As always, we barely have time to catch our breath after the hectic holiday season before we gear up for the biggest retail conference of the year, the NRF Big Show. At Rituals Cosmetics, we’re coming off a holiday season where we doubled our U.S. online sales and we’ve seen a 70% increase in global online sales this year — but we’re not taking our foot off the gas.

We’re continuing our push to streamline the multichannel shopping experience by emulating our unique in-store experience online. It’s a path we’ve been on since we began our partnership with Salesforce in 2013, and it’s something we are eager to share with retail colleagues at NRF. We’ll be featuring demos and more at the Salesforce booth (#3719) so make sure to stop by and say hello.

Challenges and opportunities

In addition to these challenges, we have always been cognizant of maintaining our brand purpose, which advocates for creating small moments of serenity, calm, and meaning throughout the day.

We found a partner in Salesforce to help us achieve our goals and expand our business online without sacrificing our brand purpose.

We began our journey with Salesforce Commerce Cloud in 2013, and we’ve leveraged the flexibility of the platform to expand our online business to 25 countries (and counting) while continuing to open stores at a steady clip of two per week.

But just as important, we’ve been able to use Salesforce technology to deliver the kind of personalized, take-it-slow experience online that we offer in stores. (Well, minus our trademark cup of tea and hand massages. Salesforce hasn’t figured out a way to do that … yet!)

We’ve integrated the Salesforce platform in these key ways:

• We use Salesforce Einstein for personalized product recommendations.
• We take advantage of the Salesforce integration with Google Analytics 360 for a complete view of every customer interaction, this gives us unlimited opportunities to serve our customers in smarter and better ways.
• Marketing campaigns, customer service, and ecommerce activities are all powered by the Lightning Platform on an international scale.
• Using the Lightning Platform means that our customers have a consistent experience with our brand, wherever they are in the world. That’s incredibly powerful.

And if I were to name anything more important than our brand purpose and values, it’s service. That’s why we’re all in with Service Cloud, which helps us track queries in real time so we can categorize, prioritize, identify, and remedy any problem. For our small customer service team, this is a huge benefit. Again, this is all part of our plan to integrate the online/offline shopping experience.

We’re particularly excited to implement conversational commerce, which will give our service agents the ability to place an order on behalf of customers, rather than sending them back to the website or store. That is an absolute game-changer.

Experience an NRF ritual

We’re looking forward to talking about all this and more at NRF, so please be sure to stop by the Salesforce booth. We’ll be bringing a little bit of mindfulness and relaxation with us in the form of free hand massages. You won’t want to miss it, and — who knows? — it might become part of your own personal ritual in 2019.