Few years back, Salesforce bought Heroku, the leading cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), to expend its App Cloud offering and empower businesses to build customer-facing apps. Indeed, apps are the new channel to reach customers and, in today competitive environment, the road to success in selling is paved with customer interactions.

 

In the following example, we have built a showcase based on Heroku to demonstrate the capability of using such an app in a retail context. The salesperson, Samantha, who is employed by the distributor, is interacting daily with consumers but doesn’t have access to the cash register. This is a typical use case in department stores or in airport duty-free stores. Samantha will use the app to capture customers contact details and their purchases. Simplicity and speed are key as Samantha has to spend as much time as possible interacting with customers.

As a first step, Samantha will log into the app with a Salesforce credential (which can be a simple Chatter Free License). As with other apps, this step won’t be required for subsequent use.

Then, Samantha will enter key contact details (name, email, phone) and save this data into Salesforce via Heroku Connect. In this demo, we have to wait for the synchronization but the synchronization could happen in the background which could save previous seconds.

Next step is to capture the customer purchases. Indeed, in our example, the distribution company Samantha is working for doesn’t have access to the store cash register system. For this step, we have integrated a bare code scanner to capture the product information. As with the contact detail, the synchronisation can process in the background.

Eventually, all the information is on the Salesforce platform: point of sales, customer details, products purchased (name, quantity, date). This will open the door to targeted marketing and drive better sales and better customers experience. Thanks Heroku!