Salesforce Order Management & Optimizing your Order Management System

Much like a stony-hearted partner, it doesn’t take much for upset customers to pack their bags and shack up with a competitor brand. We know from bundles of data that a ⅓ of customers cut ties with a beloved brand after just one bad experience; after two or three bad experiences, 92% will have had enough. 

What’s more mysterious is that only 1 in 26 frustrated customers actually complain, leaving brands and retailers with much guesswork.

The stuff that connects all positive online shopping experiences from the ecommerce site to the post-purchase management, like a well-oiled engine, is the order management system. Regular checks and updates help to boost its “smoothability” – how simple it is to navigate customer orders – and improve its inventory optimization.

In 2021, providing seamless experiences that present products and describe them effectively; that squeeze the payment and shipping process as short as possible; that make customer service as available as possible; and that ensure that returns and exchanges are as stress-free as possible, are all top of the agenda.

Whether it’s Webgility or QuickBooks Commerce or Salesforce Order Management, brands need to pivot to provide clear and transparent stock availability and order visibility – both for their organization as well as their customers.

These points of the ecommerce system, the order and inventory management, either hold up the entire system or buckle under the pressure.

But fulfilling these desires – which are increasingly becoming requirements – are much more difficult in practice.

In particular, there are three main weak points of brands and retailers when it comes to an effective order management system. And we want to take a look at them right now. So read on!

Weak point one

Having a fulfilment process that is under-optimized. For large-sized brands, they have multiple sites, stores, and warehouses. They also have their own ecommerce website and all the logistics that it implies.

To make sure these parts connect and communicate, a brand needs an order management system that is agile to fit with the fluctuating needs and demands of modern-day commerce.

An order management system that builds flexible routing options ensures customers can choose a shipping option that best suits their needs. Building best practices will help to suppress stubborn bottlenecks and free up shipping channels.

Weak point two

Having a post-purchase experience that is fragmented. Your website shouts to you that there is “only 1 left in stock.” In a hurry, the customer clicks buy, believing to have beaten the rest of the competition. But then… silence. Did they actually purchase the final product? Did it run out before the site was able to be updated?

Some order management systems suffer from the inability to manage everything and show real-time visibility. Alternatively, Salesforce Order Management was purposely built to power the entire customer experience from clear product visibility to smooth post-purchase after-care, where all channels of data are stored in a central hub for better data management and recollection.

If you are not hosted on Salesforce Order Management, then working your OMS for agility is going to be a priority.

Weak point three

Being reckless with product visibility. You come across a product with a thick red banner that tells you there are only 5 left. So hurry up and buy. Then 12 hours later an email surfaces to your phone screen from the brand to let you know that, unfortunately, that product has run out of stock, and your order has to be cancelled.

Omnichannel and unified shopping experiences are how you resolve these issues, reaching out across all your platforms and connecting them so that customers can interact with a brand while maintaining the place of conversation no matter which platform the interaction takes place. But also so that brands can accurately track and evaluate their levels of stock as well as how they represent that to their customers across their ecommerce platforms.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) dev teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.