Salesforce this week announced a multiyear partnership with FedEx and artificial intelligence updates to its marketing cloud. The partnership with FedEx is designed to help the companies deliver end-to-end e-commerce and supply chain management. Under the terms of the partnership, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Order Management will be integrated with FedEx’s ShopRunner e-commerce platform.

The growth of e-commerce is putting pressure on retailers to ensure great customer experiences while keeping up with growing demand, FedEx said. Retailers have to manage multiple, complicated inventory management systems to fulfill orders and process returns while struggling to reach their customers in a crowded e-commerce ecosystem.

SEE: Salesforce rolls out AI-powered workflows, contact center updates in Service Cloud (TechRepublic)

The two companies said having a single platform will remove the complexity and enable them to keep up with rising demand and customer expectations for things like free two-day shipping and returns while lowering supply-chain costs and increasing fulfillment efficiency.

The two companies aim to offer customers:

• Increased loyalty and customer lifetime value: Access to millions of high-value shoppers actively purchasing through ShopRunner’s platform, providing Salesforce merchants a pool of loyal consumers.

• Early network insights: Advance insights into delivery speeds and potential delays, available even before an order has shipped, will help merchants provide their customers with more accurate information on when their purchases will arrive.

• Supply chain optimization: Merchants will have access to tools designed to optimize transportation and fulfillment, increase supply chain intelligence and simplify shipping and manage costs.

• Real-time order visibility: Merchants will be able to provide shoppers with information on when their orders will arrive through enhanced, real-time delivery dates and times on the product detail page, in the shopping cart and throughout the delivery journey.

Marketing cloud enhancements

Also this week, Salesforce rolled out an enhanced version of its Marketing Cloud embedded with AI aimed at helping companies build deeper digital relationships with customers and optimize their marketing impact. 

The enhancements are focused on personalization, content creation and customer satisfaction. Specifically, Salesforces aims to help customers:

Know your customer to engage with relevancy:

• Einstein Engagement Scoring in Salesforce CDP: Marketers can now use AI in combination with cross-cloud data to target their most engaged subscribers, or suppress inactive subscribers, helping to improve engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction across each marketing moment.

Humanize every moment with real-time personalization:

• Interaction Studio Templates: Templates now extend and simplify personalization to customers via ATMs, point-of-sale, and call centers to help ensure the one-to-one relationship is personalized and connected.

• Interaction Studio + Experience Cloud Integration: As customers engage digitally, the new Experience Cloud integration provides personalized web, mobile and portal experiences, based on a customer’s real-time engagement.

• Interaction Studio + CRM Integration: As customers reach out to engage with sales and service, the new CRM integration aims to provide these teams with real-time visibility into customer behavior, segmentation and next-best actions and offers.

• Einstein Content Designer: In personalized experiences context and channel is important – but so is content. Artificial intelligence takes the guesswork out of creating the most engaging and relevant content through content generation and optimization, alleviating content production bottlenecks in personalized marketing. The goal is for marketers to be more effective and efficient as they personalize one-to-one moments at scale for their customers.

Optimize marketing impact with smarter insights:

• Datorama Connector and App for Salesforce CDP: Datorama now features a native connector into Salesforce CDP with an out-of-the-box CDP analytics App and Einstein Marketing Insights (AI) designed to help marketers optimize the business impact of their data-driven marketing and advertising.

• Datorama Connector and App for Interaction Studio: Datorama now features a native connector into Interaction Studio with an out-of-the-box analytics app and Einstein Marketing Insights (AI) with the goal of helping marketers optimize their ROI  from the web to cross-channel.

The Salesforce FedEx platform will be available in the spring of 2022 and pricing will be announced then, the companies said. 

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