A global kitchen products company widely known in more than 70 countries for empowering people to do more things in the kitchen than they ever thought possible recently acquired a coffee company specializing in high-quality, state-of-the-art coffee grinders. The company sought to welcome its coffee brand’s B2B retailer partners with a new, self-service, digital buying experience at global scale and partnered with Studio Science to create a new B2B buying experience for select retailers that would be powered by Salesforce B2B Commerce on Lightning Experience.
The CPG brand’s recent acquisitions of specialty coffee companies are expected to drive greater global brand awareness of its extensive, multi-brand portfolio of products and services, while also expanding the global breadth and depth of newly acquired product lines.
While the most recent coffee brand’s North American footprint was strong, larger growth opportunities existed globally. To expand the company and its product offerings globally, not only would the CPG need to integrate the coffee company into its operations, but it would also need to transform the existing buying experience to meet the unique needs and challenges of a global economy. This would require the team to diversify and streamline processes and accommodate multiple currencies, along with providing real-time inventory status and drop ship capabilities.
Given the strength of coffee company’s brand, the team built this new responsive digital experience within the latest brand specs to leverage existing equity. The goal was to incorporate what retailers already knew and eliminate pain points across their journey. The team was not out to change things for the sake of change; rather, Studio Science focused on what people needed and built a digital experience that would solve the specific needs and challenges that were previous roadblocks that would make a self-sufficient and enabled team.
Before the new responsive digital experience, retailers would place orders via email or by actually picking up the phone. It sounds easy, but in the very busy retail business, this was a huge inconvenience. Retailers not being able to self-service where and when they needed to take them away from the more critical aspects of their jobs, so the team set out to build a system that would enable, empower and scale in a global economy. Knowing the expectations of B2B buyers rival that of a consumer experience, the team built a sleek and inviting retailer ecommerce experience that would mirror what they would see and experience as a consumer.
The site was built in a way that allows retailers to opt in, so once logged in, what they see is in their native language and currency. This is all controlled at the account level and with login credentials. The team took this approach to the integration because it enables the company to scale the coffee. brand’s ecommerce buying experience with ease as it enters new markets across the globe.
On the back end, employees are able to navigate and customize their experience. Store managers can create multiple stores, create buying groups and even target specific retailers and/or segments. When setting up a product category, it can be shared on one site or across many, simply by setting up entitlement policies to control access. Using the cloud information data model, store admins have access to special products, inventory, and access priority. Also, when it comes to pricing, each account has a unique pricing model assigned based on the contract. This data model maps directly to some of the same AWS tech that is available if the organization ever needs to expand to a larger enterprise system or needs more cloud storage.
With this new digital experience, store administrators can create a store, manage all their products, add media, change languages, update price books and so much more. With the entitlement policies in place, the global CPG brand can rest assured users will only have access to products and prices they are entitled to view. Additionally, using the Salesforce Content Management System, administrators can publish content straight to retailers directly from Commerce Cloud.
The team also set the site to load with the latest inventory information from the coffee brand’s downstream ERP system. The team configured Commerce Cloud to provide reporting capabilities so that just-in-time inventory could be managed with ease using drop-ship capabilities within the platform.
With a fully integrated Salesforce tech stack, the global kitchen company is now able to synchronize its coffee brand’s entire retailer buying experience in ways that have never been possible before. Delivering a 100% harmonious, account-level digital experience within the Salesforce ecosystem has reduced technical debt and dramatically reduced time-to-market for its coffee products. Automated inventory management, real-time stock status, custom drop ship functionality, native languages, and currency along with content management is now empowering retailers across the globe with a seamless, customized end-to-end ecommerce buying experience.
