01/09/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/09/2025 14:09
In 2025, merchandisers find themselves at a crossroads between building commerce experiences of the past and creating deeply connected customer interactions of the future. Who would've thought just a few short years ago that retailers would be embarking on an AI revolution? Today, merchandisers have an opportunity to get tangible results in their day-to-day work with the help of Agentforce.
How can merchandisers move faster with Agentforce? They can work alongside Agents to more quickly gain insights into the business, create promotions, and write eye-catching product descriptions. Think of it as digital labor improving your efficiency in those areas. AI agents should be partners to humans, and that partnership needs to be built on trust and reliability. Agentforce Skills for Merchandising draws from the #1 CRM, governed by the Salesforce trust layer, and powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine for natural, adaptive responses.
With that foundation, Commerce Cloud has developed actions to give merchandisers a leg up in meeting customer needs. The bottom line: customers will come to expect the type of efficient shopping experiences that merchandisers can deliver with Agentforce.
With ready-to-use actions, there's no limit to how commerce customers can improve efficiency around the business. Consider the following scenarios.
Imagine products sitting on a shelf collecting dust or a digital inventory tally staying the same. A great promotion would move that product faster. What if a shopper were served a personalized, data-driven promotion based on real-time insights about that customer?
Personalization matters more to customers now than ever before, with 39% of respondents in our latest State of Commerce Report saying that personalization is a top factor in a good digital experience. Once shoppers experience a truly personalized experience, uniting their branded experiences across marketing, commerce, and service, that expectation becomes the bar to clear.
That's where Agentforce comes in. Merchandisers can set product performance goals to activate stock. Agentforce acts on these goals to generate promotions targeted at the customers most likely to purchase that product based on their status in the customer lifecycle and their past purchases. This reduces the time it takes to build a promotion, which in many cases takes upwards of dozens of clicks, eating away at precious time that could be spent on other priorities. With Agentforce, the result is speed to set a promotion and a boost to store performance.
Valuable, actionable insights on product, shopper, and inventory trends are crucial to having a great sales cycle. Becoming aware of the latest trends in your business can arm a merchandiser with vital data.
Acting on relevant, timely data, is key to retailers growing sales and growing customer lifetime value. For example, during this past Cyber Week, Commerce Cloud retailers offered a 26% average discount rate, while boosting conversion rates by 8%. As the fight for consumers' wallet-share has become more competitive, its more important than ever for merchandisers to offer up that perfect promo to the right customer at the right time.
Agentforce can help make smarter decisions faster based on the trends data, providing proactive recommendations for boosting product performance and growing customer lifetime value. Knowing customers better based on insights around their lifetime value, purchasing history, and product preferences sets a strong foundation for the buyer-seller relationship, helping merchandisers build data-driven experiences.
One of the best skills in a merchandiser's toolkit is the ability to write attention-grabbing, conversion-driving product descriptions. Make that sweater sound too comfortable to pass up. Convince a customer they absolutely need that funny mug. Writing product descriptions can be time-consuming and it requires a human touch. Or does it?
In 2024, Commerce Cloud launched Generative Product Descriptions to streamline merchandising within the flow of work. Now, we are activating this as an Agentforce skill. Not only does Agentforce generate product descriptions, those descriptions read like they were written by a human with deep knowledge of the product and your brand voice. Generated product descriptions also generate SEO-optimized metadata and can be so well-written that they reduce returns by creating accurate expectations of the product, and build trust with customers by demonstrating professionalism and transparency.
In addition to improving the merchandising experience, Agentforce can engage shoppers on the storefront, or within messaging apps like WhatsApp. Agentforce Commerce Skills for Personal Shopping can act as a digital concierge providing tailored product recommendations and assisting with search queries.
Supplementing Agentforce out-of-the-box actions, brands and systems integrators can seamlessly build new Agentforce skills. For example, merchandising tasks like managing product reviews, building Product Information Management (PIM) integrations, and setting Order Management workflows can all be built simply on the Salesforce platform.
Agentforce ushers in a revolution for commerce and for merchandisers. Learn more about Agentforce for Commerce.
Pablo Gallaga is a seasoned content marketer with over 15 years of experience in tech marketing and content creation. Before joining Salesforce he produced award-winning content for Dell Technologies. Pablo is based in Austin, TX where you can probably find him at the local Alamo Drafthouse watching... Read More horror films.
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