Officeworks builds on its Salesforce core

Officeworks is in the process of evolving its 12-year-old Salesforce implementation with quote-to-cash capabilities, data management and an AI assistant for call centre staff.

Officeworks' Martin Bowden, on the far right of the photo, speaks on an Accenture-run panel.

The retailer’s B2B enterprise solutions IT manager Martin Bowden told the Agentforce World Tour Sydney conference that while Officeworks and its processes had changed significantly over the past 12 years, its Salesforce “org implementation hadn’t”.

This, he said, triggered “a big transformation” of the Salesforce org, including of how staff understand the software’s capabilities.

“As you can imagine, if processes change and the system doesn’t support those processes, [our] teams aren’t effective,” Bowden said as part of a panel discussion facilitated by Accenture.

“The efficiency play was really where we were focusing, making sure that the teams could use the technology most effectively.”

Officeworks has been upgrading its B2B sales and service business in recent years, with a goal to increase the number of business customers and its ability to serve them.

One initiative sees the company implementing Revenue Cloud, which is Salesforce’s configure price quote (CPQ) and revenue management product.

It can be used to generate quotes, implement “guided selling flows, automated approvals, and discounting rules”, according to Salesforce’s product documentation.

“We chose Revenue Cloud for speeding up our quoting-to-cash capabilities,” Bowden said.

“It’s a process which has been very complex … [and] manual.

“We’re simplifying that process for sales to create quotes , convert that to a sales order and deliver a product to the customer.

“We were looking for a solution that allowed us to connect CRM data, [our] Sales Cloud processes and ecommerce API integrations to actually deliver a cohesive simplified experience.”

Data 360, formerly Salesforce Data Cloud, is also part of the technology stack enabling the upgraded CPQ process.

While it has a role in CPQ, Data 360’s role at Officeworks is more broad and foundational, being a key way to “get actionable data” to sales and marketing teams.

For marketers, it means being able to activate targeted campaigns targeting B2B audiences a lot faster than before.

Data 360 also underpins Officeworks’ first forays with Agentforce, Salesforce’s low-code platform for building AI agents.

“The key thing for that was to deliver actionable data so [we built] an FAQ assistant [that is] accessible by the call centre, to quickly identify what was the action they needed to take [in a given situation],” Bowden said.

Agentforce is also being used to create case summaries, which are particularly helpful for “new team members [to] understand what a historical case is about and then use the FAQs to work out what the steps they need to take” when presented with a similar circumstance.

Bowden indicated there was an appetite to innovate more on the Salesforce platform.

Part of the preparation for that is making internal teams more aware of what the platform can do; another part is giving teams and individuals the time and resources to develop ideas and get them into production.

“One of the key shifts when I came in [as IT manager] was to recognise the fact that a lot of the change we were being asked to deliver was based on people’s perception or understanding of what the Salesforce org could do,” Bowden said.

Bowden said that business teams had been offered “education and continuous learning” on Salesforce and its features.

Meanwhile, the tech teams administering and maintaining the system were offered “continuous learning in the capabilities and the roadmap” for how Salesforce is evolving from a technology and feature perspective. 

Bowden added that giving staff a space and time to learn gave them the tools and ability “to think differently” about Salesforce.

Ry Crozier attended Agentforce World Tour Sydney as a guest of Salesforce.