The Salesforce Live: Benelux virtual event was a huge success, and is now available on demand. We took this opportunity to talk to one of the event sponsors, the leading Salesforce system integration partner Accenture, about the current commerce landscape.
What have their customers done this year to reimagine success?
We know that the global pandemic has vastly changed the business landscape, and those changes are here to stay. It’s no longer a new crisis, but back in March 2020, when businesses realised they had to adapt quickly, technology was a fundamental part of that; we can safely say that COVID has accelerated the digital transformation.
In this new, all-digital world, making use of the cloud isn’t something to think about for the future. The future has arrived, and we need to make sure that traditional sales channels and processes fit in.
Rinco Buist, Senior Salesforce Delivery Manager at Accenture, explained how their customers had to look for new ways to work.
“Everything was so new and businesses needed to adapt quickly, but so much had to change, people working remotely, having to move the client technical environment, the entire IT landscape, and many just weren’t ready for such a complete transformation.”
The challenges for any business trying to connect with their customers in such a time of unprecedented change, when the face-to-face options they were used to were suddenly limited, were huge. If companies didn’t have an IT landscape that was ready for that, their people were facing ways of working they had no experience of.
When the COVID-19 crisis first began, all businesses had to adapt in some way or another. Some already had some experience of using cloud solutions or working remotely, but others really struggled with completely alien ways of working.
The Salesforce and Accenture collaboration meant that Accenture’s commerce customers had a solution waiting for them — Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Since this year it is more necessary than ever to support clients with online channels, and recent news supports this — the figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands show sales by Dutch online shops increasing by 55% in Q2 2020, and Dutch consumers spending 37% more in foreign EU online shops than they did in Q2 2019.
“This is an enormous increase,” said Rinco, “And if you’re not already there, you’re definitely missing out.”
Commerce Cloud is a secure and scalable platform that gives organisations the infrastructure that’s so vital in digital transformation, keeping the customer right at the centre of the business.
Being able to adapt the software to an individual business’s end-to-end process can be complex, and that’s where Accenture comes in with its experience of tailoring the platform to the individual needs of the customer — from making sure that the supply chain works to ensuring seamless customer experience.
During the initial uncertainty, nobody knew how long the crisis would last. Companies were quickly improvising to adapt to digital or risk going out of business, with suboptimal solutions.
Accenture’s out-of-the-box offering meant rapid implementation with fixed services based on the customers’ needs. Customers using this functionality were able to scale up and accelerate digital transformation for however long they needed to, and scale down in the future as and when things went back to ‘normal’.
But will the commerce landscape really go back to the way it was?
We all had to change the way we worked, almost overnight, it seemed. For some, that involved putting in temporary measures just to get through the weeks, maybe months, until the pandemic ended and we could go back to normal. That’s understandable, because who knew that things would continue for so long?
But that’s the thing, this is the new normal, and there’s no going back to the way things were before.
“Now is the time to realise that we’re not turning back, this is here to stay. If companies are still dealing in excel sheets and emails in order to give their customers an online experience, it’s time to invest in the next step.”
Six months ago consumers were understanding of businesses that didn’t offer a seamless online experience. They accepted that the world was all of a sudden a different place and that it would take time to adapt. That time has passed, and consumers are more demanding than ever. Digital transformation is no longer optional, it’s the key to success.
Please visit our websites for more information on Accenture cloud solutions or Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
