Providing Real-Time Customer Updates through Salesforce Communities
6-minute video
The best B2B businesses serve as partners for their customers. They help them plan ahead, meet their clients’ requests, and run their operations smoothly.
So imagine how great it would be if you could put key information at your customers’ fingertips 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That’s the power of Salesforce communities.
See also: Configuring Salesforce CPQ for Manufacturing Companies
In this short video demo, we’ll show you how one manufacturer provides information about stock availability and product specifications in a self-service portal their customers can access anytime.
The dynamic database offers information unique to each customer. So customers can see how long the estimated delivery time is for their particular geographic region. Or they can download paperwork, like packing slips and invoices, from their past orders. That saves the customer --- and the company’s customer service team --- valuable time.
Have a question you’d like answered?
Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll talk through it on a future episode!
What's the ROI? Just a few months after launching CPQ, Novatech was closing 26% more deals thanks to their accelerated quoting process.
Transcript: Demo: A Self-Service Portal for B2B Customers
Jessica: Hi and thank you for joining us for another Q&A Friday. A regular series where we chat about issues facing manufacturing companies in the new world of industry of Industry 4.0. I'm Jessica Vodden a team member here at Mountain Point, and I'm joined by Billy Weisgerber, our Senior Solutions Architect. Hey Billy.
Billy: Hey Jess.
Jessica: So you're showing us a pretty interesting demo today, we're gonna go through an example of a Salesforce Community, and how one of our clients is using it to streamline their customer service process and give their customers greater insight into the status of their orders, the availability of the stock, and be able to download pertinent documents like invoices, or packing slips. Which I think could be very useful for a lot of different manufacturers who have to shuffle a lot of paperwork on behalf of their customers. So yeah, I'd like to just turn it over to you, and let you show us what you've built.
Billy: Yup, so kinda like what you said, a lot of times manufacturers like to see ERP data inside their own Salesforce org. But they also like to be able to share it out to their customers so that they can easily access, and see what the status of their orders are. Domtar took it an extra step and made stock be available to them. And so here you can see on their community they have some useful links that users can access, along with news and information. But if I go to the stock check area, they can actually search by item code and quantity if they want to. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and show an example of that. And so one thing that's big for Domtar is that they actually depend on the location, so that's why I have country, city and state filled out because they have different distribution centers and they wanna make sure that they capture the best stock available for them, closest to them. So when I put in 1210 here, we're gonna go ahead and click submit. And it's gonna call out to their ERP system and then we'll get a response back of the available stock within their ERP system based off of that item code. So there's quite a few, 4960, that's a lot. But it also gives the customer some information that's beneficial for them to know. So weight, even the carton and pallet weight. And then they also are working currently on the list price, 'cause we are in sandbox right now. But we also included a capability to show a brand image based off of what's associated to that product so that there is some branding going alongside of this. The other side of it is that they have a capability to search by product attribute. And so based off of that stock check response that we got, users can actually search through the products that are in Salesforce. And you know, based off of certain attributes, and then select multiple products within one and do a stock check based off of that as well. So here I could select maybe two products, click stock check, and it'll do a call out, and then I should get a response back of the different inventory amounts for these two products.
Jessica: Great. One of the things that I think is really neat, and I know just from working with various finance offices is that so often customers do call for some of that backup documentation. So a packing slip or an invoice, they could actually check that on this system as well by checking on their current orders, right?
Billy: Yup. So we have another lightning component out there that allows the users to search their orders. So here you can see, this actually shows the 10 most recent orders for the company that they might be associated to. And you can see they have an order confirmation button that allows them to view the order acknowledgement, and they can also choose to have it be emailed to them, or they can download it themselves. Along with, here in these columns where it says packing list and invoice, if they click that, again it will do a call out to where they currently store these documents, and have the same capabilities as the order confirmation and where they can either have it emailed to them or download it. The only thing that's different for them is that for the POD request that actually sends an email to their support team requesting for that document because it's stored somewhere else. So they will handle that and send it to the customer once they are able to get those documents.
Jessica: That's awesome. So it seems like a very practical solution for a lot of different types of companies. Anything else you wanna show us Billy, before we sign off for today?
Billy: Just a lot of times it helps when someone can get a quick answer from a community or a portal like this, where they can see the status, it's very beneficial and helps ease the workload off of internal resources so that they can address more important issues that may not be as easily accessible.
Jessica: Absolutely. Well thanks again for taking time to talk to me. And for those of you out there listening, please let us know if you have any follow-up questions, or if there's a question, or a problem that you'd like for us to address on a future Q&A Friday episode, you can hit us up on our social media pages, you can email us, you can find information on our website, we're always really eager to hear from you guys. So thanks again and happy Friday.
Billy: Happy Friday.
What's the ROI? Just a few months after launching CPQ, Novatech was closing 26% more deals thanks to their accelerated quoting process.
Interested in more demos? Check out Demo: Field Service Lightning