering better purchasing experiences that provide less friction, more convenience, and greater revenue assurance.
Leveraging AI to Provide Next-Best-Action Support to Enable Self-Service Reordering
Many business customers reorder similar types and quantities of products, either on a fixed schedule, or on an as-needed basis. Salesforce’s use of Einstein AI to power a personalized, self-service Reordering Portal, helps organizations automate reorders and engage repeat buyers, without needing to engage the services of a sales representative. Next-best-action driven self-service portals permit organizations to refocus human sales representatives on the most complex or high-value opportunities, instead of more routine orders that can be more convenient for customers to handle themselves.
Surfacing Sales Opportunities from Service Interactions
Customers do not mind additional offers being presented during service interactions, but they must be delivered at the right time, and need to be relevant to the interaction.
Salesforce’s Order Support tool can surface sales opportunities during service interactions by recommending relevant products, based on the actions being conducted in the interaction, along with additional data integrated from agents, bots, self-service actions, and knowledge articles. This allows in-context and relevant purchasing experiences to be generated during service interactions in a seamless, friction-free manner, since the products or services that are recommended will be relevant to the customer’s ongoing service interaction.
Driving New Purchasing Experiences via Snapchat Ads
The last bit of news released focused on the forthcoming capability to leveraging Snapchat for Commerce to create ads on the platform. By creating ads directly on the social platform, it may help to increase product discoverability and enable new purchasing experiences, either by checking out directly within Snapchat, or by directing users back to a storefront. While Snapchat’s user demographics clearly skew young (the app’s largest age group was those aged 18 to 24, accounting for 38.6% of the social media platform’s total audience), organizations with customers that fall within this demographic slice cannot ignore Snapchat’s reach, which, as of July 2023, accounts for 384 million active daily users.
Each of these features leverages the data contained within Salesforce Commerce Cloud to drive contextually-relevant purchasing experiences. By incorporating customer data, past purchase history, related product information, and supporting purchase experiences within the customer’s preferred channel, significant friction can be removed from the process, particularly when trying to convert support interactions to sales opportunities.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
