In today’s experience-driven economy, customers expect more than just products and services—they expect relevance, speed, and consistency across every touchpoint. Businesses that deliver personalized experiences not only drive customer loyalty but also unlock higher revenue potential. 

One of the most powerful ways to achieve this is through the integration of Salesforce Sales/Service Cloud and Order Management. This powerful combination creates a holistic view of the customer and enables businesses to craft tailored journeys from discovery to delivery and beyond.

Understanding the Customer Journey

Before we dive into system and user enablement, it is important to align on the value of the customer journey. Understanding the customer journey enables brands to deliver meaningful and personalized experiences that target improvements in customer retention, purchase frequency, and total spend. Effective usage of the customer journey can even influence customer behaviors that target improved margins, not just the top line revenue.

This journey typically includes five key touchpoints:

1. 1. Awareness: when a customer first learns about your brand 
   2. Consideration: when a customer evaluates options 
   3. Purchase: when the transaction occurs
   4. Fulfillment: when the order is prepared, shipped, and delivered 
   5. Post-purchase: when service and loyalty efforts come into play.

Many businesses struggle to personalize interactions across these stages due to siloed systems, inconsistent data, and a lack of real-time visibility into customer behavior. However, by leveraging data-driven insights such as purchase history, channel preferences, and fulfillment trends, organizations can anticipate customer needs, tailoring communication at each stage and creating a more seamless, engaging journey from start to finish.

Salesforce: The Engine of Customer Insight 

Salesforce  allows businesses to capture and act on data across marketing, sales, and service. It holds critical customer information such as demographics, preferences, browsing behavior, and purchase history. Key tools include: 

• Sales Cloud: tracks customer interactions and deal stages 
• Service Cloud: manages cases and service requests 
• Marketing Cloud: delivers targeted messaging based on behavior 

This unified profile helps drive segmentation, automation, and personalization. However, it still needs real-time fulfillment and order status data to complete the customer journey.

Salesforce Order Management: 

Salesforce Order Management sits on top of their core platform and allows users to seamlessly use OMS features within Sales and Service Cloud. This is the Salesforce central hub for handling all aspects of the order lifecycle, including order capture, fulfillment, shipping, payment processing, and service. 

The Order Management app enables the following functionality:

• Customers can submit orders from any commerce channel and then track and manage their orders throughout the order lifecycle. 
• Fulfillment teams can manage order fulfillment, shipping, payment capture, invoicing, and service by using integrated, customizable workflows. 
• Service agents can access a repository of all order-related information, see a global view of the entire order lifecycle, and process cancellations, returns, exchanges, reshipments, refunds, and discounts. 

There are 3 Salesforce Order Management options:

Order Visibility is a component of the Salesforce Order Management app that allows companies to bring order data into Salesforce’s core platform—from order capture or external order management channels—without taking on a full secondary order management solution or replacing their current OMS. 

For customers using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a pre-integration with Order Visibility is available. For others, a custom integration can be developed to support different ecommerce or OMS platforms. 

Order Visibility brings in records for the orders, products, and payments recorded at the time of purchase. This allows customer service agents to look up orders and associate tickets to orders, saving time swivel-chairing between systems.

Order Servicing is also a component of Salesforce Order Management. As with Order Visibility,  it can bring in orders through a Commerce Cloud pre-integration and view and use that data.

What makes Order Servicing different from Order Visibility is that it enables users to take service-related action against these orders. These actions include capabilities like canceling orders and order lines, processing returns and exchanges, applying price overrides and appeasements, and more. 

Full Order Management not only provides the order visibility and native service action capabilities, but also includes fulfillment routing workflows and the ability to natively collect payments and issue refunds using Salesforce Payments.

Integrate Salesforce With an External OMS

As mentioned above, Salesforce Order Visibility and Order Servicing can be integrated with other OMS platforms to take advantage of the Salesforce foundation and capabilities without requiring organizations to replace their current OMS. This is great for retailers who have their customer services, sales operations, and/or marketing teams already on Salesforce, or for those planning to adopt these core Salesforce solutions.. 

Many enterprise retailers and global brands use other enterprise-sized OMS solutions, such as Manhattan Active Omni or IBM Sterling Order Management, due to their strength in distributed order management, store fulfillment, and complex logistics. Fortunately, Salesforce integrates well with other OMS providers. 

Here’s how they work together:

• Bi-Directional Data Exchange: Using APIs or middleware like MuleSoft (a Salesforce company), order, inventory, and customer data flows securely between Salesforce CRM and the source OMS. This ensures that Salesforce has near real-time access to order statuses, fulfillment events, and return activities managed in OMS. 
• Enhanced Customer Service with Unified Order View: Customer service agents working in Salesforce Service Cloud can view OMS (order management system) data, such as shipment tracking numbers, fulfillment locations, or return receipts, without switching systems. This improves first-contact resolution and reduces escalations. 
• Service-Related Modifications: Paired with Order Servicing, agents can make service-related modifications to orders that are submitted back to the primary order management solution to update the source order record and influence any necessary changes to its order lifecycle.
• Actionable Insights Across the Journey: When Salesforce and OMS share data, businesses gain cross-functional insights. 
  • Marketing can analyze order fulfillment speed and optimize campaigns. 
  • Sales teams can identify fulfillment bottlenecks. 
  • Service teams can anticipate and resolve issues before customers complain.

Salesforce Order Servicing with External OMS Example:

1. 1. A Service Agent who primarily operates in Service Cloud can apply appeasements to the order on the Order Summary page . . . 
   2. All without needing to toggle between systems. 
   3. The agent can select to appease the entire order or just the order line item. 
   4. The agent can also select the appeasement type and reason.

When a transaction is complete, appeasements, like other order servicing updates, can be easily found on the Order Summary record.

Personalized Post-Purchase Journeys

Salesforce Order Management data and actions are available in Marketing Cloud through a native integration using Marketing Cloud Connect. This allows marketers to do more with customer data by triggering post-order transaction emails, such as shipping notifications and cancellation confirmations, or using shopper data to build targeted marketing campaigns. 

The post-purchase journey can be easily overlooked, but it’s one of the most critical moments for building long-term customer loyalty. With Salesforce Order Management integrated into Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud, companies can orchestrate timely, relevant communications that go beyond transactional emails and deliver true personalization. Instead of sending generic order confirmations and static shipping updates, businesses can use real-time order data to trigger dynamic, context-aware messages that reflect each customer’s unique journey. 

Some examples include: 

• “Your order is arriving early—click to track!” When SFOM detects that an order is ahead of schedule based on carrier data, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can automatically send a proactive notification to surprise and delight the customer. This kind of positive reinforcement builds goodwill and increases customer satisfaction. 

• “We’ve initiated your refund—view the return receipt here.” After a return is approved in SFOM, the system can initiate an automated Service Cloud message confirming the refund and providing a link to the return summary. This removes uncertainty, reduces inbound support tickets, and gives customers confidence in your return process.

• “Your favorite product is back in stock—order now before it’s gone.” Using customer purchase history stored in CRM and real-time inventory data from SFOM, Marketing Cloud can re-engage customers with personalized product alerts. These emails can even include the customer’s size, color preference, or previous purchase bundle—driving urgency and conversion. 

• “We noticed you’ve returned similar items—need sizing help?” If SFOM identifies a pattern of returned items in a specific category (e.g., shoes or apparel), the system can prompt a proactive message offering a sizing guide, fit quiz, or personal shopper session before the next purchase. 

• “Rate your recent delivery experience.” Once an order is marked as delivered in SFOM, Marketing Cloud can trigger a post-delivery satisfaction survey. This not only gathers insights but shows the customer you care about their experience beyond the sale. 
• “Your warranty is about to expire—extend it now.” SFOM can manage warranty timelines and trigger personalized reminders when warranties are nearing expiration, driving upsell opportunities and reinforcing customer value. 

These post-purchase communications are not only functional, they’re relationship-building moments. When your OMS and CRM are connected, these logistics updates become personalized touchpoints that make the customer feel seen, valued, and understood. By delivering the right message at the right time, based on real-time operational data, businesses can turn everyday transactions into loyalty-building experiences.

Customer Experience IS the Customer Journey

The customer journey requires end-to-end alignment across the sales, service, and fulfillment functions. By integrating Sales/Service Cloud with Salesforce Order Management or third-party OMS solutions, businesses gain the visibility, flexibility, and data accuracy needed to deliver world-class experiences.

Imagine this:

1. 1. A customer buys three items online through a retailer.
   2. Order Management splits the order between two warehouses based on inventory.
   3. One item is delayed in transit due to weather.
   4. OMS updates the order status and passes it back to Salesforce.
   5. Marketing Cloud triggers an apology email with new delivery estimates and a coupon.
   6. The customer reaches out to support—an agent in Service Cloud can view the updated order timeline and directly service the customer order in real-time. No swivel chair.
   7. Some time later, customer is notified when their favorite products are on sale, and the journey continues

This seamless flow delivers transparency, empathy, and speed—key elements of a personalized customer experience.

To elevate customer experience and unlock long-term loyalty, integrating Salesforce CRM with Order Management is an impactful start. 

Impact of Unifying Customer Experiences with Salesforce

Enhancing the customer experience with Salesforce and Order Management yields substantial, quantifiable benefits across various operational and customer experience metrics:

• First Contact Resolution: Enhanced data visibility enables service agents to resolve customer issues more efficiently. According to Salesforce, improving FCR not only boosts customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs by minimizing repeat contacts. 
• Customer Satisfaction: A unified CRM and OMS platform ensures consistent and personalized customer interactions, leading to higher satisfaction scores. Salesforce emphasizes that meeting customer expectations is crucial for business success, as it directly impacts customer loyalty and revenue. 
• Training and Adoption Efficiency: Working in Salesforce Core—where CRM, service, and order management functions share a common user interface—significantly simplifies training and accelerates adoption. Teams no longer need to toggle between multiple platforms or learn entirely separate systems. Instead, they benefit from a unified, intuitive experience that reduces the learning curve, increases productivity, and improves data accuracy across departments.
• Total Cost to Serve: By leveraging Salesforce’s integrated solutions, organizations can achieve significant IT cost savings. Research indicates that companies globally report an average of 25% IT cost savings with Salesforce, highlighting the financial efficiency of such integrations.
• Future-Readiness for AI: The Salesforce core platform positions businesses to adopt emerging agentic AI technologies. This strategic alignment ensures scalability and adaptability in an evolving technological landscape.

In summary, enhancing the customer experience with Salesforce and Order Management improves operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, delivers measurable cost savings, and positions businesses for future technological advancements.