3 Ways Retail Cloud POS Can Modernize the Store | Dreamforce 2025

Hello everyone and welcome to Dreamforce. My name is Claudio Cavashini and I'm the director for the go to market retail cloud point of sales here at Salesforce. And today we are here to talk about something fundamental for the future of retail and it's how to bring the store into the modern era and connect it with the rest of the customer journey. Just before we start, quick reminder. Please take any purchasing decision based on currently available technology. I am thrilled to be joined by Valerie Grison Austri, one of our core fantastic solution engineers in retail and luxury. And our plan for today is very simple. I'm going to set up the stage and talk about the challenges and opportunity for the physical stores and then Valerie will bring it all to life with a nice demo and day on the life of a store associate. And at the end we'll talk about the bigger picture and we leave you with some next with some clear next step. Sounds good. Awesome. So let's start with the store. While 84% of the revenue come from the physical store, the in store experience is often broken. In fact this is not an associate fault, it's the technology. So the shopper come to the store and what they expect is a seamless customer journey. But what they find is friction. And compare that with with the modern stores where they offer personalized service, personalized recommendation, tailored service, real time inventory data and products. And they convert way higher because they make feel the customer seen and empower. So this is not just a customer experience issue, it's a revenue issue. Because the winner take it all. So the brands who are winning today are the brands who are taking the magic of the digital into the physical. Now we are asking our associate to be superhero. We are asking them to juggling from the client telling up to the point of sale to the order fulfillment. And we have done a research at Salesforce that is telling us that on average an associate is toggling between 16 different systems daily. 16. It's a lot. It's a lot of time. Far from the customer. It's a lot of time, far from meaningful interaction and sales left on the floor. So if we want to give the customer a seamless experience, we need to empower the associate to with the right technology. And that's where the modern point of sale retail cloud comes in. It delivers in three key ways. First, it increase conversion with clientele, endless ielts and omnichannel operation. Second, it lashes training time with this intuitive UI and intuitive design. It can reduce training time by a lot. So it gets new hire Productive in less than a week and sometime in less than 30 minutes. And third, it increase productivity with this 360 view of the customer, the order and the inventory. And this alone has helped brands like Jeannie and Jack, Steve Madden and Lovelsack increase sales by 30% or.

Now.

With 12 years of experience, this solution is both modern and trusted. And it delivers to the store associates a lot of features like its mobile first clientele, endless iOS. And we will see all of this in the demo. But also to your IT teams, we'll give an API first architecture and a native integration with the entire Salesforce ecosystem. So this is the what and the why. But nothing tell a better story than seeing this in action. That's why today we have here Valerie and she will walk us through a day in the life of a soda associate. So please give it a warm welcome to Valerie.

Thank you, Claudio. So, hello everyone. Hello from my side. Very happy and proud to be here today with you. I was just thinking you were talking about 16 different systems and you know what, it's huge. And in the end, it remembers me. A few years ago, 10, 20 years ago, I was a student, I was working in a retail store in London and it was holiday season and I managed pretty rapidly to advise the customer on what they wanted to purchase, what would suit them or not. But then when I walked to the cash desk, this became a bit stressful for me because I had to deal with just the payment terminal, which is something that is pretty sensitive. When we were talking about return processes or other processes, this was all managed by the manager. And this is a reality that we see in peak seasons when you have new employees who have to manage all the different tools of the store. It is really a challenge. And that's why today I'm very happy to present to you our new solution, Retail cloud, which really helps sales associates to have an extreme intuitive experience. Let's have a look at this. And with that I jump directly onto my iPad.

This.

This is my POS application. Modern POS application. Why is it so modern? Because we have here I have as a sales associate, Christine Bates, a personalized interface with a quick access to all the capabilities that will be relevant for me during my day. From a product search, customer search, my own KPIs, easy checkout. But also sometimes I may need for example, to do some inventory work. You know, receiving merchandising cycle counts, transfer from store to store. Would you give that to a new employee? No, it's too tricky. But here I will show you that I'M able also to do that. And if we have a look at the bottom I have a navigation and I can easily click here and have in this menu a quick access to all these tasks that I will be able to handle directly from application. But for now I want to see, I want to show you how the experience look like for me when I welcome a new customer. And you will be my Lauren Bailey for today.

Yes, I'm Lauren.

So let's meet with Lauren, my customer. She's a mom of two children and she purchased online a pair of pants for her son, five year old son. But as you may all know, sometimes it's not the right size. So she purchased online, she comes into the store and she would like to do a return and this will be very easy to me. First of all I would like to learn more about Lauren. So I will search for Lauren Bailey and immediately the data are fetched from our CRM in real time and I have access to Lauren profile who is by the way also part of our loyalty program. If I have a look at her profile we can see here that I have all the relevant insights about Loren that will help me to drive a great selling ceremony for for Lauren. So I have her profile, her lifetime value, the average spend. I can see that she's part of the loyalty program and she already has some perks like the free shipping. I can also have access here to product recommendations. I can have a look at her wish list and I can have a look also at her closet to understand a bit what has started, what are the products that she like and I see that she has products for boys and for girls. So this will help me to also upsell but great. So let's go back and let's just do easily a return for Lorraine. So I go here in this again in this quick access and I will be able to do a return. But like many of us, Lauren doesn't have any receipt with her. It's not a problem. I am able to search and because I logged her profile already I am able to see here past purchases from her. And here we have this pair of pants which is the product that we are talking about. The pair of pants is too small, so with just a click of a button I'm able to return the product. And I'm sure you all already saw this experience which is a pure e commerce online experience. So imagine how intuitive it is for me as a new sales associate to go through this process. So she ordered the wrong size and I can easily return the product this will be added to my basket. But of course she would like to buy this pair of pants in a size 6. So I add this product also to the cart and now she's having a look here around and maybe she would like to purchase a nice dress for her daughter. And if you remember, in the profile of Loren there was this nice little dress, the glitter floral dress. And she would really buy this dress for her daughter in a size 3. Unfortunately this dress is not available here. But I have the possibility to check within the network where this product is available. I am still with Lauren here. I don't need to go in another system on my computer and so on. I can see here the availability in the network and what I will propose to Lorraine, it's to ship this product at home directly and she already has a perk, you remember this free shipping. So it's another benefit that I will be able to leverage to sell this dress. So I will ship the product at her home but I will still add that to the cart. So now I have three different products in my basket. I have the pair of shorts that will return the pair of shorts that she's going to pick up immediately and the dress that will be delivered at her place. All of that in one basket. A mixed cart that I will be able to easily check out with her. For you it's a great experience because I'm able to handle everything immediately with her in mobility and with that we can easily check out and she will receive the receipt at home. This was a rapid overview of the sales associate experience. I was able to serve Lauren seamlessly on many different aspects. I could also have handle a pickup in store, probably all of that with this single application that exactly matches my needs. For me as a sales associate, I feel relieved. I have a tool that is easy to handle. I don't spend all my time on my tablet. I can really interact with Loren. That's great. So now let's have a look at the backend. How did we build this experience? So going back here I have access which is pretty unique. I have access to this web cms. Here again, I like taking the comparison with E Commerce back office. You may have already seen an E Commerce back office in which you can manage the UI experience, the product catalog, the inventory or the integrations. And here for physical point of sale we have the same. What does it mean? It means that the retail manager at HQ level will be able to manage all the point of sales at global scale in one single application. I always like taking the example when you change a price in an online shop, you press a button, it's updated. If you have experience already with point of sale, with physical point of sale, changing a price, it's not just a matter of pressing a button. It takes on average 60 hours when you're good. So imagine here the efficiency that we can really improve with that. In this backend, I have first of all access to the visual interface that I have for my sales associate. And with just clicking a few buttons, I have again a very intuitive interface where I will be able to change the text to be able to change the visual with just few clicks, with just dragging and dropping the different text. I can immediately adapt this interface and personalize it for the different roles that work in different stores regions or maybe different level of the hierarchy going into the store management. Now here, this second part, I have access to everything you need to manage for the store from all the store associated the registers. You want to activate new registers, you want to create a new store. Maybe you have an event that you plan to organize and you want to create a temporary store for that. You will be able to create your new point of sale directly. Directly from this interface you will be able to manage fiscalization and all these topics related to point of sale. Moving forward, I will not go through all the capabilities, but of course you will have all the product catalog that can be handled directly here. You will be able to upload your catalog to match with the different fields that are present in the retail cloud. So you will be able here to have all your product catalog. And moving forward you have capabilities like the promotions that you may have centralized, you may have global promotions that you want to also have in your point of sale and you will be able to import them here. Ultimately you will have here all the integrations with your different system. May that be your CRM, your erp. All the integrations will also be managed from. From here. Pretty easy, no? So what we have here, we had a great experience with Lorraine, we had our new sales associate fully relieved being able to sell more products to deal with all the processes in store and the retail manager increasing the efficiency in order to manage at a global scale. All the point of sale that.

Thank you, Valerie. That was amazing. Thank you so much. It's always amazing to see how one single tool, one single platform can transform both the experience of the associate and the customer. And we even see how the experience of the IT person who is managing all of this is so easy. We have seen yesterday in Mark Keynotes that people who are working the back office in the back end are people and they want to have the same experience as a consumer app. Right? And that's the purpose of this application. So thank you again, Valerie. Now let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture, which is unified commerce. So point of sales is great, right? But the real magic happens when you connect it natively with your order management system and with your E commerce and that's where you have that single view of the order of the inventory of the customer. And that's what your customers are looking for. That's what they are expecting now because 80% of the retail sales are happening in the physical stores. The point of sales is the critical first step in this transformational journey. Now, I thank you so much and I hope you live with the understanding on how retail cloud can help you to increase conversion, to improve productivities and to reduce training time. So if you want to learn more, so please go to the Commerce Campground and there is the Genie and Jack experience. They have a full demo with all the device plugged in, so I really strongly suggest you to go there. Last but not least, we really care about your feedback. So please leave us a feedback and coffee is on us. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of Dreamforce.

Thank you.

Thank you, Valerie. Thank you.