The customer experience has a huge influence on the buying habits of modern consumers. In fact, two out of three customers say convenience is the main reason they choose to buy a specific online retailer, according to the 2021 State of Ecommerce Landscape report. Moreover, convenience is more important to customers than either price or variety of offerings, the study found. What this means is that every aspect of the modern buyer journey needs to meet—and ideally—exceed expectations. And these expectations extend to the ordering process. 

Traditionally, ordering has been dismissed as the no-frills, transactional part of the buyer journey. But customers today expect much more from every aspect of ordering, and it’s every business’s job to deliver this experience. Fortunately, when you use Salesforce Order Management, it’s easy to make the ordering process seamless and effortless for your customers. The key advantage of Salesforce Order Management is that it integrates all of the different systems that businesses use to support customer orders; this ensures that customers can get their ordering-related questions answered, receive what they ordered in a timely manner, and ultimately come away from the experience with an overall positive impression. Let’s explore five essential tips for designing a customer-centric ordering experience in Salesforce Order Management:

Enable customers to self-track their orders

From the moment customers place their order, they want to know it’s being fulfilled promptly and exactly when they can expect to receive their order. Sometimes they need to know the delivery date because their own internal deadlines or timelines depend on it. Other times they’re concerned that the delivery date has slipped. And sometimes they need to update the shipping address or delivery instructions. No matter what the situation, customers want to be able to access detailed information about their order from their fingertips—and they expect to be able to access it instantly and in real-time. Salesforce Order Management is designed to enable customers to readily self-track and even update their order information, as well as opt into receiving text and email updates. Not only are these convenient customer features, but they also cut down on the volume of individual inquiries from customers who must manually seek this information from the business itself.

Offer multiple delivery options to customers

Businesses’ natural instinct is often to keep shipping and delivery fees to a minimum, even when cost control comes at the expense of being able to get orders to customers faster. While a one-size-fits-all shipping strategy may work for some customers, it doesn’t work for everyone. And that’s why it’s important to offer multiple delivery options whenever possible—next-day delivery, same-day delivery, one-hour delivery, in-store pickup, and so forth. Salesforce Order Management makes it simple and easy for businesses to present all of these options side by side to customers (and associated costs), so customers can easily compare and make the best choice for their needs. Meanwhile, on the backend, Order Management connects the systems and teams necessary to make these various delivery options implementable.  

Make returns fully self-service

When customers place orders for products sight unseen, they expect hassle-free returns if the product doesn’t work out. Similarly, when they have a change of heart, they want to be able to cancel their order if it hasn’t shipped yet. Salesforce Order Management makes these customer-friendly features readily accessible via fully self-service options, including being able to generate and print out return labels, as well as select how and where to return the item. 

Surface your ordering data to improve customer service

Many businesses struggle to find specific pieces of information about a specific order when they go looking—a specific transaction date, the identity of an employee who processed a specific order, a recent chat conversation with the customer about a specific order. The problem is that this information tends to be spread across multiple disconnected, siloed systems. Salesforce Order Management makes it possible to integrate all of these pieces of data—and to surface them instantly and automatically across a range of systems, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud. The end result is every business can readily retrieve relevant ordering data when they need it most.

Build marketing campaigns around ordering data

The data that Salesforce Order Management collects is rich, relevant, and perfect for building highly targeted, tailored marketing campaigns. You should be turning to ordering data to inform the design of loyalty and reward programs, and to craft educational articles, social media posts, and other content marketing resources that inform and add value to your customers’ lives. Ordering data from Order Management also enables you to construct detailed customer journeys and customer profiles that become the building blocks of future marketing campaigns.

Modern customers expect a modern ordering experience, and Salesforce Order Management is at the heart of being able to deliver on this experience. The keys to using Order Management effectively include letting customers self-track their orders, giving customers multiple shipping options, offering self-service returns, surfacing ordering data in Service Cloud and other systems, and harnessing ordering data to build tailored marketing campaigns.

Simplus would love to help you use Salesforce Order Management to create seamless, customer-centric buying experiences. To learn how Simplus helped a consumer products manufacturer use Salesforce to build streamlined customer experiences, please check out this Simplus case study on the Fiskars company.

To learn more about how you can use Salesforce Order Management to supercharge your customer experience, please reach out to our implementation experts at Simplus. We look forward to helping you create the modern buying experiences you and your customers want.