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

Hello everyone and welcome. So welcome to today's session, Drive Efficiency and Cut Costs with Order Management, and this is personally a favorite topic of mine. So firstly, thank you all for joining us today. My name is Catherine Aliotta and I'm on the solution engineering team here at Salesforce. And I primarily focus on the Commerce Cloud and Order Management products. So before we begin, I'd just like to share a few quick notes about our webinar platform that you are all currently using. So today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up the session, you can access it through the URL you're currently on. But please note the slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. You can enlarge the slides or the media player tool by clicking the square button located in the top right hand corner of the widget. And if you require any technical assistance along the way, simply click on the help widget located at the bottom of your console. We've also provided some additional resources accessible through the resources window, which is at the right -- to the right of the slides, where you can find that related content. And lastly, we do encourage you to submit your questions at any time throughout our presentation using the Join the Conversation widget at the bottom of your console. And we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. We've got lots to talk about. So on that note, let's get straight into it. So for today's agenda, we're going to be covering four key things. Firstly, we'll look at some market research and some of the solutions we have to tackle some of those challenges that you as a business may be facing today. We'll hear from the Fisher & Paykel team on how they have been able to achieve operational efficiency using order management, followed by a product demonstration of our order management platform, and then finishing off with some of the Q&A and going through the closing resources. And we really hope that you all enjoy today's discussions. Now before we get into it, if you've been to a sales event -- a Salesforce event in the past or you've been to -- seen one of our webinars before, I'm sure this slide will look familiar. We really encourage you all to make purchasing decisions based on features and functionality currently available today. And of course, we really want to thank you all for taking the time to join us to learn more about order management. Now we know time is a precious thing, and we really appreciate you spending your time with us. So on that note, let's get into it. So let's just start off with a bit of a poll question here. We're really interested in where you're all at with your order management journey currently. We've got a few choices here, so we'd love for you all to answer. I'll give you about 20 seconds. And for anyone who has answered, feel free to pop any questions into the Q&A for us to answer at a later stage. [Voting]

Okay, let's take a look. Lovely. So a lot of you are all researching order management systems out there, which is fantastic. So welcome to our webinar, and we're really excited to have you all here so you can learn more about the Salesforce Order Management system. For those of you who already know about it, this might not be new information, but I'm sure it'll be very insightful. We've got one more question. So how many of you have actually heard about Salesforce's order management solution, other than those who currently already bought it or utilizing it? Again. I'll give you about 20 seconds. [Voting]

Okay, let's take a look. Okay, good. So we've got quite a few people who know that Salesforce does have an order management system, just don't know too much about it. So this will definitely be a great session for you to learn a lot more. Amazing. Thank you all. So let's get into it. So it's no surprise that customers expect connected and more simplified purchasing experiences from the awareness in that purchase stage to the delivery and the pickup of their orders right through to that seamless support at the end. As we know, sometimes things change well after your customers have made their purchase. The ability to buy our favorite products the way that we want to, with seamless checkouts, personalized experiences, flexible delivery offerings and exceptional post-purchase journeys, all create those memorable experiences that really drive loyalty for your customer. In fact, 70% of consumers started using curbside pickup just over the past few years, powering some of those great experiences. And I know myself having that flexibility to be able to collect my order at any time that suits me at a location convenient to me is definitely a driver to purchase for the brand. But these great experiences really shouldn't stop once your customer places the order. They need to be connected at every step of the entire post-purchase journey. But what does this mean? Maybe it's a personalized commerce experience. Maybe it's a chat bot. It could be a WhatsApp notification popping up on your site, and then it moves into real-time order status and delivery dates, followed by bringing over convenient fulfillment on your terms and being able to unlock two-day shipping and even same-day shipping. And sometimes, we need to have support in there. In particular, connected support to not only empower your end consumers, but also to empower your customer service agents with the tools that they need to be able to support your order inquiries quickly. So why isn't every business doing this today? It really comes down to legacy back order -- back office order management systems, which are making this very difficult to achieve. And I'm sure there's many of you on the call that are listening that can relate to this. So these legacy order management systems, or they could be order support systems or service systems, they're just inflexible and disconnected and don't put the customer at the center of everything that you do. So everything across marketing, service, sales and commerce, all these different touch points are so far away and disconnected from that back office system. But we heard directly from retail brands across the world that you need an order management solution to help you cut costs with service and fulfillment automation on the world's number one CRM. We also heard how important it is for you to be able to efficiently service and support these omni-channel orders with contextualized order information on the screen in a single pane of glass. Plus having those tools that you need to be able to service those orders quickly. Maybe it's adding an item that was forgotten to an order or doing a cancellation or a return. And on top of this, we understand how important it is to be able to fulfill faster with real-time inventory visibility in a centralized location. So your service reps have inventory availability, but so do your customers directly on that product page when they're searching. And lastly, we heard how important it is to really tackle those complex supply chain solutions and workflows and make this super simple and automated for you on the Salesforce platform using tools that you know and love already today. So I just wanted to share with you some of the highlights that we have and of the great innovation that we've got launching this year with our order management product. So firstly, we've enabled more high-scale ordering for our larger customers and enterprise accounts. So you know you'll be covered during those really key peak times. We're introducing Return Insights, really helping you minimize returns by analyzing natural language provided into return reason codes and product reviews for actionable product description updates. And finally, we have Inventory Insights, allowing business users to view inventory data and trends and create actionable insights. Maybe that's to minimize stock outs or excess stock and more. And these are just a few of the key features that we have launching this year, with many more to come. And we've made some incredible relationships along the way and heard some amazing stories. With over 370 global customers, we have customer success all over the world. We've been doing interviews and webinars just like these, hearing from brands across the world, across different industries. And we're very excited to hear from one of our customers, Fisher & Paykel, today. So last week, both Rudi and Shireen from the Fisher & Paykel team sat down with one of our solution engineers, Verity, to discuss.

Thank you to both Rudi and Shireen from Fisher & Paykel for joining us today. We're really excited to speak with you and learn a little bit more about how you use Salesforce Order Management to drive some of your business success. So I guess to get started, if you could both tell me a little bit about yourselves and Fisher & Paykel at large would be great. Maybe starting with you, Rudi.

Sounds great. Great to be here. My name is Rudi, and I'm the Chief Digital Officer for Fisher & Paykel. Have been around in the company for 15 years and have been, along with Shireen and a few others, leading the charge with our Salesforce program of work over that time. And Shireen is our Salesforce architect, and she was actually employee number one in the Salesforce area for us. And of course, if you were in Australia and New Zealand, you're going to know who Fisher & Paykel are. We're a high-end luxury appliance company. We design, manufacture, distribute and sell and service, of course, end to end, luxury appliances globally. If you're in Australia and New Zealand, you'll absolutely know who we are.

Definitely a household name for sure. And Shireen, did you have anything to add?

No. But I have been at Fisher & Paykel, I mean, over a decade now working with Rudi and the team. And I think what we try and do is we definitely try and be the bridge, I think, between the business needs and technical solutions. So we're always looking at a human-centered system that's nice and easy.

And Rudi, I guess if you could tell us a little bit about what was the driver for exploring order management with Salesforce.

Absolutely. So we were introducing a new business model into the Australian market with our retail partners. And it was -- it's a B2B2C, where our retail partners sell on behalf of us and we fulfill and ship and install direct to the consumer. And we needed a whole lot of technology transformation to bring that business model to life. But one of the big areas was how do we manage and orchestrate orders and, in particular, how do we automate a lot of the business functions so that as we move to this business model, we weren't increasing our overheads and having to put a lot of labor in and also trying to reduce the amount of manual work that our partners had to do as well. And so that was the real driver for going and looking for an order management system for us.

Perfect. And so correct me if I'm wrong. Your order management was previously managed within your ERP. And so I guess what was some of the benefits of lifting up that order management closer to the customer record for Fisher & Paykel?

Hey, look, I'll start and Shireen will probably jump in as well because we have slightly different -- come at it from slightly different point of views. But my drive was automation and self-service, and so the ability to link up the front-end experiences we already had in Service Cloud with Order Management. So things like automating the communications, automating when you buy something to be able to book a delivery yourself without having to speak to anyone or without having to do anything manually. And then I had a real drive to allow customers to self-serve as well, so giving them the ability to do things on their own. And unfortunately, the tools that we had or the systems that we had wouldn't -- I mean, you could do it. I mean, everything is possible. But probably, the level of customization made me uncomfortable. So that's why we went looking elsewhere.

And we also wanted to improve, I think, our customer visibility. I mean, we use one platform that captures all our customer data in one place. And I think by integrating order management with our core platform, we've managed to gain that one view of our customer and our customer interactions as well, which has been invaluable for us really.

Yes. And I guess the on-floor effects of that, obviously, you're empowering your team with that visibility. Have you had any kind of direct feedback from team internally or even customers indirectly around how that has benefited the business?

Well, it's been really good. I mean, I think the team's just having all our customer data in one place, they can access all the order information, track the shipments. And we could also address all our customer inquiries efficiently, which has actually improved our customer satisfaction. Would you say, Rudi?

Yes, absolutely. Yes. And giving them that single pane of glass as well means less swivel chairing between apps. And it keeps them in the tools that you've spent so much time building. It does make a difference.

Yes. Brilliant. And operationally...

Well, in this case, this is a new project. I'm sorry.

That's okay. I think there's a slight delay here, so apologies if I cut you off there as well. I was just querying what changes you had to make operationally with the rollout of Salesforce Order Management?

I think as a business, we definitely needed to align our business processes with the capabilities of our order management system, and that actually involved like reviewing and redesigning some of the workflows to ensure that there was a seamless integration between OMS and our daily operations. But I think it was also the whole collaboration between the different departments at Fisher & Paykel like sales, finance, the inventory management system, and our customer services. So we definitely needed to foster that culture of collaboration and open communication. So everyone was aligned in this journey.

Yes. Brilliant. And I think it would be great if you could expand a little bit more around kind of the process and methodology in terms of driving that operational change as well and having the whole team along for the ride, even during in pre-implementation as well. Did you get stakeholders from multiple parts of the business to have input into how that needed to be structured?

Absolutely. I mean, we definitely needed to get all the understanding of our current processes and how they were actually doing things before we actually started. So the requirement gathering was crucial. The discovery piece was absolutely crucial. And we designed based on the feedback that we actually got from the teams. And we've also established a culture of continuous improvement, which has been fundamental in our success and our customers. Absolutely. And we've had the feedback loop so that from our customers, from our end users, so we could actually identify the pain points and make iterative improvements in our systems and our processes.

Yes, and I guess that's an ongoing process now that you probably will continue to go through as well.

Absolutely.

Yes. Brilliant. And so given the engine for automatic...

Yes. It's not static.

Yes. Sorry again. We've got that slight delay there. Apologies. So just touching on, I guess, the fact that order management is based in Salesforce Flow predominantly, what has that meant for the administration of your automation as well?

I love that our admins have become experts in the business. And working with almost no code to deliver complex solution, I think it's helped us move so fast. We've been able to scale and resolve business problems quickly. We call them flow gods, but it's been brilliant.

And was there a steep learning curve for those team members? Or were they already somewhat familiar with Salesforce Cloud?

So our teams were familiar with flows, but I think the complexity of our business and also utilizing the order management flow was initially a challenge for us. But I think once we got the hang of it, we've managed to integrate that with third-party applications. That's helped us leverage their integration capabilities and integrate with our ERP system, our payment gateway, our integration layer and analytics. So we've been able to build that whole end-to-end process and that one view of our customers. So it's been awesome.

Sorry. I'm pausing to make sure there's nothing from Rudi, given the delay there. I guess, in terms of the power of Salesforce as well, if your team is learning on the fly as well with that, it means that you can obviously extend the utilization of flow to other parts of your business as well.

Definitely. And the no code, I think, almost no code has been invaluable in our speed of delivery.

Yes. Brilliant. Rudi, do you have anything to add there in terms of some of the benefits of that for the business?

No, I agree. And look I think the other benefit just to -- I mentioned it before with the self-service. And so we've started exposing what traditionally would be internal-only processes out to our partners and some of those out to consumers as well. And again, that's where the real value is created, when you can automate and allow customers to self-serve.

Yes. What has been the impact of that for your partners?

And that couldn't be done without that. Yes, I mean, when we didn't have it, they were spending a lot of time contacting us to make changes, and we were spending a lot of time making those changes. And it was frustrating the end user. We know because when we went live with the project, we didn't have some of that self-serve to begin with so -- because we took an iterative approach to delivery. So we actually know the difference that it made because when we turned it on, the -- some of those order change inquiries went from dozens a day to almost zero. And they're quite labor-intensive processes. So yes, the feedback from our partners is, yes, we want to be able to do this ourselves. When we're helping the customer real-time, we don't want to wait for a back office function to do this. So it's been game changing. And back to your original question. Because we had flows to do it with, we were able to create it exactly how we needed it for our customers, which is really important.

Yes. And I think you were talking earlier in terms of that iterative change process as well. And I think it would be great to expand on the fact that now that you have brought that customer record and the order management piece really close together and kind of the impact that drives for your service team and what some of those iterative changes might look like as well, if you're using feedback from that team to continuously improve that customer experience across your business.

Not a day that goes by that you don't get a good suggestion from the team on what to do next. And it's brilliant because you can react quickly for, well, the ones that are high value just -- we can just get them done.

Yes. Perfect. And I think, Shireen, you were talking earlier, I guess, in terms of the power of the fact that it is low code. So are you making those changes internally kind of independent of a partner provider? Is your team having that independence to be really agile with those shifts in business processes and service offering?

Absolutely. And I think it's made our release management a lot easier as well. It's simplified that whole process because we can make a change fairly quickly. Admins can do it without the need for the development team, for example, or a partner, as you mentioned. And we control that whole piece.

Question to both of you. What advice would you have for someone who's considering getting started with Salesforce Order Management?

I think the understanding of what customer experience you want to provide and build for that because the system can do what you want it to do with flows and automation. So I think it's thoroughly understanding the organization's order management processes, identifying key stakeholders, mapping out the existing processes, workflows, and then define the journey that you want to build for.

Rudi?

Yes, I was -- very well said, Shireen. And just to build on that point, the system or the technology is not the constraint anymore. And actually, you can focus on creating that experience for your customer that you've always wanted or always dreamed of. And yes, that's absolutely where I'd start is what's the end goal that you're trying to achieve and then break that down into little parts and start delivering.

Brilliant. And I guess with that in mind, what's next for Fisher & Paykel?

Well, more self-service. So we did a great job doing self-service for our partners. I think we want to do a lot more for the end user directly through their My Account. So again, putting the power right back in the consumer's hands, that's definitely on the cards. And then the project that we did focus predominantly on, the B2B2C part of our business and B2C where we have B2C, where we'd like to take it next is get this across all of our orders. And B2B is what's left in our organization to do and apply the same kind of principles to that and get the same benefits, where we can automate and create self-service and transparency for our B2B customers the same way we have in this new business model. So that's kind of what's next for order management.

Yes. Brilliant. Exciting. Shireen, did you have anything to add on that?

For me, I think it's adopting the Salesforce Order Management system is a journey and continuous learning and improvement is so crucial. And I think being able to get our customers to actually now have that control around how they interact with us is it's almost a win-win situation for both parties.

Yes. Wonderful. Well, thank you both so much for joining and taking the time to speak with us today. It's been really insightful. I'm sure everyone who's tuning in online has also taken a lot of learnings from this. Once again, thank you for your time. And we're excited to see what's next for Fisher & Paykel across the board but particularly obviously with order management.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

Big thank you to Rudi and Shireen from the Fisher & Paykel team. Unfortunately, as you can see, that was a prerecorded session. We had some scheduling issues. But it's been definitely insightful to understand more about the Fisher & Paykel journey and how they're utilizing order management to really drive more efficiency in their business. So thanks again. And of course, to Verity, our senior solution engineer, who is -- got to chat with them. So now I'm going to share with you a bit of a demonstration on how Salesforce Order Management helps to drive that operational efficiency in the service center and creates those seamless post-purchase journeys that your customers really expect more of nowadays. And this is through our product demonstration. So take a look. As you can see, I'm in the order management system. And here, we have a view of all of the orders across the NTO network. Now, this is really important for someone like an operations manager that wants to see and understand a holistic view of all the current orders across the network. We can also see if there's any orders that have issues against them, allowing your team to further investigate. Now, what we're looking at here is the order summary. And it represents a real-time view of the order. And it really is the brains of our product. The order summary understands everything about the order from the moment that it's been placed. We know of any promotions that were placed, how the taxation is calculated. We also have all of the payment details. And we can also see how much money is available to capture or to be refunded later on within the fulfillment process. Now we keep all these payment details because we have a pluggable payment interface to be able to transact payment captures, reauthorizations and refunds. Customers can also easily integrate to their own payment provider or even connect to their ERP system. And because the product is built on the core platform, just like Service Cloud, everything I just showed you within order management is also exposed to the service agent. So I just switched over to the service console. And here, we can access the same order summary information that we were just looking at. Within the context of service, we also have chat-to-case capabilities, allowing shoppers to interact directly from the storefront. And the service agents can also see all the cases that have been auto generated from the storefront and get access to a full transcript when the shopper is transferred to an agent to provide that seamless customer experience. Now over to the left here, we have a number of actions in order to service your customer better. So if I wanted to quickly process a return as a service agent, I could do so. All I need to do is select the product that we need to be returning along with the reason for return. And we also have the ability to set any shipping amounts that are required. And just like that, I've been able to complete a return as a service agent. So as an agent, I have access to all of the order modification components to facilitate my day-to-day job, without needing to switch screens or applications. Service agents can process a return. They can process an exchange. They can even reship items or cancel items. And this is really helping you service your customers better. And finally, we also have exception capabilities within the product to help address when something goes wrong with an order because we all know a lot can happen during the order fulfillment process, and it's really important to be able to proactively surface those issues so that you know about an order issue before a customer even has to call you. And that's why we built Advanced Exception Handling to allow you to easily identify exceptions that have occurred for an order. You can broadly review all open or existing exceptions in your network and filter by severity, priority or even by the category. And if you were to drill into a specific order exception, you can understand all the necessary information to go through and process this troubleshooting and resolve that particular exception. Exceptions can also be triggered by flow or leveraged through the APIs. So now you've seen where all the magic happens. And our Salesforce Order Management works harmoniously with Service Cloud to really empower brands to deliver those seamless post-purchase experiences. So there you have it first hand, our order management platform in action. So we hope you enjoyed that one.

So we're now coming to the question-and-answer portion of our webinar. We do have a few questions that have been submitted. So we'll go through and answer them. And we've got Verity on the line as well. So again, unfortunately, given Rudi and Shireen were not live, we don't have -- we aren't able to answer any questions around the Fisher & Paykel journey. So we'll answer the ones that we can. So thanks, Verity. I'll start with you, Verity. So the Fisher & Paykel team referenced the benefits of bringing OMS or order management and service onto the one platform. Does this extend to self-service as well?

Yes, absolutely. And so I think if we think back to the Fisher & Paykel team referencing some of the benefits in terms of bringing order management and that customer record onto the one platform, which is obviously the same platform in which their service team is operating, obviously, not only reducing swivel chair, but we're allowing agents to have greater visibility around the customer record and obviously the order record in conjunction with that. And therefore, agents are able to support customers with things such as returns and cancellations all on the platform. And we can extend that beyond the platform as well to be a self-service functionality for our end customers as well. So there's the ability to utilize a Where Is My Order bot, for example, which allows customers to query the whereabouts of an order and get results without needing to engage with an agent directly. So most certainly, you can utilize some of those kind of self-service capabilities for order management from a customer perspective.

Yes. Awesome. What about for those teams that don't have any experience on the Salesforce core platform? We've got someone on the line wanting to understand how difficult it would be to actually implement order management.

Yes. Cool. So again, I'll kind of reference the Fisher & Paykel team. And obviously, Shireen spoke around some of the benefits that their team have had in terms of being more agile with flow. From a implementation perspective, we always recommend working with a certified partner. And there's multiple partners that we can recommend from an order management implementation standpoint. And that obviously allows you to just scope and deliver based on the business needs utilizing flow. With that said though and as per what Shireen was referencing as well, their team is able to kind of self-manage some configuration changes to flows. And for those that might not be familiar, there's Trailhead which is a really great learning tool which allows you to up-skill on things like Salesforce Flow. And fundamentally, the Salesforce Flow tool is designed to be clicks, not code. So most certainly again during implementation, we recommend working with a partner. But certainly beyond that, as per what you heard with Fisher & Paykel, there is the capability to kind of self-manage changes to flows so that you can remain agile. Perfect. Let me have a look and see if anything has come through. There's a couple more questions. I might switch pace and throw them your way, Cat, so there's a question that's come through regarding the licensing. So can I use my existing Service Cloud user licenses to access order management?

Yes, definitely. See, that's the beauty of having the order management platform built on the core platform. Just like Service Cloud, you're really able to leverage those existing business user licenses and simply extend your permission sets so that you do have -- so that your business users who are utilizing order management actually have the opportunity to use all the different order objects that are available with order management. So definitely, yes, definitely key having them both in the same platform.

Cool. And there's one more, which I'll throw your way as well. So how often are we rolling out new features in regards to the order management platform?

Yes. So innovations, as most of us would already know that it's one of Salesforce's core values. So we really are constantly developing new technologies and solutions to help organizations better use the data to create those stronger customer relationships. And that's why we have about three major releases for order management over the year. We touched on some of those new releases earlier around Return Insights and Inventory Insights that we do have coming this year. And there is definitely more to come. So yes, we're definitely constantly innovating on the platform.

Perfect. There's another one here. In fact, there's two kind of in regards to learning more about Salesforce Order Management. So there was a question about how they can learn more in regards to Salesforce Order Management in depth. And then there's one about the future of order management as a career growth opportunity. So I made reference earlier to Trailhead being a really great resource for anyone who's learning, wanting to up-skill. There are obviously other certifications as well from a Salesforce perspective in terms of admin and platform certifications, which help get users up to speed with the core Salesforce platform, which order management is built on. So I'd certainly recommend looking at both of those as resources if you're wanting to learn a little bit more about Salesforce Order Management.

Yes. And we've also got -- yes, I'm just going to say, shortly, I'll also give you a URL that you can definitely visit to learn about all things order management. So there's definitely some resources in there. And there are also the resources that are on the platform during this forum that you can actually access as well to learn more about water management.

There's another question as well. Cat, happy to throw it your way. So is there a way to integrate order management with Consumer Goods Cloud?

Yes, definitely. I think it's one of those where discuss -- if you've got an implementation partner, definitely discuss it with that with your implementation partner on the specifics. But yes, you could integrate into Consumer Goods Cloud too.

Okay, I'm just reading the last one, so we can get familiar. There's one that's a bit more granular, and we might have to do a follow-up. So I don't know the individual that's asked this in regards to some pieces around tangible items. So we might take that one as a follow-up. I believe that we take down the source of the questions. So that one, we might take offline. I think that's all that's coming through. Final call out. Obviously, if you do have any further questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A. I think that's everything that's come through.

Cool. I think on that note, we might move on. So just quickly, we recently participated in a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, and this study contains about seven case studies with global customers across different industries, including retail, consumer goods, there's manufacturing and healthcare and life sciences in there. So this study aggregated all of the data of our customers and put it into a really nice bite-sized report. And we really encourage you to grab a copy so you can simply just scan the QR code and pull that right up and read into some of the stats in there. I'll just leave that up for a couple of seconds, so you guys have a chance to get that QR code down. I think we've also provided this in the resources as well. And just as I mentioned just before, so if you do want to learn more about order management, just visit the URL on this screen. Again, this is also in the set of resources that we do have in this webinar as well. Or you can also speak to your account manager for further information. Okay. On that note, thank you all again so much for your time today. We really appreciate you listening to us, and we really hope that you found this session worthwhile. Thank you all again.