Maintaining Customer Service Excellence During Salesforce to Shopify Migration
When a leading direct-to-consumer outdoor apparel brand made the strategic move from Salesforce to Shopify in 2021, they gained access to a robust app ecosystem and faster innovation cycles. But they also lost critical order management flexibility that had been central to their customer-first service philosophy. After implementing Cleverific's self-service order editing, the brand saw cancellation-related requests drop by 50% while empowering 150 to 400 customers daily to edit their own orders during peak times, with high reorder conversion rates.
Why leave Salesforce for Shopify?
The outdoor brand's strategic migration from Salesforce to Shopify was driven by three key factors: lower development costs, faster implementation through apps, and access to cutting-edge innovation.
The company's IT Operations Manager explains: "Our team has always been pretty small, and we wanted to spend a little bit less on the development side and seek something more that was app-based and more conducive to our small group."
Rather than building custom features on Salesforce, Shopify's app ecosystem enabled faster, more cost-effective solutions. "It allows us to work with companies like Cleverific and other app providers to tackle very niche, specific needs, where some of these would have been much larger roadmap projects for Salesforce."
The brand was also attracted by Shopify's reputation as an innovation leader, with larger brands successfully making the same transition.
The migration challenge: Losing critical order flexibility from Salesforce
While the Shopify migration brought numerous benefits, it created an unexpected challenge. The brand had built its reputation on exceptional customer service, with Salesforce providing robust flexibility in cancelling orders, editing orders, and controlling fulfillment speed. Shopify's out-of-the-box capabilities couldn't replicate this functionality.
"On Salesforce, we had much more flexibility in the realm of cancelling orders and editing orders and the speed in which orders were passed down to our warehouse," the IT manager explains. "When we got to Shopify, it's great, the APIs and all the webhooks and everything that we have is phenomenal and it works great, but it limited us in the way that there was not really a remorse window where we could go in and power our customer service agents to help customers in certain cancel or edit situations."
“We are incredibly customer-first and customer-focused, almost to a fault. We have a very relaxed policy for returns, exchanges, and price adjustments. This is kind of a sense of who we are.”
The impact was immediate. The brand went through an entire holiday period and a half without the order flexibility they had taken for granted on Salesforce, resulting in significant customer feedback and frustration.
Customers expected the same level of service flexibility they had always received, regardless of which platform powered the backend.
The solution: Cleverific bridges the Salesforce-to-Shopify gap
After struggling through a challenging holiday season without the order management capabilities they had relied on with Salesforce, the brand needed a solution fast. They discovered Cleverific through their development team's research, and the easy trial period and quick demo environment impressed them immediately.
"Cleverific was one of the first partners our development team found," the IT manager recalls. "We were able to spin up a quick demo environment and build a more robust Shopify flow to have this 'on hold' time period where an app like Cleverific's just plugs into that time frame and lines everything up."
Cleverific's self-service order editing seamlessly integrated with their existing Shopify systems, creating an "on-hold" period where customers could independently make changes to their orders. This restored the functionality they had lost in the Salesforce migration while actually improving on it by empowering customers to make changes themselves without requiring customer service intervention.
From the customer perspective, the self-service capability meant they could quickly fix mistakes, add items their friends wanted, or update size selections without waiting for support hours or dealing with phone calls and emails.
The results: Empowered customers and streamlined operations
Dramatic reduction in customer service requests and high reorder rate
The brand saw cancellation-related inquiries plummet. "I think we've dropped that by over 50%," the IT manager estimates. More impressively, Cleverific's self-service order editing has positively impacted their reorder rate. The manager explains, "We do see a good amount of people that cancel end up reordering, either because they forgot to add a loyalty reward or they forgot their discount code. That conversion is pretty high."
He adds, "It's not normally because they had buyer's remorse in a 30-minute window. It's that they want to reset or get into something deeper and pay one shipping cost. So the volume in which they reorder is very high for us."
To keep track of these customer interactions in real-time, the brand has integrated Slack notifications with Cleverific's post-purchase editing solution. The IT manager explains, "We have a Slack connection set up now. So every time someone cancels an order, we get a little notification. In peak times, we're anywhere from 150 to 400 a day of customers adding a second item, their friend wants one now, or they made a quick error on a size."
This integration allows the brand to monitor customer activity closely and respond quickly if needed, further enhancing their customer-centric approach.
Enhanced customer service efficiency
With fewer calls and emails about order changes, the brand's customer service team can focus on other crucial tasks. The IT manager proudly states, "We're able to keep that inbox incredibly low. If you're emailing our company, you're getting a response in a world-class time frame, within a couple of hours for the most part, with a resolution and the next step."
Improved product development
The time saved has allowed customer service representatives to gather more valuable feedback from customers, directly contributing to product improvements.
“A lot of our customer service reps, as they promote through the company, often go into product development with knowledge they’ve learned from customers.”
Unexpected insights and improvements
The implementation of Cleverific's self-service order editing provided the brand with valuable insights into their customers' behavior. "I never really realized how many people actually made mistakes on our orders," the IT manager admits. This information has led to improvements in their product pages and add-to-cart process, further enhancing the customer experience.
Why Cleverific's self-service order editing?
The brand appreciates Cleverific not just for its product, but for its responsive customer service and willingness to adapt to their specific needs. After the challenges of the Salesforce migration, selecting the right app partners became even more crucial to their operations.
The IT manager explains their app selection process: "For me, coming from a customer service background, that goes a long way. We've had apps that were on our site for a little bit, but I couldn't get a hold of someone for days, weeks on end. That kind of gets me off their app and really makes me want to go find something else that is more of an extension of our team."
The manager emphasizes the importance of partnership in their app choices: "We're a smaller team and we rely on these kinds of apps to do important things on our site. Customer service and the ability to, even if it's not an immediate solution, think about that going forward as a roadmap initiative and work together as a partner, I think is important for some of these apps."
In this context, Cleverific has proven to be an essential partner for the brand. "The speed at which you guys have been able to respond and actually action some of our feedback has been incredibly impressive," the IT manager enthuses. "We feel at this point, your guys' speed in turning around on things for us has been great."
“As someone who is relying on an app provider to give us an essential service, we feel at this point, your guys’ speed in turning around on things for us has been great. We have obviously received a lot of great customer feedback. Our customer service team has just rave reviews about the way this works on our site. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for this kind of functionality.”
For this brand, Cleverific's self-service order editing isn't just a service but a crucial tool in their mission to deliver exceptional customer experiences. More importantly, it successfully bridged the gap between their previous Salesforce capabilities and their new Shopify platform, proving that migration to Shopify doesn't mean sacrificing customer service quality.
As the brand looks forward to future growth on Shopify, they're confident that Cleverific's post-purchase editing solution will continue to play a vital role in their customer service strategy, helping to drive conversions and maintain their unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction.
“The self-service order editing is probably their favorite thing that we’ve done as an IT team. They were sick of being asked, ‘Can we cancel this? Is it still in a window?’ We’ve created these rules, and Cleverific’s app has plugged right into that. It’s been great to see.”
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