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Our Chair and CEO Marc Benioff posted a heartfelt letter to our customers earlier this month, and I echo his sentiments – we’re focused on the health and safety of our employees, families and communities, and remain relentlessly focused on your success. 

I’ve had the chance to speak with many e-commerce customers this month and, as expected, the conversation around commerce is changing. The main thing on your mind is the continuity of our service. You’re seeing traffic and transactions spike. Your order management systems are in constant flux. And you’re using your website to communicate with customers in almost real-time. You need flexibility and reliability. And we understand that.

Commerce Cloud is committed to supporting companies of all sizes and industries, in all locations, through this crisis and beyond. In fact, we’re meeting continually to ensure you can maintain business as usual. But we’re hearing from you that the recent disruption to traditional ways of working is giving you concern for your site’s reliability. 

Here’s how to maintain business operations for your commerce site during unpredictable times:

  1. Reassess critical workflows: Develop a daily standup meeting of critical cross-functional partners. We include leadership, technical, product, support and customer success teams. This team should work to identify any risks, and assign the necessary adjustments and changes in real-time as the situation evolves.

  2. Ensure VPN reliability: We normally support flexible working arrangements throughout our workforce – on any given day, 25-50% of our employees work remotely and securely away from our office locations. But that’s not the case for all companies and this may be the first time your corporate VPN is tested. Meet with providers, request additional support and restrict employee sign-ins to critical site operations personnel if needing to problem solve quickly.

  3. Maximise site coverage: Many of our customer service and technology functions are based in multiple global locations, which provides operational resilience during any disruption, no matter the time of day. If you have employees in different timezones, strategise about how you can provide maximum site support with the team you have. Or allow flexible working hours so coverage extends beyond the traditional workday.

  4. Develop business continuity plans: These are protocols to guide you through major events, such as the one we’re in now. Start with a variety of scenarios and work through with your technical, business planning and PR teams how you might respond both internally with workflow adjustments and externally with customer communications. To help get you started, see how your service is performing with 100% visibility. 

  5. Help your team manage the stress: Even as your site is running full-steam, we understand your employees may experience stress as a result of the global health crisis. Use our Employee Mindfulness resources to help your team members overcome anxiety by building a practice of mindfulness for your company. This Trail includes tips on how to work from home and maintain personal wellbeing.

The entire Commerce Cloud team is a committed partner to you and your business. We know the role of e-commerce is more important and urgent than ever, and we are steadfast in our commitment to maintaining your operations. 

As always, Salesforce Help is available 24 hours a day, providing access to documentation and videos, Trailhead training, and our Trailblazer Community. Additionally, case submission and our support agents are operating as normal. Together, we’ll get through this.

Find more advice for leadership, remote work, leading your business and more in the Leading Through Change series – our community is sharing insights and expertise to help businesses survive and thrive.