Firstly, it is important to establish what Commerce Cloud is.
This Salesforce functionality, which became available in 2016 as a result of an acquisition, forms the basis of a full end-to-end e-commerce platform. Commerce Cloud can ensure customers have the best possible experience when making purchases of goods and services, whether they are done online or in actual stores.
Users can now maintain contact with customers throughout their entire journey, providing them with better service, a deeper insight into who they are as individuals, a more complete picture of where their business stands, and a wealth of data and reporting capabilities that will give you a leg up on the competition.
How does Commerce Cloud work?
The platform, in essence, has to scale with the ever-increasing demands of consumer habits. Speed, efficiency, and a seamless experience across all digital mediums are paramount, and the technology must be able to support this. Salesforce Commerce Cloud, powered by the best-in-class CRM platform, offers this in abundance.
One of the biggest benefits Salesforce offers is the ability to always have a complete 360-degree view of your customers and their purchasing patterns, whether that means connecting your Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, or Einstein AI to help provide a one-stop shop for all your customers' needs. More than ever, the information-rich digital age has made it possible for businesses to maintain close ties to their customers.
For your customers, Commerce Cloud offers frictionless experiences, including quick checkout on mobile devices, predictive analytics, and recommendations using AI and Einstein. This can lead to companies also delivering more personalized and tailored campaigns that can be run on data-rich driven insights.
How is Commerce Cloud related to financial services?
Well, that’s very simple. Uses for Commerce Cloud within business banks allow financial institutions to better understand their clientele, provide superior service, and differentiate themselves from rivals. A simple way would be to offer the capability for their business banking customers to use commerce cloud licenses in a white-labelled fashion, in their own retail shops or online stores. Not only would the customers be able to benefit from a full end-to-end e-commerce platform, but the banks could offer this as part of their proposition.
The advantage for banks would be that they would have a better understanding of how their customers in their business banking division are performing. With this, the banks can offer tailored and personalized experiences and products to their customers based on the data collected. In their business banking division, they not only de-risk their ability to lend but also practice more shrewd portfolio management.
The advantage for the business customer is that they would be able to benefit from a powerful e-commerce platform, allowing them to gain a greater understanding of their business, and customers, offer better experiences, and ultimately be successful in their respective fields. Sounds like a win-win for both parties involved.
The other advantage for financial institutions is that this paves the way for the sector to broaden its capabilities beyond the traditional B2B sphere and into the B2B2C sector, thereby broadening its reach and increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction through the use of Salesforce and Commerce Cloud.
Another example would be within the currency exchange market. We know that some providers can also use Commerce Cloud. How, you might ask? With their relationships with banks across the world, travel exchange companies can offer a white-labelled version in order to offer direct access to banks with up-to-date currency exchange information. This allows for direct integration into their product offering, but more importantly, the ability to showcase a one-to-many relationship with different products. As currencies in different geographies are pegged to a baseline currency, Commerce Cloud makes it possible to calculate in real-time exchanges for customers in various locations and currencies.
This will allow banks and exchanges to widen their product offerings while also tracking the performance of various currencies, locations, and products more accurately. Institutions are now able to act and react quickly with informed data at hand, decision making can be done with insight-driven information.
All in all, there are some strong use cases for financial institutions to explore Commerce Cloud opportunities to broaden their reach and differentiate themselves from the competition. Traditionally, some will consider ways in which they can monetise their B2B verticals, and one way will be through the power of Commerce Cloud.