Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Delivering Results with Predictive Intelligence

 

It is nothing new that ecommerce selling is poised to be the new normal in the coming years. It is also true that most people have gotten quite comfortable with AI in their everyday lives and are now using it during shopping.

It’s proven that 20% of customers use chatbots to shop an,d 40% use them to find better deals and offers. Of the money invested in ecommerce, 20% is in the implementation of AI.

By 2021, this is expected to go up to approximately $49 billion. Moreover, Gartner predicts that as 2020 ended, over 80% of all interactions in customer relationship management would be managed via AI.

These are some pretty impressive numbers, and they apply in B2B ecommerce too. Frost & Sullivan had already predicted that B2B online sales would reach $6.7 trillion by 2020.

More and more B2B sellers migrated to ecommerce platforms online from the traditional on-premise systems. B2B ecommerce had long surpassed B2C ecommerce, being over three times the latter’s size by the end of 2017 itself.

Customers in the B2B ecommerce market have slowly started favouring B2C trends and practices conventionally.

As a result, there has been a steady shift in B2B ecommerce features to accommodate these changes in the B2B buying behaviour.

One of the ways this has manifested is the widespread integration of AI technology in B2B ecommerce software. It is valid for the Salesforce B2B ecommerce platform too.

Salesforce uses Einstein AI to power its processes, including its B2B ecommerce portal, called the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

You will not have to explicitly do a Salesforce ecommerce integration of Einstein AI on your B2B commerce solution; it comes built into the B2B Commerce Salesforce platform.

Components of Predictive Intelligence in Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud

It is known that personalized customer experience increases revenue and loyalty. With predictive intelligence powered by AI, you take this a step further.

There are five advanced ecommerce solutions or tools for Salesforce AI ecommerce implementation to optimize your B2B ecommerce sales process. These are as follows:

1) Einstein Commerce Insights

This is the analytical section of Einstein AI for Commerce Cloud. It provides valuable behavioural information throughout the B2B ecommerce customer journey.

The data can improve essential business outcome metrics and help increase customer retention and grow revenue.

Knowing beforehand what to expect in the next step of the ecommerce life cycle is very useful as it allows sales representatives to chalk out the buyer journey mapping and tailor the customer’s shopping experience.

Einstein AI collects three types of data – clickstream, product, and order. The Shopping Basket Analysis Dashboard allows reps to check the activity around each product and build up a solid B2B ecommerce strategy to increase revenue growth.

2) Einstein Search Dictionaries

Nothing is more disappointing than finding out that what you are looking for is unavailable or possibly not typing in the correct item. Keyword research is the backbone of SEO.

Similarly, Search Dictionaries is the backbone for correctly implementing AI by B2B ecommerce companies.

This feature registers every search that customers put in on the site and lists the popular ones that are not included in your current keyword list.

It will even provide recommendations and synonyms that you should add to the content on your site.

By doing so, you ensure that whenever your viewers and prospects are on your site, they never come up empty-handed during a search, even if they have typed the search term in incorrectly.

3) Einstein Search Recommendations

The B2B ecommerce marketplace has become an unpredictable one. So many variables are active at any moment that it is difficult to predict what a user wants. But it is not at all strict with AI.

The predictive intelligence of Einstein auto-completes and auto-corrects search terms based on the browsing and buying history of the customers, recent searches, and trending terms.

Whether you have used the current device only or have taken advantage of omnichannel B2B commerce, your past behaviour will have been recognized and used to provide personalized search recommendations when you use the platform again.

The older or more active a customer, the more the AI learns, and the more accurate its predictions are.

4) Einstein Predictive Sort

One of the most ingenious ways to bring personalization in B2B selling is to make sure that customers first see what they want.

Salesforce does this through the Predictive Sort feature. Its effect is primarily observed in search results and when viewing product categories.

When you search for a product or open a product page, the products displayed are curated and sorted carefully to ensure that the effects on top are the ones that accurately match your search intent.

By providing the most relevant object first, customers do not have to waste time searching for the right one.

This increases the chances of a successful sale and reduces the rate of customer churn significantly. Moreover, it frees sales representatives up to attend to more complicated, important tasks.

5) Einstein Product Recommendations

Like Predictive Sort, Product Recommendations also uses predictive intelligence to display the products to the customer they want to see.

Utilizing machine learning, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform creates product recommendations tailored to that customer’s needs and wants.

The predictive technology allows company reps to do intelligent merchandising by curating the customer’s products.

The reps do not have to manually go through sheet after sheet of data to manually implement recommendations and display products best associated with the customer’s intent, especially past behaviour, and other consumers’ usual trends with the same intent.

Whether a shopper is already registered with the company or not, they can take advantage of it to see the kinds of products the company sells.

How Predictive Intelligence Encourages B2B Ecommerce Growth

Different B2B companies have other objectives when utilizing AI’s predictive and analytical powers in their ecommerce operations.

However, the primary goals remain the same throughout. It is to gain a deeper understanding of how the market as a whole and as a combination of interconnected and interdependent business entities behave.

Once the system gets a reasonably accurate idea, one can use the detected patterns and logic to determine customers’ future actions and behaviour to keep ready what they may need and provide it immediately on cue.

With Salesforce Einstein AI, you can leverage the power of predictive intelligence and gain the following advantages:

• Provide Greater Personalization in Shopping Experiences – Einstein AI gauges customer behaviour and automatically shows product recommendations, sorts search results, and assists the shopper in reaching the product they want faster by personalizing their buying journey.

• Optimize And Improve The Work Of Sales Representatives – Einstein AI helps automate many of the routine and repetitive tasks that sales and service representatives used to do manually. It takes over the menial work, allowing the reps to focus on more specialized jobs, thus increasing the team’s productivity and efficiency.

• Increase Revenue Generated By Predicting Buyer Behavior – Customer churn and cart abandonment are serious problems that reduce revenue. By providing intelligent recommendations and tailoring the customer journey, Einstein AI increases the average order size and hikes up total revenue.

• Predict and Stay Ahead Of Otherwise Unexpected Market Trends – The B2B market can be highly dynamic and unpredictable. But with Einstein AI, these trends can be predicted and prepared for so that the business does not get blindsided at any point.

• Provide Omnichannel B2B CRM Wherever Customer Needs – Einstein AI is headless and can be facilitated in any channel the customer uses through APIs. It helps keep track of the customer journey throughout and without discontinuity, customizing their experience through the entirety of their interactions with the business.

Conclusion

AI has spread through the veins of technology in every industry and branch of commerce. Its predictive power puts businesses at an advantage in all fields and arenas, as laid out in detail in this blog post.

Whether you want to increase productivity or personalize your customers’ journey, master the B2B market or generate revenue growth, Salesforce Einstein AI can help you achieve that in your B2B ecommerce with its predictive intelligence.

Source: Delivering Results with Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Personalization Throughout the B2B Customer Journey – the Current Strategy

 

Personalized experiences are the new digital imperative. 65% of business buyers state they’d almost certainly switch brands if an organization didn’t put forth an attempt to personalize communications with their business.

Your buyers expect that you should know them and their needs. B2B buyers demand rich and personalized experiences and features such as one-click ordering and immersive product content as these are no longer exclusive to retail giants or niche brands.

75% of business buyers anticipate that organizations send them customized offers while 74% concur that getting these customized offers affects their loyalty.

Meeting these personalization desires in B2B will have significant income impacts. It’s predicted that B2B commerce deals will reach $6.6 trillion by 2020, an overwhelming B2C business sales estimate of $3.2 trillion.

How B2B Personalization is Different?

B2B consumers expect personalized experience. In order to put this into action, B2B retailers must incorporate online advertisements and email marketing promotions created around past conduct or buying decisions of their customers. There are some contrasts in B2C and B2B buyer journeys that make personalization more difficult to provide.

The Purchase Decision is More Complex

Unlike the B2C marketing funnel, the B2B customer journey is fragmented, and there are typically several decision-makers in different roles involved in the procurement of an item.

Single-decision-maker personalization is quite difficult to do on your own, but add a handful of decision-makers, all with different roles, priorities, and preferences, and there are plenty of different touchpoints to hit.

Personalization is More than Messaging

While a messaging system that addresses every one of these roles is significant, it probably won’t be sufficient. Personalization in a B2B journey may likewise mean executing new applications and usefulness that are custom-fitted for a role. A buyer may need a spreadsheet-type view to input values, yet an entrepreneur is bound to react to a B2C-like item and checkout experience.

Ease of Experience in Place of Promotions

50% off blaze deals and BOGOs are normal in B2C, yet in B2B it’s the experience and the data you give, not promotions, that keep customers returning. Prices are generally set based on contractual agreements; therefore, there is no price competition, so you need to find other, more convincing ways to influence buying behavior.

Aim to provide the right content around products and augment self-sufficiency so customers can do enough research to compel them to do business. This may involve associations with your back-end systems to give the data that a leader may require alongside the purchase journey.

What role does personalization have in B2B E-Commerce?

The great thing about B2B is that B2B clients are accustomed to signing in. At the point when they sign in, you know what their identity is. You realize what organization they work for, where they are located, their position, and the industry that they are in. B2B organizations ought to endeavor to make the signed-in experience more extravagant than the vanilla experience by:

• Creating a custom catalog based on contract, terms, and conditions

• Contract pricing and volume pricing

• Ensure that search and navigation are with regards to their agreement (what items are they permitted to see)

• Segment content on the landing page dependent on their industry

• Prompt a quick order or bulk order form for swift ordering

• Payment of invoices and other Accounts Payable activities

• Segmented by role: buyers and approvers

Getting Started with Personalization

The need for B2B personalization is clear, but getting started can be as complex as the buyer’s journey. What steps should you take to implement personalization?

Understand Your Customer’s Buying Journey

1. Connect with Your Customers In B2B, strategies are often made while never conversing with the client. Numerous organizations rely on the experiences of their sales teams or marketers to tell them what’s working, what’s selling, and what the client needs.

However, by talking with your clients – you may find that you don’t have the foggiest idea about the process they really experience. You have to comprehend who the client is and what sort of experience they need. Client research will assist you with understanding the effect of your changes on your audience and focuses on understanding behaviors, needs, and inspirations. From a solid understanding of your clients, you can start to design your strategic course.

2. Create Customer Journey Maps

Once you understand the needs of your customers, the processes, and the people involved, create customer journeys for everyone. A customer journey map tells the story of the customer’s understanding from initial contact to the engagement process and even a long-term relationship.

It helps identify gaps and focuses on the customer experience that is inconsistent or difficult. A good customer journey map illustrates every interaction a customer makes when completing a transaction. A world-class map incorporates customer data and information to identify weak points and the best ways to eliminate them.

3. Develop Strategies to Digitally Transform Your Experience

A compelling personalization strategy must be driven by the client’s needs and the journeys you’ve recognized. It will set up your personalization vision, yet the advantages won’t be acknowledged until the strategy is executed. In view of this, the strategy should likewise incorporate a guide to control the execution effort and a budget to viably finance the necessary investments.

The best personalization strategy will miss the mark except if you put resources into the best possible foundation and procedures. To deliver these experiences, you should have a viable mix of innovation, operational processes, and estimation setup.

4. Conduct the B2B customer segmentation

Every industry has its own peculiarities, so you have to adjust segmentation rehearses to coordinate your demands.

• Segmentation based on firmographics categorizes B2C consumers by demographics. These incorporate highlights, for example, locations, business size, enterprises, administrative levels, titles, and capacities, and so on.

• Segmentation based on tiering is a proactive method of B2B customer segmentation as you target prospects based on concrete expectations. Rather than industry-wide customers, you will be searching for B2B clients who can possibly produce a specific measure of benefit.

• Segmentation based on needs takes into account what your customers want from you. It gives you the opportunity for micro-segmentation, yet you should adhere to a meaningful boundary to maintain a strategic distance from absolute broadening.

The Benefits of B2B Personalization for Your Business

To put it simply, personalization implies tailoring your offers and correspondence in order to fit the necessities of every customer independently. There are such huge advantages of personalization in a B2B situation, yet we will name just the most significant:

• B2B personalization strategies empower you to deliver the right message to the right customer.

• You are not only able to tailor messages but also to send them in real-time, choosing the ideal second to deliver information.

• Some B2B clients prefer email marketing, while others put more accentuation on social media or phone conversations. With personalized service, you know precisely where to discover potential customers.

It might appear to be a little portion of enhancements, yet it really has an immense effect on your organization.

What’s Next?

The steps sketched out in this guide are basic to building up a customer-first personalization strategy. If you need assistance understanding your clients, your organization’s capacities, and how you can offer customized experiences, we can help.

Source: Personalization Throughout the B2B Customer