Background

A prominent retailer sought to enhance their customer service capabilities and streamline their operations. Facing challenges with multiple systems, their customer service representatives often had to “swivel chair” between their order management system (OMS) and Salesforce, which hindered efficiency and customer satisfaction. Recognizing the need for a more integrated solution, they turned to Summit Advisory Team for expertise in Salesforce implementations.

Objective

The purpose of the engagement was to enable Salesforce Service Cloud as the company’s single customer care platform. Doing so would provide customer service representatives with a unified platform to access order information and perform necessary actions without switching between systems. Additionally, the integration would involve introducing a chatbot feature to facilitate order modifications and cancellations.

Methods

Summit Advisory Team began the engagement with a comprehensive assessment of the company’s existing systems and processes to identify pain points and determine the necessary functionalities for integration. The team’s expertise in both order management and Salesforce was critical in defining the project and executing the solution. They outlined a project that involved several key steps to build strong, intelligent connections between the platforms.

Discovery

The process involved understanding the pain points experienced by customer service representatives and identifying the necessary functionalities for the integration. This information was used to draft and align on measurable objectives, ensuring that the requirements, scope, and final decisions remained focused on achieving those goals.

Improved Salesforce Capabilities

Rather than heavily customizing Salesforce Service Cloud to accomplish the company’s goals, Summit partnered with the company and Salesforce to implement an offering that leverages a limited set of capabilities from the Salesforce OMS to enhance the UI, data, and workflow capabilities of Service Cloud. Since Salesforce OMS works natively with Service Cloud due to Salesforce’s core platform infrastructure, the order visibility and service tools could be made available for Service Cloud customers that have a non-Salesforce OMS without requiring the purchase of the full OMS offering.

Integration Development

The team developed an on-demand integration in near real time that enabled expanded service and visibility in Salesforce. This approach allowed representatives to fetch order details from the OMS based on customer inquiries, eliminating the need to maintain constant synchronization between the two systems. By retrieving order information live, representatives could always access the most recent version of the order.

In addition, the integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud provided agents with visibility into transactional emails sent to customers for the respective orders being serviced. This feature allowed the recipient to edit and resend, retiring another application while enhancing the capabilities available to agents within Order Servicing.

User Interface Enhancement

A user-friendly interface within Salesforce made available by the adoption of Order Servicing enabled customer service agents to view necessary information and perform various actions directly from the newer platform. For example, the interface allowed customer service reps to see the discounts applied, modify orders for cancellations, change shipment methods, process returns, make exchanges, and gain visibility into triggered emails for customer orders. Since Order Servicing provided a useful UI with expanded capabilities, minimal customizations were required to accomplish the company’s goals and keep their implementation as close to the base product as possible. This also reduced future capability adoption risk associated with new Salesforce features, such as agentic AI capabilities.

Training and Support

The Summit team provided comprehensive training sessions to the retailer’s staff to ensure smooth adoption and effective use of the new system. Thorough training was critical to the success of implementation, allowing the users to feel confident in both using and seeing the benefits of the new interface.

Summit’s scope for the integration also included supporting the retailer’s change management initiatives throughout the integration process and introducing a chatbot to facilitate customer self-serve options.

Results

The integration project achieved the following significant milestones:

• Customer service representatives reported improved turnaround times when addressing client inquiries, leading to a more efficient operation and enhanced customer experience.
• The implementation of the self-service portal empowered customers to manage their orders, resulting in 516 self-service order lines processed within the first month.
• The on-demand integration minimized data storage costs and complexity while ensuring that customer service representatives had access to the most current order information at their fingertips.
• In the first week, half of customer service agents voluntarily began using the new interface, embracing the new process over the old way of doing things.
• The company is positioned to adopt new Salesforce capabilities in the service domain with a much lower technology barrier to entry.

By successfully integrating their systems, this large retailer not only streamlined their operations but also enhanced the overall customer experience. Summit Advisory Team remains committed to supporting them in their continued journey toward operational excellence.