3 AI Features Personalizing the B2B Commerce Customer Experience

Advisory Director, Jason Rieckewald-Schmidt discusses how new Artificial Intelligence (AI) features will positively impact Salesforce B2B Commerce

The biggest complaint I hear from B2B Commerce customers is that they have more visibility to the $30 pizza they are getting delivered than their recent $3,000 B2B order. Or think about how you can return a product from Amazon in just a few clicks compared to the long hold times to do a return with products delivered at work. We wish the convenience and personalization of our consumer lives fed into our business buying experience. 

The good news is that all the advancements in our consumer life are happening simultaneously in your B2B life as well. Simply put, AI is at the forefront of Salesforce’s Commerce vision – for both consumers and business buyers. 

3 AI-Powered Commerce Products for Personalization in B2B 

B2B customers can expect more personalization with the new AI-powered Commerce products, announced at Dreamforce 2023. 62% of buyers believe that the businesses they buy from should surface more relevant information in their buying experience. In the past, surfacing this data has been complex from the different silos and has been slow and expensive. But now with AI, that data will be surfaced from different locations, in real-time, providing the personalized buying experience that business buyers are looking for. Here are 3 AI features that will provide an improved Salesforce B2B Commerce buying experience. 

1. Personalized Product Recommendations 

By looking at different data points such as order history and white space, product recommendations will now be more relevant than ever. Instead of having a ‘one size fits all’ strategy with static cross-sells or upsells, AI will drive personalized recommendations for buyers. This will reduce the time buyers spend on the site while promoting products that are more relevant to them. All of this will increase customer satisfaction and increase revenue without having to add additional staff. 

2. Return Rate Insights 

AI isn’t just for your end customers. One new feature that users will love is the Return Rate insights. This is a way that Generative AI will help business buyers make better purchasing decisions that will lead to lower returns. So not only can AI promote better products to recommend, but it can also reduce the probability that those same buyers will return products. AI is both increasing revenue and reducing the cost of service. 

3. Self-Service Chatbots for Order Management

The biggest release that will help our customers immediately is the ‘where’s my order’ chatbot for Order Management. This not only reduces the highest volume of cases — where’s my order — but it is typically the most expensive channel. And this couldn’t have come at a better time. 

I recently heard that one Salesforce Service Cloud customer no longer allows sales reps to have access to the ERP. This means that when a customer calls to find out their order status, the sales reps call the customer service agent, who then looks up the order in the ERP. Then the sales reps call back the customer and relay the information. These types of interactions are costly, inefficient, and reduce customer satisfaction. 

This new chatbot lets customers, dealers or even sales reps look up an order status without ever needing to call customer support. Chatbots can deflect those order status inquiries which reduces case volume and increases customer satisfaction. A recent Harvard Business Review study uncovered that 81% of customers want to try a self-service channel before calling a service agent to solve their issue. Our customers want to self-serve, we just need to make it easier for them.  

The early results show that this will decrease the number of cases by 20-35%. Imagine turning on a chatbot and then freeing up 2.5 hours a day for each service agent! That is the power of bringing data into Salesforce and then giving users an easy way to access that data. 

AI-Powered Commerce in Motion 

RafterOne will be continuing the conversation around AI-powered commerce and diving deeper into ta this topic of Order Servicing, so stay tuned. We’re excited to explore these next generation features with our customers so that you can harness the power of Salesforce and AI to drive your businesses forward. 

– Jason Rieckewald-Schmidt, Advisory Director