Building a customer-first experience is a complex and time-consuming process. It extends far beyond the ‘Buy’ action to include post-purchase servicing and is handled by several different business systems with limited to no communication.
Even with an Order Management System in place, merchants find it difficult to establish seamless coordination between the different systems and processes involved in various stages of the order lifecycle for timely delivery and easy order fulfillment. Such isolated silos create friction and delays in order processing and ultimately, lead to unsatisfactory customer experiences.
An offering from the world’s #1 CRM platform, Salesforce Order Management (SOM) promises a seamless, omnichannel commerce experience from the time customers place their orders till their products are delivered at their doorstep and more.
Utilizing the Lightning interface, SOM can be easily customized as per merchant requests and integrated to the existing Commerce Cloud platform. With Salesforce Lightning Order Management, merchants bring together people, processes, and systems on a centralized system to streamline and automate order processing, fulfillment, and delivery.
Integrating SOM to your Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform enhances the competitive flexibility of Salesforce in driving undifferentiated customer experiences across the proliferating intersection points.
The business value of Salesforce Order Management for your SFCC store
Just like all other Salesforce products, the order management system in Salesforce is built on a tried-and-tested Salesforce platform, which offers a slew of benefits. From consistent uptime and timely updates to the extensive ‘App Store’ availability for different purposes and functionalities in AppExchange, Salesforce Order Management offers elevated performances and a 360-degree view of an order from when it is placed until it is delivered and post-delivery experience. The best part: you can easily customize experiences, thanks to the tools, settings, Apex code, and lightning web components.
Customer-first approach: With Salesforce Lightning Order Management handling your digital retail’s ‘behind the scenes’, shoppers can place their orders from any channel, and track and manage their orders from any other touchpoint throughout the order lifecycle.
Flexible order fulfillment: Merchants gain a single and easy-to-manage view of the orders, its fulfillment, payment, invoicing, shipping, and post-purchase services by integrating with pre-built connector apps to resolve omnichannel challenges and fulfill unique business needs.
Robust and out-of-the-box integrations: Other than the available features and functionalities, Salesforce Order Management system can fully integrate with B2C Commerce (Salesforce Commerce Cloud) to accomplish commerce goals and natively supports Service Cloud and B2B Commerce, offering a full view of order data and history. Apart from this, you can easily look for other integrations related to payment providers, ERP, accounting software, etc., leveraging Salesforce APIs or the middleware tool.
Centralized data management: You can create rich experiences using two powerful products from Salesforce- Commerce Cloud and SOM. This allows you to gain a centralized view of your order data, customer history, recent purchases, most purchased products, and more. You can use this data to build campaigns and journeys that personalize every communication you have with your customers across several intersection points.
Affordability in time and costs: Unlike other order management systems that require a tedious number of hours and a good investment for an integration with your SFCC store, using the Salesforce Lightning Order Management system for your SFCC platform is a speedy approach being part of the Salesforce ecosystem. All you have to do is connect with the Salesforce experts and they can integrate your store with SOM in just a few clicks.
The competitive benefits of Salesforce Order Management System
There is so much happening even after a customer clicks on the ‘Buy Now’ button. It is a tedious process, one that involves connecting with people in different departments, warehouses, time zones, and locations just to get an order delivered. Browsing details on different systems is excessively time consuming, especially if you have a shopper on hold during customer support.
If your eCommerce store runs on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform, you need an order management system like Salesforce Order Management to sync order statuses, billing, shipping, delivery, and invoicing information. It is worth mentioning that SOM does not come with SFCC as a free offering, but it does offer loads of benefits that boost its ROI function. These include:
#1: Order Management Console
Order Management Console is a centralized hub containing all the information about every order across every touchpoint. You can easily glance at key order details, review additional info, and manage service requests via Order Management Console in Salesforce Order Management. The best part: it keeps all your data together.
You can customize it as per your needs- name, description, branding elements, easy-to-navigate items, etc. via App Builder. Moreover, you can create custom pages, add custom fields, change layouts, or modify the components.
#2: A single source of truth for order summaries
Unlike order details that include products, prices, fees, and taxes, order summaries include information from capturing, fulfillment, payment, shipping, delivery, and post-service queries, all of which the Salesforce Order Management system displays on a single interface. Order summaries are where you can find answers to:
- Who placed the order and when?
- The attributes of an order (color, quantities, prices)
- What items are canceled or returned?
- Where and how are these items being shipped?
- The payment captured from the orders shipped
- The payment that is refunded to the customer and more
#3: Automating order fulfillment process via Flow Builder
The ultimate goal of an order management system is to ensure accurate and timely order fulfillment. It is a make or break aspect for your business. You need to consistently deliver what you promised, at the exact price, in the exact timeline. If it doesn’t happen, you need to track every order and delivery. When using disparate systems for capturing orders, collecting payments, shipping orders, etc., it makes your system vulnerable to errors and mishaps, ultimately driving down customer satisfaction.
However, with Salesforce Lightning Order Management, you can use Flow Builder to efficiently and quickly move products from one location to another. It allows you to create visual representation of the entire order from start to finish.
Of course, SOM helps you with pre-built flows, which you can modify as per your processes and requirements. These automated flows are easily customizable in a drag-and-drop manner. The order management process in Salesforce via the Flow Builder, allows you to keep track of where you order is in the fulfillment process, even add commands for creating separate fulfillment orders for when products can’t be shipped together, dynamically update order summaries using details from each fulfillment order, etc.
As for the payment processing methods, you can configure providers, processes, and options for your eCommerce site and integrate them to your fulfillment flow. Salesforce Lightning Order Management system also creates a payment summary for each order, uses invoices and credit memos to reconcile payment transactions, and captures all data exchange between your payment platform and external gateways.
#4: Distributed Order Management (DOM)
While order fulfillment is essential for business success and growth, brands today need to do more than the usual. You need to offer a seamless order experience both online and offline, which you can accomplish with distributed order management (DOM).
Salesforce Order Management’s DOM optimizes order fulfillment to ensure faster and cost-effective deliveries throughout the service locations. You can use its automation capabilities to identify fulfillment locations that can easily handle order requirements and then reserve those routes. This improves order efficiency and boosts customer satisfaction by expediting order delivery in a reduced number of shipments.
Salesforce Order Management already contains a pre-built DOM package that includes all the custom objects, apex classes and custom fields for both physical and online stores. Of course, you can modify the package components depending on your requirements and business logic and even implement fulfillment options like BOPIS. This customization of distributed order management along with functionalities like ‘find routes with fewest splits’ and ‘proximity-based routing’ in Salesforce Lightning Order Management makes all the difference to your order fulfillment process.
#5: Integrated Salesforce B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce & Service Cloud
As mentioned before, Salesforce Order Management system is seamlessly integrated with B2C Commerce and natively supports B2B Commerce and Service Cloud. But what does it mean for your business?
For example, a customer connects with your customer support about an order query. Now, because critical order information is stored in different systems, it takes some time before your service agent can pull up the required details and help the customer. The more time a service agent takes, the more frustrated a customer becomes. However, your agents can speedily close customer requests if they have the Salesforce Order Management system is in place along with Service Cloud providing a holistic view to the support agents.
As SOM natively supports Service Cloud, your agents can gain a complete view of order information, customer details alike to your order management team. It means, agents no longer have to dive into external disparate systems to access order records since they can now do so from the Service Console. This approach not only is time efficient but saves your agents from unnecessary hassle.
But that’s not it, your service agents can now easily and speedily process returns, cancellations, discounts, refunds, reshipments, and similar order actions in the ‘Actions & Recommendations’ section of the Order Summary page. Of course, all such actions performed by your agents are simultaneously updated in the order summary tab.
For example, when an agent processes a return and immediately issues a refund, SOM automatically creates a change order, updates product status in the inventory, and creates a credit memo to match the refund with your financial system. That’s how fast Salesforce Order Management is!
Better order experiences leads to personalized customer experiences
With millions of online stores running globally, the modern eCommerce ecosystem is more competitive than ever. It is why, if you run a Salesforce Commerce Cloud-led online business, the Salesforce Order Management system is how you can cut through this clutter and boost your business value. Not to mention, you don’t have to spend time and money in integrating Salesforce Order Management to your SFCC store when compared to other order management systems being part of the Salesforce ecosystem, it will be the implementation of SOM that will be done per your business needs.
Gain a 360 degree view of your customers via SOM
Our certified Salesforce professionals can tell you how.
