Did you know that 84% of customers say that the experience a brand provides is just as important as its products? (That’s up from 80% in last year’s survey.) However, 51% say that companies fall short of their expectations. Customer service is a big part of a customer’s perception of a brand, and creating a great experience can drive customer loyalty.

Let’s say you just ordered a tent from a brand, but you ordered the wrong one, and you call customer service. They help you order the right one and also recommend some additional products. This capability on Salesforce Commerce Cloud is referred to as “Order on Behalf Of” (OOBO). If you have Commerce and Service Clouds with the Salesforce platform, you can drive revenue by enabling agents to help customers place orders, add coupons, or even suggest additional items to cross-sell or upsell. But that’s not all; this capability also enables your service agents to see a 360-degree view of your customers. 

Our Salesforce Solution Kits for Commerce and Service outlines the process, functional requirements, and other information to successfully integrate this capability. Let’s take a look at how it works.

What’s under the hood?

In the end-to-end flow diagram below, you’ll see how the platform handles the OOBO function. When a shopper contacts the service center, an agent can pull up a customer’s information, order history, and other applicable order details. The agent then initiates placing an order on behalf of the shopper, where Service Cloud authorizes (and Commerce Cloud verifies) the rights of the agent to launch a dedicated storefront. From there, the agent can add items to the customer’s cart, complete the transaction for the customer, and close the case, or they can turn the cart back over to the shopper to complete their own purchase.

Some of the key things to keep in mind with this use case is that: 

• It uses the public APIs that Salesforce provides. This means you need to take API limits into account from Salesforce.
• The order is placed by the service agent as if the customer placed the order directly on the Commerce site
• If the consumer already has a cart, the agent will see and use that cart when they are logged in as that consumer

Commerce and Service Cloud Connector

The Commerce to Service Connector provides an easy way to integrate Commerce and Service Cloud. The benefit of the connector is that it also takes care of creating the consumer profile in Service Cloud so that you can start to build a 360-degree view of the customer with their profile information and their orders. All of this is easily available using the power of the Lightning Platform for service agents when they call in.

Set up the right permissions

Make sure that the agents you want to give OOBO permissions to are Service Cloud users and Commerce Cloud users with Order On Behalf Of rights. 

To grant the correct permissions, you can use “Login_On_Behalf” and “Login_Agent” Business Manager functional permissions in Commerce Cloud.

Set up the layout for the Lightning Console Page

The connector comes with pre-built buttons that you can setup on your Lightning Console pages. You can add this to the Case Object or the Person Account Object.

Reporting

Commerce Cloud tracks the order as an agent-placed order. Within Service Cloud, you have the power of the Salesforce platform to run reports, allowing you to see how integrating commerce and service experiences lead to better retention and additional conversions and revenue.

Things to keep in mind

This use case is limited to customers who have already created a profile in Commerce Cloud because the Commerce to Service Connector uses the Commerce Cloud Customer ID to launch the session. 

Next steps?

Take a look at the other use cases that Solution Kits cover here. Think about your business use cases and see how Salesforce Commerce with Service or Marketing Cloud can drive conversions as well as retention.