This interview featuring OSF resident Salesforce Cloud experts Anna Petriv and Anemona Stanomir demystifies the process behind taking a multi-cloud and unified commerce approach to your business. An exploration of OSF UnifyCOMMERCE is provided in this discussion as well as a glimpse into what the most recent version of this innovative product brings to the table.

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE, a solution that provides 360° visibility into customer profiles and interactions in a single interface, promises a unified shopping experience across all channels. Here’s an interview that was conducted with Anemona Stanomir, Multi-Cloud Marketing Manager, and Anna Petriv, VP, MultiCloud & Salesforce Alliance at OSF Digital.

What challenges does a solution like OSF UnifyCOMMERCE resolve?

Anna Petriv: Today, retailers are acutely aware that customers demand a fast, seamless, and flexible shopping experience. Consumers want to maintain their preferences across all channels, web, mobile, and within a physical store. This is why brands can no longer separate the physical channel from e-commerce. Yet, they are not always properly equipped and fear significant budget investments. With OSF UnifyCOMMERCE, we offer a solution for all retailers.

Please offer details about the latest version of OSF UnifyCOMMERCE?

Anna Petriv: Our goal is to help brands become customer-centric, with a single interface providing a 360° view of customer interactions with the brand. We take it a step further with the ability to bring this information offline, in a physical store, with an iPad app. It could be considered an extension of Salesforce.

Anemona Stanomir: Indeed, we must not forget that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated and that on average, nearly 90% of purchases are still happening in the physical store. Therefore, consumers expect shop sellers to anticipate their needs, not just online but also offline, and many want in-store recommendations from sales associates. This is why, in the latest version of OSF UnifyCOMMERCE, we added the offline/in-store component, that is the Clienteling App. In the previous version of this product, we had the online store (Salesforce Commerce Cloud) connected with the CRM (Sales/Service Cloud), Community Cloud and Marketing Cloud. In the latest version, we added integration with POS, with the help of Heroku Connect, the big-data lake, through which we can also process a significant volume of data. Now, we can truly say Unified Commerce is no longer a Nirvana for retailers, and the single view of online & offline consumer data is achievable and can be leveraged to not only personalize, but individualize the customer shopping journey on the website as well as in-store.

Do you have an example?

Anemona Stanomir: Let's imagine that a client goes to an online beauty store, and adds some products to her cart, but doesn’t finalize the order because she decides to check the items in the physical store, as it is not far from her workplace. Once in the shop, the store assistant is able to identify the client and access her online and offline unified customer profile from a tablet which has the OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Clienteling Application installed. It is important to understand that 42% of customer service agents are unable to properly resolve customer issues because of disconnected systems, old user interfaces, and multiple applications. OSF UnifyCOMMERCE solves this issue.

The Clienteling App provides the store assistant with access to a 360-degree view of customer data, including her online and in-store order history, products she added to her basket, but did not purchase, wish list and even the last items viewed while browsing the website. Based on this information, and with the help of AI that generates personalized recommendations, the assistant can individualize the shopping journey inside the physical store. With the Clienteling App, the store assistant can access relevant information about what the customer actually likes and wants, and is able to provide a unique in-store experience and up-sell or cross-sell by recommending relevant products and services. For example, she may offer the customer a free makeup session to test the products viewed online, or those added to the wish list or shopping cart. She may also give a discount on the shopper’s next purchase or as a birthday gift. Thanks to this 360 ° view of the customer, brands can make the most of each interaction they have with consumers, through all touchpoints, and provide a personalized and unified shopping journey across all channels.

What best practices do you recommend?

Anna Petriv: It sounds obvious, but many brands do not have the basics as part of their operations. Their different systems work in silos, and this is the main mistake in my opinion. As a Salesforce partner, we help our joint customers better integrate their clouds and other platforms such as OMS, POS, CRM and more. But it's not so much a question of connecting the platforms between them as purely just a business move on our side – it is essential, and it is also our role, to define an integration strategy that makes sense for the brand. It is also important to ensure that centralized data is transformed into something intelligent by offering the best experience to the customer. The challenge is to do the same thing offline ̶ that the conversation is more personalized, and the shopping experience individualized.

At OSF we say that we help brands to achieve connected commerce. This means that they can fully meet their customer’s expectations for personalized attention, offer relevant product recommendations, provide responsive customer service, and much more.