Optimizing Retail Operations with New Salesforce Data and AI

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Salesforce revealed new data and AI-powered solutions to improve the whole shopping experience today at NRF 2024. Retail merchandisers and marketers can use the generative AI built into Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud to optimise every customer interaction, increasing loyalty, driving revenue, and boosting employee productivity.

The Einstein 1 Platform seamlessly integrates with retail or shopper data, ensuring real-time context, brand voice consistency, data governance, and security. This provides whole new shopper, merchandiser, and retail market experiences through linked data and AI-powered applications.

Benefits of AI-powered solutions in Retail

According to recent Salesforce statistics, AI has improved operational efficiency for 83% of worldwide merchants. Furthermore, 63% of marketers believe that using trustworthy consumer data is critical when deploying generative AI in their businesses. Retailers want a system that can consolidate all of their consumer data into a single, trusted platform and then utilise it to power the most efficient, AI-driven retail experiences.

New Features for Consumers

1. Einstein Copilot for Shoppers

Einstein Copilot has a new consumer-facing version that facilitates personalised discussions with consumers. Customers may browse items and make purchases more quickly by utilizing natural language interactions on merchant platforms such as digital storefronts and messaging applications.

For example, a shopper in the Pacific Northwest can notify Einstein Copilot for Shoppers that he or she needs camping materials. Einstein Copilot for Shoppers can offer a waterproof and windproof tent in the shopper’s desired colour, as well as a link for fast payment, based on existing consumer data such as location, preferences, and previous purchases.

2. New features for retail merchandisers

a. Page Designer

Page Designer accelerates the design, development, and customisation of e-commerce sites and pages by leveraging generative AI-powered natural language prompts. For example, a merchandiser may rapidly create a campaign landing page for a new line of running shoes by entering a few prompts into Page Designer and immediately generating a new web page that mimics the branding on its current shop.

b. Return Insights in Order Management

Return Insights In Order Management analyses data, looks for trends in return behaviour, and utilises AI to advise shops to make product display modifications that reduce future returns. It also use sentiment analysis to evaluate comments on product evaluations and return reason codes before recommending ways to swiftly resolve issues with specific items.

c. Inventory Insights

Inventory Insights provides digital merchants with a clear picture of available inventory, allowing them to keep items in stock whenever feasible. With near-real-time access to inventory data and analytics, merchants can quickly manage inventory reservations and product holds, forecast future inventory demand, and provide customer care representatives with product suggestions that may be added to a customer’s basket.

d. Customer and Product Insights

In order to assist merchandisers in creating innovative, focused commerce experiences, Customer and Product Insights leverages data from Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud to present trends, such the most popular product bundles sold and the most active shopper demographics.

3. New Features for retail marketers

a. Global Promotion Management

Retailers can simply coordinate price and incentive activities for both loyalty members and non-loyalty consumers by using global promotion management to combine customer marketing and promotions data with predictive analytics to estimate prospective promotion income. Marketers can easily create, launch, and distribute omni-channel promotions with discounts and loyalty benefits to better engage their consumer base by using guided setup with pre-defined promotion templates.

b. Referral Marketing

Referral Marketing offers pre-built templates and an integrated ‘Likely to Refer’ AI engine to help organisations discover consumers most likely to participate in referral programmes, enabling them to swiftly enhance conversions and begin referral programmes. In order to build integrated experiences across interactive email campaigns, landing pages, A/B testing, and send-time personalisation, brands can now assess trends and adjust promotions.

c. Segment Creation

Segment Creation uses trustworthy data from Data Cloud and generative AI suggestions to help merchants enhance targeting and personalisation. With the ability to create new segments in minutes, businesses can now customise journeys, offers, and suggestions for customers throughout the shopping experience across marketing, commerce, and service touchpoints.

d. Content Creation for Marketing Cloud Engagement 

Content Creation for the Marketing Cloud Engagement enables retail marketers to address content bottlenecks in their campaign and personalisation strategies. Marketers can use natural language prompts powered by generative AI to produce personalised on-brand visual content, email subject lines, and body text at scale, improving customer happiness and conversion.

Salesforce unveiled a number of solutions for media networks, theft, staff efficiency, and real estate today in addition to new commerce and marketing AI product breakthroughs. These solutions help retailers run operations more effectively and generate new income streams.

Availability of these features

• Page Designer is in pilot right now.
• Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is now in pilot and will be accessible in the summer of 2024.
• Return Insights in Order Management are generally accessible now.
• Customer and Product Insights Dashboard and Inventory Insights are now under pilot and will be generally available in summer 2024.
• Global Promotion Management is now under pilot and will be generally available in spring 2024.
• Referral Marketing is generally available now.
• Segment Creation is currently in pilot and will be generally available in spring 2024.
• Content Creation is generally available now.

References

Salesforce Data and AI Innovations for Retail Help Businesses Drive Efficiency

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