Three steps to create an integrated online and in-store buying experience

For many companies, it was COVID-19 that lit a fire under their digital strategies, but for Bucherer, it was meeting the 2020 Christmas rush while all physical stores had been forced to close. In just four months, it needed to transform its website from a digital showroom into a fully functioning ecommerce site with a seamless customer experience.

Working with implementation partner, Merkle, the team mapped out a minimum viable product (MVP) built on B2C Commerce Cloud with Salesforce Order Management, and integrated with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.

“We were told the project would take six months, but we delivered early and to budget in time for the festive season four months later,” said Maria Pfeiffer, Head of Digital Projects at Bucherer.

How? With strong collaboration between stakeholders and the project team, daily workshops, and a lot of hard work.

By prioritising what has the biggest impact on the shopping experience – better visibility of stock and orders across multiple stores and online – Bucherer is well placed to innovate at speed to add a little luxury to the shopping experience in the next iterations.

When it comes to achieving Customer 360, connecting touchpoints on one platform is key. In the luxury market, customers often browse online before coming in-store to complete the purchase. With Sales Cloud, in-store transactions are captured at the till to provide a comprehensive history of every interaction.

In the future, sales agents armed with mobile devices will know everything about a customer the moment they walk into a boutique; from their browsing history and past purchases to what they’re interested in and why they might be visiting that day.

While Bucherer is still optimising these experiences, more joined up processes are already having an impact on efficiency.

“Achieving true 360-degree visibility can be challenging. We have two websites we wanted to merge and needed to balance standardising back-office processes for efficiency while keeping customer data separate in line with privacy requirements,” explained Heinz Krienbuehl, Head of eCommerce, Technical at Bucherer.

The team uses Page Designer to streamline managing web content for both websites from a central dashboard. The easy-to-use visual page editor helps Bucherer to develop reusable templates and assets that make creating and editing future images and content much easier.

Bucherer also has plans to launch its ‘Be in Shape’ project to implement a powerful new ERP system to standardise operations across different regions. The ERP will be integrated with Salesforce to keep retail processes running smoothly and take omnichannel to the next level.

One of the biggest advantages of ecommerce is that it changes the customer relationship from periodic (or one-time) transactions to long-term and continuous engagement. As well as making returns and refunds a breeze with Order Management, Salesforce empowers service agents to schedule repairs and answer customer queries from a central Service Cloud console. And giving customers a great service makes them more likely to buy again.

But service isn’t the only way Bucherer is making shopping more memorable. Einstein product recommendations show customers items they might like that match their browsing and purchase history.

“There are so many different ways to personalise the customer experience with Salesforce. We can tailor marketing content based on real insights to get one step closer to being like a personal shopper in their pocket, for example,” said Pfeiffer.

In the next year, the company is also planning on running its loyalty program in Salesforce and getting even smarter with Salesforce CDP for marketing.

“One year into our Salesforce rollout, we’ve already seen a 200% increase in sales from online channels across all markets, a click-through-rate of 48.7% for our order update emails, and an overall increase in recurring customers,” said Krienbuehl. “With Salesforce, we can create a truly connected in-store and online experience at scale. Next, we’re working on adding more personal touches to give customers a luxurious shopping experience across any channel.”