Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the webinar. We have a lot to share with you today, so let's get straight into it. And before we get started, I do have to warn you that Salesforce is a publicly traded company, so please make all of your purchasing decisions based on features and functionality that is currently available. And thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us today. We hope that you can take something useful away from what we're about to share. My name is Daisy Han, Product Marketing Manager at Salesforce. I am joined by my wonderful colleagues in Solution Engineering, Monika, who will be answering our Q&A portion at the end. So please feel free to pop any questions you have into the chat box throughout the webinar. Kazim, who will be taking you through an exciting demo later and Rui from our Business Value Service team will be outlining how you can maximize ROI using the tools we're showing you in an actionable way. So let's -- so you can see our agenda here, and we are going to start by talking about Activating Commerce Everywhere. We are in a transformative era of commerce. It is an era where customer expectations have just been accelerating with the adoption of increasingly digital experiences. Just one negative interaction can drive a customer away, and customers want to be more than just a number. We know that in our daily lives, we're all individuals, and we want to feel known and seen by the brands and companies that we're interacting with. We want businesses to know us, how we interact with their brand and our preferences. We're headed toward a future that's customer-focused, data-rich and powered by AI, and that means the old playbook no longer applies. A decade ago, transactions were isolated. But today, commerce has evolved and is integrated into every facet of your business. Modern customers demand more than a traditional storefront. They see the convenience of purchasing through diverse channels from WhatsApp to social media. Commerce is an indispensable component of every industry that sells, not just retail, but as diverse as manufacturing to health and life sciences. But companies are having a hard time staying connected to their customers. It's really hard to do because data is exploding and promising unprecedented insights if unlocked, but most companies are still facing challenges. So what are the major obstacles keeping companies from delivering rich experiences that their customers expect? Disconnected systems and a lack of a single source of customer data to power personalized experiences, resource constraints in people and budgets to move fast and, of course, trust and privacy in an era where breaches make headlines and can be a deadly blow. So how can companies bridge the gap and meet their customer expectations? Well, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the most complete platform to power your business beyond these challenges. Built natively on the core Salesforce platform, companies can make the most of customer data and utilize the entire Customer 360 to reduce costs with Einstein AI-powered predictions and recommendations and insights that use real-time unified profile data to personalize every single customer experience. We can also help our customers increase productivity by connecting data with things like Salesforce Flow to automate the manual business processes that you're managing today. We're ultimately helping our customers reduce time to market and realize faster ROI by powering low-code app development and all of this while keeping your customer data secure and compliant on the Hyperforce infrastructure, which is just newly launched in Australia and Japan. If you're already a customer on other clouds, as you can see at the top here, the Commerce app sits right next to the products and services that you already know and love like sales, marketing and Service Cloud. Commerce unlocks that true cloud interoperability because everything is built on the same platform. Commerce Cloud was just named the #1 commerce platform for the eighth consecutive year by IDC. Commerce Cloud powers revenue growth across every part of the customer journey using AI insight, guidance and automation from storefront setup to unlocking the team's potential, personalizing and scaling with data from across the enterprise with the power of Data Cloud and seamlessly integrating digital commerce into your channels. Companies, who use Commerce Cloud has seen a 29% increase in online revenue. Salesforce Commerce makes by easy for every customer everywhere. We're helping companies unify technology around the customer. It's easier than ever to add commerce to existing processes, to drive more revenue and profitability. We're also helping customers across the globe drive efficiencies with AI and our click-based automation tools so that you can reach every touch point in the customer life cycle and provide personalized and meaningful experiences to every single customer that you interact with. According to the Forrester TEI report, customers who use commerce see a 15% productivity increase amongst their sales reps because Commerce Cloud helps automate low-touch processes so reps can focus on high-value accounts. And speaking of sales reps, Commerce Cloud Salesforce Commerce -- sorry, speaking of sales reps, some of you online today probably have some kind of sales footprint. You might be wondering how to get the most out of your tools and how commerce ties into what you're already using. Salesforce Commerce helps companies scale sales with easy self-service ordering, so that reps can focus on high-value selling by standing up a digital ordering portal fast that automates. That can help you automate reorders and reach the long tail more efficiently, and that can help you boost long-term profitability. Businesses can automate sales with easy-to-use tools by embedding commerce throughout the customer life cycle, can unify customer data on a single platform, so companies can personalize buying for customers with commerce powered by your CRM. And for those of you on the webinar with Service Cloud, you can get the most out of commerce with order management. Repeat customers now rely on the ability to deliver great experiences beyond the buy button, and that is where order management comes in. When things go wrong, you need to have a system in place that empower service agents to be able to quickly take action and resolve cases quickly and efficiently. And we are all used to buying online these days. I want you to think back to the last time you had issues tracking or managing an online order. How frustrating is that feeling and all the time that you waste following up on what should be a really easy process. While order management helps you create an amazing connected customer experience from the start of placing an order to driving loyalty or initiating returns, it is all seamlessly integrated, really eliminating that swivel chair exercise and hopping from system to system that slows down your service agents, and is helping you offer your customers automated order servicing for simple returns, cancellations or simply to find the status of their order. I know when I've ordered something online, I don't want to call into a call center. I just want to be able to track my order online and get answers quickly to things like return policy. And because I'm millennial and without having to talk to anyone, so connecting order management, Einstein Bots on your store front allows you to build a connected journey for those customers who want self-serve like me. And all these capabilities are covered very quickly because we want to get to the demo, which is a really exciting part of this webinar. But what I want you to take away today is that Commerce Cloud has cross-cloud synergies that enables companies to easily, quickly and efficiently activate commerce everywhere, all while using platform tools that you're probably already familiar with from flexible composability to opening a new direct-to-consumer channel to shoppable marketing with Instagram and TikTok, and now standing up a B2B order portal to automate those reorders and reach the long tail as well as seamless order support and servicing. Salesforce Commerce has all the tools you need to efficiently run your business and deliver faster time to value on the same platform that you're familiar with already. And with that, let's see this in action. So take it away, Kaz.

Thanks so much, Daisy. Okay. So I'm going to take you through how we can provide a complete commerce ecosystem from marketing to sales to commerce and to service. I'll demonstrate how we can enhance the customer experiences leading to an increase in average order value conversion rates and ultimately, the customer lifetime value. Now the platform not only drives operational efficiencies, enabling you to accomplish more with less, but it also seamlessly embeds commerce into every digital interaction like Daisy went through, and this integration empowers every channel to maximize sales potential. And I'm going to go through this journey today. And first off, we're going to be in the persona of Lauren. And Lauren is going to go through a typical purchasing journey all the way through to creating an order. And then we're going to pass that order over to Matt. And Matt is going to take us through the back end of Salesforce and show you how that all works. So -- and I'll just mention, if you want to see any of this in more detail because it goes through quite a lot in a very short period of time, feel free to reach out after the webinar, and we'll only be more than happy to take you through any of this in a lot more detail. Okay. Thanks. So Lauren starts off like most shoppers do, with a Google search. And in this instance, she's searching for solar energy rebate. And she sees a paid ad from Cirrus. And she is enticed by that, so she clicks through Cirrus. They provide products to do with energy efficiency, primarily wind turbines and things like that. Now everything that you see on the site here is configured with a drag-and-drop builder, making it extremely easy for the marketing team, the admin team in order to administer everything to do with the site. You don't need to engage IT. In this instance, we're actually using personalization to tailor the experience to Lauren based upon what have seen of her so far. Out of the box with Salesforce Commerce, we provide what's called explicit personalization, which basically means you can tailor any part of the site, any component on the page to a piece of information we know about Lauren, and that could come from our Sales Cloud, engagements with her or our Service Cloud engagements with her or through any other channel for that matter. In this instance, actually what I'm showing you is personalization being driven by Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and it's using what's called implicit personalization. And that's basically being able to personalize based upon in-session user behavior. So just wanted to call out that key distinction there. So really, really powerful with that off-site activities, she engage with that Google paid ad and that's allowed us to continue to converse with her as she's come to the site. So we can see that here, a banner here is lining up with that. And we can also see some various banners through here are really targeting that solar messaging there. So just so that I can show you a little bit more. I'm going to log in. And now that Lauren is logged in, and I can show you that we've actually been able to personalize the experience just a little bit more. This time, we're able to personalize the experience based upon Lauren's prior ordering behavior with us. In this instance, we can tell that she's a loyal customer. Thank you for coming back. Here's a $15 off discount. So we'll just take note of that $15 off coupon code for a little bit later. And we're also doing some product recommendations here as well. We can do product recommendations statically, so everybody who comes to the site sees the same product recommendations or we can do it by customer segments, so particular groups of customers see the same products. Or we can leave that to AI. And from an AI standpoint, which we call Einstein, we can configure it in much the same way as you would experience from shopping through Amazon. So in this instance, I've got the AI configured in order to show top-selling items, which basically means that as your products change and evolve, as your user behavior on the site changes and evolves, so too will the product recommendations change without your team needing to do anything. Those recommendations will just change there for you. So really, really powerful from an operational efficiency standpoint there and also from a customer experience standpoint because your shoppers don't want stale information -- stale content within the site. So the more AI can come into play here, the better. So now Lauren's going to engage with this particular banner here. Okay. So Lauren comes to this product detail page now. Just talking a little bit about this page in itself. So we can completely personalize the experience on this product detail page. So if you're servicing consumers and business buyers to your site, he can tailor the experience to the business buyer to show them much more rich information about your products. You can enrich the product description, product detail, specification, you can provide documentation from within here into your business buyers. And as we scroll down a little bit more, we can see we've got some videos that are able to be shown for this particular product. And we've also got product recommendations down here as well. So in this instance, we've got the AI configured in order to show other products that are commonly bought with this particular item. And again, that's completely out of the box for you, keeping your site very fresh and up to date without you needing to do anything. So let's go and add that to our cart, and we're going to continue to shop. Lauren is also interested in a power bank, so she does a quick search. She misspells that search term. But luckily, we've got AI-powered search at play here, which means that it allows for a certain element of user error to try to provide -- to still provide quick purchase path through the site. So just to talk about a couple of the AI capabilities that we have. So we have the ability to do spell corrections. We have the ability to do search, type ahead from a facet standpoint over here on the left-hand side, if you have a large number of facets that are configured across your catalog, you can let the AI determine what's the top 10 most relevant facets to show at any point in time. So depending upon the search results that are appearing, we'll dictate which facets the AI allow us to show, so really powerful there. We also have AI-driven automatic synonym management as well. And that basically relates to when a shopper comes to your site and they do a search, it triangulates the search term used with the products that are eventually viewed, with the products that are eventually purchased in order to improve subsequent search results. So the specific use case there that is really relevant to a lot of the customers that we have is where they say that it's impossible for them to keep up with the way that their different customer base in different regions in the country referred to their products. And so that allows -- that provides a mechanism for them in order to basically let the AI learn the way that the customers are referring to their products and services and enhance the search results for subsequent shoppers. So really, really powerful there. So let's go and have a look at this power bank, and specifically interested in this orange one, in this particular size. So we can see that, that product image has been updated in relation to the variance that we have seen. So let's go and add that to our cart. Let's go and check out our cart. Let's go and add our coupon, $15 off, going to apply that. And we can see we've got that $15 discount being applied there. And then let's go and check out. So we can enter our credit card details here. So just talking briefly about Salesforce payments. So Salesforce payments provides out-of-the-box ability in order to pay via any credit card. It provides Google Pay, Apple Pay and bank transfer. Just talking about Salesforce payments a little bit more holistically across the Salesforce platform. It can also do direct debit capability as well. So let's go and enter these details in here, and we'll go and place our order. Okay. So we've got our order created now. So now that Lauren's here, she actually remembers that from her past order, there was an issue that she needs to deal with. So Lauren goes and enters in her details, enters a description. She had an issue with the wind generator in her previous order and she wants to engage in a conversation there. And now the system is engaging with our chatbot, that's configured called Luna and it provides us with a number of different options. So we've got an issue with one of our orders, so let's go and click through on that. And we can see that order coming up in the list, but it's actually the last order that we're most interested in. So we'll go and click through on that as the order that we had an issue with. Now, we could start an automatic return process. So you could easily make a change to the workflow behind the scenes here to completely automate things. So for example, if it was a low dollar amount that was being disputed, you may want to just ship the product back to them completely in an automated sense or issue the customer with a refund. So you've got that complete control of being able to do that. In this instance, I'm going to show you how we can transfer this to a live agent. So we can see here that the bot has now left and we're in a queue waiting for an agent. So now if we go into the back end of Salesforce and we're in Service Cloud here, and we're now logged in as Matt. And Matt can see his dashboard of all of the things that he needs to do today as well as how he's currently performing. He's just started his shift, so he's going to log in. And this is what we call omnichannel routing, and this is an efficient routing engine, which basically allows a message to go to the right service agent who is best capable of being able to deal with it. So we're going to say we're available for messaging. And we can see this has now popped into our queue, which we'll accept. And now we're able to start to see a 360-degree view of all of the interactions that we've had as a business with Lauren and this particular issue. So over here on the left-hand side, we can see all of Lauren's engagement with the chatbot and we can get up to speed on that. We can navigate and see a bunch of other information to do with Lauren as well. And we've also got our order here so that we can see everything at a glance. So over here, Matt can basically say I want to use this snippet. And just inform Lauren that I'm reading through things, but feel free to provide us with a little bit more context, if you so wish, and we can go back over here and see that, that message has appeared for Lauren. We can also pop open the case that has been automatically created for this chat session as well. So you can see how we've got a chat that's linked to a particular case. That is also linked to a particular order without the service agent needing to do anything, right? So -- and that's an example of how we can add commerce to every digital experience. So if we scroll down a little bit here. We can also pop open that order. This is a window into our order management capabilities. So here, we have the order being shown to us. And this is a window into our order management capability. From this display, we can view a number of different things. We can review all of the details to do with what products we purchased, where it was shipped, how many shipments were sent. We can also see how the order might have been split, if it was split, and that's where we can see from fulfillment orders there. We can see if any returns had been triggered so far and so on and so forth. So from an order management standpoint, when you have Salesforce Commerce in play, you automatically get what we call order visibility. And what that means is that an order will come into the order summary and you'll just be able to review the order and integrate it to a system of record. The next evolution of that is being able to incorporate omnichannel orders within this -- in the system. So that's basically orders that have been created through different channels and you're integrating them into Salesforce so that your sales and service team can just use Salesforce to review all of the orders to do with your customers. And that's from a visibility standpoint, which is extremely beneficial in not needing them to go into other systems and review things. So the next step up from there is what we call order support. From an order support standpoint, you then are enabled to be able to interact with that order. So you can cancel the order, you can trigger a discount, if you want. You can trigger a return, trigger an RMA process, if you would like. On top of those things, you can also create an order completely from the back end of Salesforce, not needing to go through a storefront experience like what we went through earlier. And the system is able to do that by tapping into the configuration that you have within one of your Salesforce Commerce store fronts to be able to facilitate that process. So it basically piggybacks off that configuration within the storefront. So really powerful there. Then the third aspect to our order management capability is what we call order routing. An order routing can be configured using flows in such a way where it can be to the benefit of the business in regards to lowering your costs in order to ship to customers or you can put the customer first and say, okay, I will bear the burden of some of these additional costs in multiple shipments, but let me ship to the customer what I have available today and also in the subsequent shipment later. So you've got all of those options at your disposal when it comes to our order management capability. Okay. So now I'm going to flip over into my commerce application. And this is basically our cockpit when it comes to doing -- anything to do with our commerce sites. From within here, we can create a new store, we can do some merchandising, some pricing. We can manage content within the site as well. We can see some various analytics and we configure different ones there, and we can see the different commerce sites that are configured within the solution. And now we come over into the store itself, and we can administer various aspects of the site. I'm just going to drill on the experience builder now. Okay. So now we're looking at our experience builder. Our experience builder is what you see is what you get editor. And you can construct the pages using components. And as I navigate around the page, you can see the blue boxes represent the different components of the page. And here, our list of different components that have been dragged and dropped into the pages onto the site as a whole to create the experience that I showed you earlier. You can control the theming, colors, imagery and whatnot of different things from here, you can navigate through -- granular aspects of the paid structure, give tags, and whatnot. And you can also go through some various settings here as well. So if you want to get really deep on SEO, you can do that here, generate your site maps and whatnot. Over here, we can navigate through the different pages that we have as well. We can look at the different form factors that are available and tailor the experience based upon them as well. We can also preview the site and publish the site when we're ready. So what I'm going to do now is I am going to grab a component, this Einstein recommendation component and drop this onto the top of the cart page. And now in most commerce solutions, this is an extremely difficult thing to do because the cart page and subsequent pages are locked down and typically lock down and requiring a developer to interact with them. So here, you can start to see just how easy this is to do. So we've got this AI recommendations control, and what we can do is we can set an anchor. So here, we can see, we can say, okay, I want you to anchor your recommendations based upon products in the cart. So basically, it will draw context from the products in the cart in order to recommend subsequent products to visitors. And the use case that we want to use is customers also bought. So hey, these products are in your cart. These products are also commonly purchased alongside those products in your cart. And we'll change the text here to -- you might also like. Okay. So now we've got that configured. Super, super easy to do. So next thing that we want to do is we want to incorporate some static recommendations. So we're going to use one of our personalization capabilities in order to tailor this particular experience. So we're going to call this variation, Static Recommendations. And we are going to get rid of the Einstein recommendation control from that and we're going to drag another component onto the page and we're going to configure some static products here. Okay. So now we've got them showing. What we'll do is we'll go and add some visibility rules to this as well. So we'll go, we want to look at the user. We want to look at the user record, and we can look at the contact record. And we can look at their CSAT score, and we can say if they're greater than or equal to 80, meaning they're a happy customer that can allow us to take a little bit more liberty in the product recommendations that we're providing in order to try to sell higher profit products. So we can do that to those particular segment of customers. And so if I toggle through this, and I'll go back to the default, you'll see that our Einstein recommendation control is at play there. So I believe our customers will see that where our happier customers, I'm specifically targeting these products at them. And then I can publish that and put that live. Okay. So hopefully, you can see that just how simple and easy it is in order to tailor that experience and the type of experiences that you can provide either to the benefit of the customer or yourselves as an organization. Okay. So coming back to here. I'm going to do a search for Lauren -- and this is Lauren's contact record. And this is the same information that can be seen within sales and service. So we've got our typical details here. We've got all our sales opportunities here. We've got our service information here, the various cases that have been logged, the assets that are owned, the chat transcripts that are there. If there's any marketing activities that we've done directly to Lauren that appear here, and we've also got our commerce information. So our various orders as well as our cart information here. Within a single click, we can also reset Lauren's password, if she's called up, having a bit of an issue with that. Anyone in the business who has access to this, within a few short clicks can reset someone's password. So really, really simple to being able to do that and reset that password there. Let's go back to Lauren. So we've also got the ability to log in on behalf of Lauren. So if Lauren's experiencing an issue with the site, or she's having a bit of trouble finding a product, we can assist her. So Salesforce has multisite capability so you can do -- you can have your corporate website, your brand website, your microsites or your store fronts, whether they're B2B or D2C within Salesforce. So in this instance, I'm going to go and open this one up here, which is that same experience that we saw last time. And now Matt is logged in on behalf of Lauren and able to see what she sees. And he can add to a cart in real time. If Lauren refreshes the page after Matt has added a product to her cart, she will be able to see that. So really powerful there. So you can really see that enhanced 360-degree view that anyone in the business can have of Lauren and all of her interactions with your business. And you can also see how from a Salesforce standpoint that we can provide capabilities from marketing to sales to commerce and to service or there at your disposal.

We now drive into the path to faster [indiscernible] Unfortunately, there's a power outage where I am. Sorry if this comes across a bit choppy, but hopefully, it gets better. So we are going to talk about faster ROI and how to achieve it with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. So do you see the slides moving? Not yet? So first off, I would like to emphasize that today, we are not only asked to do more for our customers and attract more revenue and provide them in really [indiscernible] that customer experience [Technical Difficulty] all that you heard today [indiscernible] [ platform ] towards your [ TCO ], not only in [ technology ] what are the three ingredients required. Okay. Okay. If we think what are the three ingredients required to get you successful on Commerce Cloud, one is get personal, then get efficient and get unified. So getting personal is making the best use of your data. First, you need to obviously gather that data in a way that is rich and -- and connected for every customer's purchases and service interactions with you and then you move into if [Technical Difficulty] experiences. Digital leaders are 4x more effective, and they use our Commerce Cloud [Technical Difficulty] through cost and maximum ROI. Commerce itself, e-commerce itself is obviously a digital channel, [Technical Difficulty] and they do that. You want that because of [ low cost-to-serve channel ], and it enables you, as we've said before, to take care of that [ long-tail ] service at the lowest possible. Getting [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. Apologies, everyone, it appears. Unfortunately, our speaker Rui is in area with power outage, very unfortunate, and we seem to have lost him in the connection. So I think Rui is back. Okay. Hello, Rui, are you connected again?

[indiscernible] [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. I think his connection is still very choppy. Apologies again. Rui, are you connected and are you able to -- yes, I think we're still having connectivity issues. So I think what we might do, just to save everyone's time is to jump to our Q&A for Rui's section in terms of getting the most ROI out of or faster active value for -- sorry, have to faster ROI. What we will do is we will make sure that Rui records his section, so it will be available for you to watch on demand, following this webniar you will receive a link to the recording of the webinar, and we will ensure that Rui's section is complete and without lags for you to be able to watch on-demand then. So we -- if I will hand over to Mon for Q&A. So please, if you do have any questions about anything we've talked about so far, feel free to pop it into the chat.

Thank you, Daisy. Pleased to meet you all. I'm Monika, one of the Solution Engineers on to Commerce Cloud. As for the questions, we do have one for Rui. But I'll leave it towards the end, just to give you a little time to get back the bandwidth and we can test that out. In the meantime, we've got a few more, a little bit in relation to what we saw in the demo. The first one being, can I still bring in orders from a separate channel into order management, how about historical ones? And the answer essentially is, yes. The main purpose and the value from order management being built within the service or the sales console is to consolidate all the orders into one single system, regardless of whatever channel they've come from. So you may notice that earlier, Kazim mentioned, omnichannel orders. So whether they are online, offline, bring them into Salesforce for visibility, but also the ability to take actions on them as well. So absolutely, whether they're historical orders or whether they are live orders coming through into Salesforce that can be supported. All right. The next question is for Rui. I'm not sure if you're able to come off mute. It's about the benefits being discussed. If you can help to summarize where there are additional benefits, business or technology where you see improvements. And if not, make sure you reply that after. Perfect.

Thank you for that. I think, obviously, without having passed the message along, it's going to be hard to respond to that. What we can say is that we -- on the face, we see benefits, obviously, on sales and conversion rates and also on a total cost of ownership of the platform. Below the surface there are a lot of service costs, especially on orders and even deeper implications to the business, if we think about inventory and optimizing inventory to orders and routes to fulfill the demand, we see benefits there as well. As we see in the broader scope of our platform when compared with other products in the market in the sense that we take a very broad definition of commerce. And so we cover areas that are typically not covered by commerce platforms. That means promotions, merchandise, even managing multiple currencies and other things that are obviously large, efficient angles for the business and technology savings as well.

Perfect. Thank you. All right. Next question is around AI recommendations. Are they ever validated by an agents. And most of these can be relevant for the purchaser besides seeing the marketing behind a high-profit item. And to answer that question is, there still is that a portion of control from a human resource perspective. So there is the possibility to select the specific strategy that you want to roll out to your end consumers or also the possibility to essentially put out manual recommendations in replacement or in conjunction with AI recommendations as well. So there is that flexibility across our AI recommendation approach. Okay. Thank you for the questions. I think we've got one last one, which is around, I am also considering experience cloud, does this mean our need, 2 separate Salesforce sites. And if you are considering experience cloud then, essentially, the answer is no, you won't need 2 separate experience sites or Salesforce sites if you don't want to, because they are built on the same builder that Kazim showed earlier, and so we're able to drag and drop components and essentially mesh that commerce and experience into that one-stop shop. So having to manage 2 separate sites essentially. All right. With that, conscious of time, I will pass it back to Daisy, as we gone through all our questions.

Great. Thank you so much, Monika. And thank you, everyone, for attending the webinar. Again, apologies for the technical issues that we had for Rui's section on faster path -- faster path to ROI. It is definitely in title section, and we will make sure that Rui, records it in full, that is available for you to view on-demand. Thank you so much for your time today, and we hope you have a great rest of your day.