Maeve Condell

There was the world before ChatGPT, and there is the world after ChatGPT.

In fact, ChatGPT’s emergence is being hailed as the next Industrial Revolution. With over a billion visitors per month, this generative AI tool is being rapidly adopted in fields ranging from creative industries like graphic design and content writing to more technical roles such as software development. Its potential has continued expanding into other arenas, including customer support.

No doubt, generative AI is the future of CX. And with 88% of business leaders reporting that their customers’ attitudes towards automation have improved over the past year — it’s no longer a matter of if you should look to automate your support but when.

The benefits for B2B ecommerce brands are clear. Since 80% of customers identify CX as a key differentiator and think it is just as important as products or services, gen AI is a crucial way to improve your customer support offering and get a leg up on your competitors. Yet, because this technology is relatively new, and many B2B companies have more complex product packages and setups, you may still be wondering how, in practice, generative AI can enhance your customer support.

First, let’s take a look at what makes generative AI tools like ChatGPT so much better than their predecessors in simulating human-like conversations. From there, we can better understand how this technology can optimize your customer support.

Generative AI’s technology and how it works

Before we explore some of the best use cases for generative AI in the B2B ecommerce support context, it’s a good idea to understand what the technology is and how it works. Gen AI refers to the particular iteration of artificial intelligence that powers tools like ChatGPT — as well as a growing host of other bots like DALL-E, Google’s Bard, and MidJourney. Gen AI is distinct from previous forms of automation because it enables bots to hold impressively natural conversations. This is because generative AI draws on large language models (LLMs) that, in the case of ChatGPT, have even passed the Turing test, a method of proving machine intelligence.

But what exactly is an LLM and why is it so revolutionary in the AI space? What sets these models apart is the use of “transformers” (as if there wasn’t already something so sci-fi and “Marvel-esque” about this technology). Transformers effectively mimic human conversational style because they can process all inputs simultaneously rather than needing to be fed data sequentially. This means that, in the case of ChatGPT, the bot can process all of the written content on the internet (up until 2022) to generate the answer to a given prompt. This holistic processing capability allows it to produce responses with the context and tone you expect when talking with a regular person.

As you might have guessed by now, this can be especially useful for customer support automation. This is because a virtual agent that uses generative AI can seamlessly mimic your brand tone of voice as well as the conversational style of your human agents. As a result, you can offer an improved conversational experience for customers, make your support agents’ lives easier, and provide your customers with more than ever before.

The top 3 generative AI use cases revolutionizing CX in the B2B space:

1 – A more advanced conversational experience for customers

With generative AI offering such natural and human-like conversations, you don’t have to worry about automation damaging the customer experience with your brand. With the help of generative AI, the virtual agent can instantly pull info from your FAQ pages, knowledge base, help center, or any other company page — and serve this to customers in a natural, conversational way. There’s no training required, and you can get started in minutes.

As long as a topic is covered in your help center, the bot can process all of the articles available to answer customer queries. So, if a customer asks, ‘Where can I find and download my last invoice?’ the bot can instantly provide instructions.

In this scenario, your customers can have their cake and eat it too — by getting the information they need much more quickly through self-service, without losing the conversational format of speaking with a human agent. This will boost your automation rate, while ensuring that your customers still feel supported with high quality customer service.

2 – Assisting support agents

While a virtual agent powered by generative AI may be able to effectively do the work of several human agents, it doesn’t mean that they will be replacing them anytime soon. Rather, automation serves as a tool that can help agents to do their jobs better. For instance, a virtual agent that uses generative AI can offer a more seamless transition from bot to human agent by helping to structure, summarize, and automatically populate tickets so agents don’t have to. This will lead to much faster response times and a cleaner handover to agents in cases the bot can’t fully resolve. In addition, agents can prompt generative AI to offer suggested replies that help them to draft responses more efficiently.

These things can be a major game-changer in the event of an uptick in queries, unexpected or otherwise. This makes automation useful for answering simple questions like order status or requesting a password change. It also helps to free up agents’ time to deal with more complicated issues. For B2B ecommerce brands where queries can be complex and technical, having a primer from the bot allows agents to hit the ground running when addressing customer issues. With the help of generative AI, the bot assists your agents in having better and faster insights into customers’ needs and helps your team work more efficiently.

3 – Understanding your customers and what they’re asking

Lastly, generative AI will help you to educate your customers and offer them even more value than they were expecting from interactions with your support team. Businesses often shop around between different suppliers before making a purchase, so you want them to discover the unique selling point of your product offerings as quickly as possible. This discovery process is where generative AI comes in. It can comb your existing content to offer useful, educational suggestions to answer any pre-purchase questions. It can also provide such content to busy support agents when prompted. Through the transformer model that powers it, generative AI can instantly serve up this information without needing to be manually updated as you publish new content on your site.

Conclusion

Generative AI is the latest and most sophisticated edition of automation technology, and it has real potential to optimize the B2B customer experience. In particular, it has the capacity to mimic natural conversations, assist your agents in structuring support tickets, and provide customers with an enriched support experience — all without hiring any extra agents. It’s a time-efficient, affordable, and scalable solution to mitigating long wait times, depersonalized CX, and clunky self-service offerings. While the technology may be new, the sky is hardly the limit on its potential for supercharging your CX as the number of applicable use cases only continues to grow.

About the author:

Maeve Condell is a solution architect at Ultimate, a customer service automation company. Her focus is on combining AI and conversation design to build personalized virtual agents.

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Brian Zielinski, CEO, ShapeConnect

One example is ShapeConnect, a Chicago-based online marketplace for business services. Founded in November 2019, ShapeConnect’s activity surged the following year as buyers and sellers of services found new value in connecting online for services ranging from accounting and tax preparation to web design and marketing, CEO and co-founder Brian Zielinski says.

ShapeConnect, which is privately owned and self-funded, grew by more than 800% between 2020 and 2021, Zielinski says, as its base of 3,000 business users increased their online buying and selling of services during the pandemic.

Tom Parker, a partner with Itasca, Illinois-based accounting firm Fates, Bodily & Parker, says exposure on ShapeConnect helped his firm grow between 25% and 30% in 2021 over 2020. “They also connected us with vendors who manage our social media and website development, and helped us develop our CRM and Hubspot referral network,” he says.

Zielisnki projects the value of gross transaction volume on ShapeConnect is on course to reach $1 million per month within two years. ShapeConnect earns its revenue by charging sellers a commission of 15% or less based on transaction volume.

Marketplaces have emerged in recent years as the fastest-growing B2B ecommerce channel, according to the 2022 B2B Ecommerce Market Report from Digital Commerce 360.

“Suddenly, marketplaces are everywhere in B2B,” says Alex Moazed, CEO of Applico Inc., a digital business advisory firm. “And B2B customers are clear they want the experience” of broad choice among suppliers and products.

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Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO, Freshworks Inc.

Among the Freshworks product suite are such applications as Freshsales, which it describes as AI-powered “ecommerce CRM software” that provides a company’s marketing and sales teams “a unified view of leads” to help segment and target website visitors, turn them into leads, and interact with them via live chat, email, text messages or telephone.

“When your lead browses your ecommerce website and looks for information, you have a chance to engage with the lead,” increase conversions with personalized interactions and minimize cart abandonment, Freshworks says.

Launched in 2010, Freshworks says it has more than 50,000 customers and more than $300 million in annual revenue.

Shares of the software company closed at $47.55 Wednesday in New York trading, giving it a market value of $13 billion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units, Freshworks would have a fully diluted value of more than $14 billion.

The potential competitor to far larger Salesforce.com was valued at $3.5 billion in a 2019 funding round. Freshworks sold 28.5 million shares Tuesday for $36 each after marketing them for $32 to $34, a target that the company had elevated from $28 to $32.

Freshworks boosted revenue about 40% last year after the coronavirus pandemic prompted businesses to go digital, and sales continue to grow in the first half of 2021 while its net loss shrank.

Now with 52,500 customers, the company saw its revenue grow in the first six months of this year to $169 million, up from $110 million in the first half of 2020. Its net loss shrank to $9.8 million from $57 million a year ago, according to its filings.

Promoting a single tool to connect with customers

Freshworks was founded in India and moved to Silicon Valley to be closer to customers. Now based in San Mateo, California, the company retains a substantial workforce in the southern Indian city of Chennai. In its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, founder Girish Mathrubootham likened Freshworks software to the iPhone, saying businesses shouldn’t have to rely on multiple tools to engage with customers.

Affiliates of Accel India and others of Tiger Global Management each control more than a quarter of the company’s Class B shares.

Mathrubootham said that when he started the company, he wanted to reach $1 million in revenue. He said that was until Shekhar Kirani of Accel put the idea of a U.S. IPO in his head.

“He said you can sell Freshworks and make a lot of money, or you can be the first Indian company in SaaS to go public in the U.S. and it would really be a historic milestone,” Mathrubootham said. “And from that point on that was when the dream towards today actually started.”

‘Respect’ for Salesforce

He added that he considers Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com an “amazing leader.”

“We have great respect for Salesforce and what they’ve built,” he said. “We would love to continue to build Freshworks to greater heights.” Salesforce—whose CRM and other software applications integrate with its Commerce Cloud B2B and retail ecommerce software—this week raised its revenue outlook to over $26 billion for its current fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2022.

Accel partner Sameer Gandhi, a Freshworks board member, said Freshworks didn’t need U.S. sales professionals to get the startup off the ground.

“The product has to be the salesperson,” he said, adding that the company continues to grow because its software is intuitive and easy to use. He added that he expects the company to make more acquisitions.

The IPO was led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Bank of America Corp. Freshworks shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol FRSH.

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Greg Ricciardi

COVID-19’s acceleration of trends within the B2B space is sending jaw-dropping ripples throughout C-suites and marketing organizations around the globe. For years, B2B leaders have been told that they need to catch up to their B2C counterparts when it comes to capabilities in ecommerce, direct-to-consumer relationships and creative storytelling. Now, we’re realizing that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The pandemic has catapulted digital transformation needs to the forefront of B2B executive conversations. According to technology research and advisory firm Gartner Inc., a full 80%  of B2B sales interactions will take place in digital channels by 2025, requiring no small pivot when it comes to how companies engage their buyers along their journeys. But if a company’s leaders are thinking about the needed transformation only in terms of technology, then they’re missing the point.

The simple fact is that, yes, today’s B2B organizations do need to start meeting B2C-level expectations when it comes to establishing relationships with their customers. But these expectations go well beyond how people discover and purchase from a B2B enterprise. It starts, in fact, with the company’s very purpose.

The Rise of Purpose in B2B Organizations

Every single brand today needs to reassess the value it brings to its customers and question its continued relevance in their lives. That goes for B2C and B2B companies alike. And this is where purpose comes in.

Brands that put purpose first were already gaining ground prior to the pandemic. But for the most part, the brands that have done so most successfully have existed on the consumer side of the aisle—brands like TOMS, Patagonia, Kind, Method, Allbirds, and Unilever. But that’s going to change.

As we emerge from the pandemic, purpose will prove to be a core and essential differentiator for both B2C and B2B companies in the future. After all, today’s customers are looking for more than just a product or a service. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to make a difference and know that the companies they support are of the same mindset.

This desire to align with like-minded brands doesn’t end with people’s shoes and skincare products. On the contrary, more so than ever, business leaders signing multi-year, multi-million-dollar contracts want their investments to mean something, not just for their companies but for the world around them. And they want to be able to communicate and demonstrate that meaning to their employees, customers and stakeholders.

The challenge for companies in 2021 will be to not only redefine how they provide value to their customers but also how they provide value to the world around them.

The Unique Challenge of Purpose in B2B

On the consumer side of the aisle, purpose often manifests in giving—giving back to communities, giving products to people in need, giving portions of profits to causes near and dear to a company’s circle of influence.

For B2B enterprises, becoming purpose-first looks a little different. After all, the TOMS buy-one-give-one model of donating products to those in need doesn’t work quite as well when your product is an integrated SaaS-based technology stack designed to streamline operations across an elaborate supply chain. But that doesn’t mean your company can’t still put purpose at the core of its business model.

In the B2B space, purpose will look a little bit different for every company, but the thrust behind every established purpose should be an inherently human one. No matter how technical a space a company might play in, its leaders must turn their attention to the very real effect that it has on the people around and within it. Sustainability, diversity and inclusion, social justice: When enterprises commit to improving their internal and external practices around these goals, they turn their businesses into platforms for meaningful change.

In the drive to become purpose-first, B2B organizations shouldn’t just be following in their B2C counterparts’ footsteps. They should be leading the charge. By putting purpose at the center of their businesses, they have the opportunity to not only build a more sustainable future for their employees and shareholders, but also for the world around them.

Greg Ricciardi is president and CEO of Philadelphia-based creative brand agency 20nine. Connect with him at greg@20nine.com and on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Richard Barnett

Semiconductors and other electronic components are essential to the way businesses and people operate. These commodities are vital to enabling advances across a range of industries.

Digital disruption and digital transformation could not—and cannot—happen without them.

The great irony is that the businesses in this electronics industry are themselves often digital laggards.

Banking, consumer goods, and financial services are all much further ahead in thinking about buyer journey orchestration across different channels of engagement; driving digital engagement all the way through to an ecommerce transaction; providing self-service options that address customer needs; and using different forms of intelligence to optimize that process.

There is general consensus in our space that the semiconductor and electronic components industry is trailing behind other sectors. But we wanted to get a better look at this vital issue.

The Average Maturity Score Suggests a Significant Opportunity for Improvement

To better understand and assess this phenomenon, we surveyed marketing and sales leaders from 180 electronics distributors and suppliers across the globe. (The total annual revenue of all the companies in the survey is around $860 billion, a healthy representation of the global electronics value chain.) We examined B2B digital marketing, ecommerce, and sales academic research and maturity models. And we merged some of the best frameworks and thinking across those three domains into a digital customer engagement maturity model.

Digital customer engagement maturity is about more than just technology. So, in our efforts to attack this topic holistically and comprehensively, we balanced our maturity model across the classic dimensions of people, process, technology and systems, and, to some extent, policy.

That way, semiconductor and electronic component industry organizations can use the model to align considerations around talent, organizational design, investment in technology and new forms of intelligence, and then create more different digital engagement touchpoints.

On a five-point scale, the average customer engagement maturity score was 2.4. This suggests that the semiconductor and electronic components industry is a digital customer engagement laggard, has been stalled on this front for the last two decades, and has ample room to mature.

The Jury is Still Out on Whether—and How Much—the Pandemic Moved the Needle

Industry analyst and media reports in the last 18 months noted that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives at many global manufacturers. But our April 2021 survey suggests that the pandemic was a gating factor for component suppliers and distributors, 39% of which said the environment brought on by COVID-19 delayed their customer experience and ecommerce digital transformations.

Perhaps by next year, the industry will have a better handle on the pandemic’s overall impact on this front. But what’s clear is that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many businesses in our industry saw the need to do more digital engagement because their traditional field sales and engineering teams couldn’t visit customer locations. That is now driving a shift to create virtual sales teams.

Changes Driven by COVID-19 May Help Break Through the Lingering Laggard Mindset

But while everyone has scrambled to adjust to the new reality, we estimate that online transactions account for just 6% of the industry’s total annual sales.

There’s also a lingering laggard marketing mindset. Many companies in this industry still think of marketing investment solely in relation to corporate brand awareness. They also tend to overlook digital engagement, how marketing can impact their sales go-to-market strategy, and how engineering content influences design cycles. That’s a really big disconnect.

Part of the reason is that companies in this industry are very engineering- and sales-driven. Marketing is traditionally an afterthought. But COVID-19 was so disruptive that it really forced sales to rethink what they have been doing. I’m optimistic that we’ll see a cluster of companies in the industry, maybe the top quartile that have the right leadership and mindset, move from level two to level three—or even four—in the maturity model within a couple of years.

Organizational Integration, Talent, and Greater Marketing Investment Are Going to Be Key

Businesses with tightly integrated sales and marketing efforts are best positioned to make this shift. Sales and marketing integration helps businesses to figure out how to tailor the right content to particular prospects, and to align with the design cycles across different markets and customers as they do this. Companies that can synchronize and scale these efforts can leapfrog from two to four on the digital engagement maturity model scale almost overnight.

But the challenges to getting there include hiring the right talent and driving greater investment in marketing. There is a massive under investment in marketing as a percentage of revenue in the global electronics industry. However, our research indicates that 66% of sales and marketing leaders in the industry plan to maintain or increase their digital advertising budgets.

That’s a step in the right direction. But progressing to a higher level of digital commerce and digital customer engagement maturity is about more than simply buying a different business system, hiring a new person, or making some other small incremental organizational change.

New Forms of Intelligence Are Vital to Drive Customer Engagement at Scale

Sales and marketing leaders—and sometimes even CEOs—need to assess where they are in terms of digital customer engagement and ecommerce maturity, examine and possibly reset their assumptions around what’s critical to their success, and lay out their vision for the future.

COVID-19 has changed the way the world works. Businesses are contending with a global component shortage. And the need for digital engagement has never been higher.

Now’s the time to position to be the supplier of choice. In today’s world, that entails more than simply having the best technology or components. It requires the best level of engagement, trust, and intelligence to meet customers every step of the way at scale. Companies that do that better than their peers will win more business, enjoy greater profitability, and grow.

Richard Barnett is chief marketing officer of Supplyframe, a provider of technology and services designed to help businesses in the global electronics industry design, source, market and sell products. Siemens AG, a global electronics manufacturer, has agreed to acquire Supplyframe and expects to close on the deal in the fourth quarter.

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Microsoft widely released its Azure Synapse Analytics tool and announced a preview of a new product called Purview, which is meant to help companies keep up with data security and compliance needs. ABN Amro Bank NV is using Synapse to figure out what financial services products are best targeted at which customers, and Wolters Kluwer NV, which helps develop medical software, built an artificial intelligence system that better predicts which patients will get a rapidly spread hospital-borne infection. Companies like FedEx Corp. and Procter & Gamble Co. are also using the new software, Jason Zander, Azure executive vice president, said in an interview.

Too many customers aren’t able to effectively use the data generated from a variety of different programs and devices, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will tell customers Thursday at a virtual event.

“Today, we are generating data faster than we are able to understand it,” Nadella will say, according to prepared remarks provided by Microsoft. “It’s relegated to internal and external silos or simply ignored.” Half of Fortune 1,000 executives say they don’t treat their data as a “business asset. It’s not because they don’t think it matters. They just don’t have the process or capability to get there.”

A high-level view of data—including Amazon and SAP applications

Azure Purview adds data governance, security and compliance features. The service lets users find confidential data and allows executives responsible for securing it to get a high-level view of all the information in various programs, including those from rivals like Amazon and SAP SE, Zander said.

Microsoft’s new products come as the market for such tools is heating up, part of why Snowflake’s September initial public offering hit a record for a software company and was the biggest in the U.S. this year. Amazon’s AWS cloud unit has been improving its Redshift data warehouse. The market for cloud data management services will be worth $13 billion next year, according to estimates from Forrester, as customers try to make sense of information that’s stored in the cloud, corporate data centers and devices disbursed around offices, factories and other sites.

“There’s been this no-man’s-land between where the data sits and how you are using the data,” said Michele Goetz, an analyst at Forrester. “There’s a lot that needs to be done to transform the data into something that’s usable and contextual.”

Microsoft’s own finance department saw the need for these tools. When staffers had to locate some sort of information or insight, 70% of time they had to manually collect data—before the company introduced its new tools.

“It was pretty demoralizing,” said chief financial officer Amy Hood in a video that will be shown at the event. “You have great talent and you want to make a difference and instead they’re spending time explaining to me how much time they spent in cut, copy and paste.”

Combining 120 data sources

Now the finance team has combined 120 different data sources in Azure, which also cut costs. The ability to better see all the information let Hood’s team improve financial forecasting. “We were OK at it — we weren’t great at it,” she said about their work before using the new products. After, her team cut the variance of forecasts in half. “People may say, gosh is that lot? Well going from 3% to 1.5% is the difference frankly between being right and being wrong and saving hundreds of millions of dollars,” she said.

Some of the technology also came from the work Microsoft did to comply with European data privacy regulations, Zander said.

“We built out all of these custom tools and work in order to handle exabytes of data,” Zander said. “We’re taking all that technology that we use ourselves and making it available to our customers.”

The new products and the focus on data management will also intensify competition with companies like SAP, Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp., Goetz said. It remains to be seen how Microsoft navigates the partnerships and rivalries it has with those companies, including, for example, using SAP’s software for Hood’s finance department.

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The transaction, Salesforce’s largest-ever acquisition, is expected to close by the end of July, the San Francisco-based company said Tuesday in a statement. Slack investors will receive $26.78 for each company share as well as 0.0776 share of Salesforce—representing a 55% premium to Slack’s price on Nov. 24, the day before reports about deal talks between the companies.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com Inc.

Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff has orchestrated more than 60 acquisitions in 21 years, taking his company from dot-com era upstart to a titan of cloud computing.

The Slack deal would give Salesforce, the leader in programs for managing customer relationships, another angle of attack against Microsoft Corp., which has itself become a major force in internet-based computing. Microsoft’s Teams product, which offers a workplace chatroom, automation tools and videoconference hosting, is a top rival to Slack.

“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,” Benioff said in the statement.

Slack’s ‘end-to-end’ role in serving customers

In a third-quarter earnings call with investment analysts this week, Benioff said the Slack Connect communications tool will integrate with Salesforce’s Customer 360 suite of sales, service, marketing, ecommerce, and analytics software to help companies better connect with their customers. Asserting that such operations as ecommerce, marketing and customer service are “not siloed by department anymore,” Benioff said businesses today need to manage customer relationships in an “end-to-end journey and to really achieve that, we think Slack is a good tool that facilitates that in a really unique way.”

Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack Technologies Inc.

Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and CEO, will continue to run the business as a Salesforce unit when the deal is completed. He said he is excited to join the company that sparked the cloud revolution.

“The opportunity we see together is massive,” Butterfield said in the statement. “This is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”

Salesforce’s shares declined by about 4% in extended trading after closing at $241.35. The stock has jumped 48% this year. Slack’s shares were little changed after closing at $43.84. The stock has almost doubled in 2020, with about half of that gain coming since the acquisition talks were reported.

Salesforce, among the first of the fast-growing cloud software companies when it went public in 2004, strives to generate year-over-year revenue increases of more than 25%. Slack, which is expected to increase its sales by almost 40% to $877 million this fiscal year, could help that effort. Slack, launched in 2013, went public via a direct listing in 2019. Bloomberg News and other publications reported that companies including Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google expressed interest in buying Slack at various times when it was still private.

Benioff for years has turned to acquisitions to keep his product lineup fresh. He has set an annual revenue goal of $35 billion for Salesforce by fiscal 2024, compared with $17 billion in fiscal 2020. The company bought analytics firm Tableau Software Inc. in an all-stock deal valued at $15.3 billion last year, which was Salesforce’s biggest acquisition at the time. The year before, in 2018, Benioff took over MuleSoft Inc. for $6.5 billion.

A new era for Slack under Salesforce

Salesforce ownership will mark a new era for Slack, a tech upstart with the lofty goal of trying to replace the need for business emails. The cloud-software giant may be able to sell Slack’s chatroom product to existing customers around the world, making it even more popular. Slack said in March that it had reached 12.5 million users who were simultaneously connected on its platform, which has grown more essential while corporate employees work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Slack has boosted revenue in the midst of Covid-19, but the company’s billings have been underwhelming because of shaky demand from small and mid-sized clients.

Meanwhile, use of Microsoft Teams has jumped during the pandemic, and Slack has taken issue with the company’s business tactics. In July, Slack complained to the European Union that Microsoft had broken antitrust law and should be investigated.

“Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers,” Slack said in a statement at the time. Microsoft, which integrates its products with Slack, has denied any wrongdoing.

While the boards of both companies approved the deal, Slack will be required to pay Salesforce $900 million if Slack’s directors change their recommendation or back out to accept a “superior proposal,” according to a regulatory filing.

‘Facilitating this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world’

Benioff, who just three months ago said he didn’t foresee making any acquisitions given the economic environment, praised chief operating officer Bret Taylor for organizing the deal with Butterfield, then pitching him on the idea.

“What’s very exciting is this vision that Stewart and Bret have put together,” he said in a conference call. “It’s a wow.”

Taylor, who sold his productivity software company, Quip, to Salesforce in 2016, said Slack will be deeply integrated with the app maker’s software suite to help its customers’ employees.

“It really is about facilitating this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, to enable team selling, to enable people in a contact center to swarm on a case digitally whether or not you’re in the same building, to enable marketers to plan a campaign,” Taylor said.

Separately, Salesforce projected revenue will grow about 17% in the current period to as much as $5.675 billion. That will be the slowest quarter of year-over-year sales growth in 11 years for the software maker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, excluding some items, will be 73 to 74 cents in the period ending in January, missing analysts’ projections for 86 cents.

Marketing and commerce software revenue up 25%

Salesforce reported this week a 20% year-over-year gain in revenue to $5.42 billion for its fiscal third quarter ended Oct. 31; net income, benefitting from changes related to strategic investments and income tax, was $1.08 billion, compared with a year-earlier loss. For the nine months ended Oct. 31, revenue increased by 26% to $15.44 billion, as net income reached $3.81 billion.

The company said revenue from its Marketing and Commerce Cloud technology, which includes its B2B and B2C ecommerce software, increased 24.8% in Q3 to $804 million and by 24.3% in the first nine months to $2.26 billion.

The editorial staff of Digital Commerce 360 contributed to this report.

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Nevertheless, the distributor’s revamped site unexpectedly opened up a thriving B2C channel.

Like many B2B suppliers, Lindemann found that it had outgrown its original B2B platform, which was a hodgepodge of systems from myriad vendors that had become too difficult to manage.

“It was a random mix of applications and it got to the point where we hit the breaking point,” recalls Michael Schaefer, director of operations for Lindemann Chimney Co. “We knew we had to upgrade and wanted a solution that could grow with our ecommerce business the next 5 to 10 years versus an ERP system that we’d probably outgrow in 2-3 years.”

After surveying the software market, the company settled on Oracle Corp.’s NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced platform. While Lindemann knew that a cloud-based platform could handle all of its customer-facing and back-end needs under one hood, which is what it wanted, SuiteCommerce Advanced was on the high-end of Lindemann’s price range.

“We were also on the low-end of customers in terms of size that NetSuite targets, so it was a pricey proposition for us,” Schaefer says.

But Lindemann decided to bite the bullet and invest in the new platform for the long-term.

Part of the company’s strategy in launching the new ecommerce site, at LindemannChimneySupply.com, was to make the user experience more intuitive by not requiring all buyers to log in to make a purchase. As a result, first-time buyers do not have to set up an account and can see retail prices for chimney caps, dampers, cleaning tools and other products. Quick ordering options and order-tracking features were also available to buyers that opted not to log-in. Existing B2B buyers, on the other hand, can see their discounted pricing by logging in to their account.

“Our intent was to create an ecommerce platform that is easy to navigate and provides fast, easy ordering for B2B buyers because the last thing chimney professionals want is to be talking to a supply house during business hours when they are on a roof working on or cleaning a chimney,” Schaefer says. “Chimney professionals prefer to order early in the morning or later in the evening when our call center staff is not available. Having a website that allows for fast, easy ordering 24/7 lets them place orders on their schedule.”

A sudden surge in direct-to-consumer sales

But a surprising thing happened after launching its new site, Lindemann found it was attracting a whole new customer base—do-it-yourselfers. Suddenly, the distributor had a new direct-to-consumer ecommerce channel that was undergoing explosive growth.

It wasn’t long before Lindemann, which sells primarily via ecommerce channels, had to add staff to manage its B2C channel, which now accounts for 20% of its ecommerce sales and has helped to generate more sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. The distributor also realized it needed to learn how to properly service consumers because their needs are different from those of B2B customers.

“One of the things we realized is that we had to be careful about the products we made available to our B2C customers because they are not chimney professionals,” says Schaefer. “They also ask a lot of technical questions, which raised concerns about how qualified they are to install and use some of the products we offer.”

Lindemann operates LindemannChimney.com, which links to the products site LindemannChimneySupply.com and a site for researching and scheduling residential chimney maintenance and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning services, LindemannChimneyService.com.

A Lindemann Chimney service crew.

LindemannChimneySupply.com sells products ranging from chimney parts and cleaning supplies to fireplace equipment and masonry repair materials. It caters to B2B commercial and wholesale customers who can log into their accounts and do-it-yourselfers who can make online purchases either with an account or by just entering their email address for order confirmation.

Lindemann’s customer service agents direct consumers on the product site with technical questions to The Chimney Safety Institute of America, which can also help consumers determine whether they need a professional to inspect their work.

Matching the UX of Amazon and Walmart.com

“Building a B2C business was never a strategy; it was simply a byproduct of launching a new site that is easier to navigate and provided a better user experience,” Schaefer says.

Lindemann, which also sells to consumers through Walmart.com and Amazom.com, discovered that B2C shoppers wanted the same kind of helpful digital user experience, or UX, those sites offer. That also made the distributor realize that offering the same kind of user experience on its B2C site—which is a public-facing site sharing the same platform as the log-in portal for B2B buyers—would make it a complementary sales channel to its core B2B business.

“The user experience doesn’t vary much between the two sites,” Schaefer says, noting that both are designed for such features as quick-ordering, order-tracking and access to customer service. “The biggest difference is that B2B users can log into their account portal to get the functionality they expect, such as the ability to reorder, see their discounted pricing and order history, and pay their bill.”

Balancing the pricing for B2C and B2B

Another difference between the two sites is that Lindemann makes sure to keep its retail prices high enough on its B2C site so as not to draw the ire of its B2B buyers, Schaefer adds.

With its B2C presence established, Lindemann is preparing to tweak the user experience on its B2C site to make it more aesthetically pleasing. Many of the lessons the distributor has learned about the user experience for B2C customers also apply to B2B buyers, such as more easily finding products and fast checkout.

“B2B and B2C buyers all want the same experience,” Schaefer says. “Interactions with both sets of customers also help us understand how to service them better through our ecommerce channel and what kinds of new products to add. We focus on our ecommerce channels as a whole, not as separate entities.”

Peter Lucas is a Highland Park, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.  

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By February, when it became apparent that Graybar faced the challenge of operating as an essential business during a pandemic, the employee-owned business distributor of electrical and data networking products and services forged ahead with networking infrastructure to communicate with employees and customers, including many in the healthcare industry. It also launched a program to provide food and personal protective equipment to community organizations in employees’ neighborhoods, and it checked on its retired employees “to say, ‘Are you OK … do you need anything?’” Mazzarella said.

Enhancing Graybar’s ecommerce strategy

The company also pushed ahead with its ecommerce and other digital operations.

Graybar sells online at Graybar.com, where it has announced several upgrades including faster page-loading speed, improved visibility into contract pricing, and the ability of customers to manage multiple users and shipping addresses under a single account.

“As we’ve been through COVID, some of our projects have slowed down a little, but in the majority of cases we’re continuing with our original digital platform,” Mazzarella said. “One of the things we’re doing is enhancing our ecommerce strategy. For us, ecommerce isn’t just about transacting online. It really is about producing business interaction … could be a new technology, could be a new design service, could be a whole variety of things, in the supply chain between us and our customers, as well as back to our suppliers.”

That enables Graybar to share information on product demand between its customers and suppliers, helping to provide products that meet the specifications customers need, Mazzarella said. For its customers in the construction industry, for example, Graybar helps them keep their job sites operating with the necessary equipment.

Bringing more value digitally to B2B customers

Graybar is continuing to develop its digital commerce platform to help customers, particularly in the construction industry, to process orders more quickly in ways that reduce their operating costs. “We’re doing a lot of digitization again and using our ecommerce platform to deliver that to our customers,” she said. “Now, yes, they can buy online, but for us it’s really more about the business process, making it easy for them … to do business with us whenever they want to, how they want to.”

This also enables Graybar to better compete against Amazon Business and other online marketplaces by providing customized products and services, she added.

Graybar is also moving ahead with such digital technologies as robotic process automation, which it is deploying in dozens of projects including contract management to automate some basic manual tasks. It’s also looking at how RPA can help operate its new CRM system and increase the adoption of it by its salespeople.

“Graybar has put a big focus on improving productivity internally around the whole digitization of the business,” Mazzarella said.

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact editor Paul Demery at paul@digitalcommerce360.com and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.

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