Today, Salesforce introduced new, HIPAA-compliant Commerce Cloud capabilities that streamline healthcare commerce experiences and lower the cost to serve customers and patients. Combined with Data Cloud, Salesforce’s real-time customer data platform, Commerce Cloud also helps create personalized experiences across every interaction through a unified, real-time view of each patient and provider.
Why it’s relevant: As the healthcare industry’s digital transformation continues, organizations that don’t offer online commerce channels run the risk of losing both customers and revenue to their competition.
- Over half of surveyed* healthcare workers say their job has become more digitized in the last two years.
- Healthcare and life sciences organizations expect 42% of their sales to come from digital channels by 2024.
Innovation in action: With new features in Commerce Cloud, healthcare and life sciences organizations can sell directly to their customers more easily, automate B2B sales, and improve service with streamlined order support.
Digital Storefronts
- A medical device company that typically sells through distributors, for example, can easily set up a single storefront for both direct-to-patient and B2B ordering. This accelerates time to value and with a single commerce platform, implementation and maintenance costs are reduced.
- A vision care company can create recurring revenue on the direct-to-patient storefront by offering a monthly contact lens subscription that’s both convenient and specific to the customer.
- A medical device company selling over-the-counter (OTC) devices, like home blood pressure monitors, can enable patients to register their warranties directly through their online storefront, rather than via mail or phone.
- With new Re-ordering features on Commerce Cloud, a pharmaceutical company can provide pharmacies with an easy re-ordering portal for prescription and over-the-counter medicine supply. This automates the selling process and decreases order time for their customers.
Streamline Order Support
- With Data Cloud connecting and harmonizing each customer’s data in real time and feeding it into Commerce Cloud’s Order Management system, a service agent can easily see a customer’s purchase history alongside every interaction they’ve had with the brand – across sales, service, marketing, and more. With a native integration into Service Cloud, agents using Order Management have all the information at their fingertips to more quickly respond to questions and can make changes to an existing order directly from the Service Cloud console. This eliminates the need to toggle between separate ecommerce and customer service platforms – reducing service costs and call resolution time, and improving agent efficiency.
- Additionally, service reps can identify relevant opportunities to upsell or cross-sell additional products to the customer while on a service call and with new Commerce Cloud Order On Behalf Of capabilities, they can directly add requested items to the patient’s cart
The Salesforce perspective: “In today’s evolving healthcare landscape, companies must find ways to lower their cost to serve patients while continuing to improve patient and provider experiences. With Commerce Cloud benefitting from platform capabilities like Data Cloud, healthcare organizations can embed personalized commerce opportunities into every touchpoint and leverage automation to reduce operational costs.” – Michael Affronti, GM and SVP of Commerce Cloud
With Commerce Cloud benefitting from platform capabilities like Data Cloud, healthcare organizations can embed personalized commerce opportunities into every touchpoint and leverage automation to reduce operational costs.
Michael Affronti, GM and SVP of Commerce Cloud
The customer perspective: “We used to have to train our customer success agents on the 10 different systems they’d be using to help customers with order requests and questions. With Order Management tied into our Service Cloud capabilities, when our service agents are on the phone, they can see the customer record and order history right in front of them. And, they can place, cancel, and refund an order — all from one place. That allows them to focus the conversation on nurturing the customer relationship.” – Tracey Calson, Director of Special Projects at AlgaeCal, a bone health supplement brand
Explore further: Learn more about Salesforce commerce offerings for healthcare and life science organizations here.
*Data from Salesforce’s New Era in Data Stewardship is based on a survey of 1,230 full-time employees within automotive (400 respondents), government (412 respondents), and healthcare (418 respondents) across the U.S. The survey was conducted in partnership with YouGov in March 2023.
