Overview
How Cloudwerx helped LW Reid switch to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and create a class-leading customer experience.
Location: Australia and New Zealand
Industry: Clothing Manufacturing
Solutions: Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud
The Client
At a Glance
Previously, LW Reid relied on Magento to power their commerce capabilities. Cloudwerx supported them to switch to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, saving four hours of product mapping each day and allowing them to access rich customer insights to power up their service capabilities.
About LW Reid
Founded in 1922, LW Reid is Australia’s leading uniform supplier, supplying schools and sporting teams with the highest quality apparel. As a proud member of Mountcastle, one of Australia’s oldest companies, LW Reid has always offered a superior level of personalised, friendly service to every customer — big and small.
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Challenge
LW Reid faced an age-old problem often encountered by seasoned players in the B2B realm: antiquated, manual processes, which they had been using for the last 30+ years. Their reliance on outdated methods for order management — involving a mix of PDFs and FTPs — was not only time-consuming but fraught with the potential for errors, affecting their ability to promptly and accurately serve their customers.
But the challenges didn’t end there. LW Reid’s customer data and insights were siloed within individual teams and scattered across various platforms. Their field sales team could access field sales data but nothing else. Their customer service team could access orders and emails (though often in different applications) but had no visibility into sales activity. Without the ability to gain a unified, 360-degree view of the customer, LW Reid was unable to offer a truly world-class customer experience.
“Previously we were running at 7,000 SKUs on the platform. That’s not really a problem with that volume of product. But as we pushed it up past 60,000 SKUs, the pressures on the old platform became big, big headaches here for us. We can’t get product in front of customers until we can publish it. And if you can only publish once a day and cross your fingers that it works, that’s a big problem.”
Brad Aurisch, CEO LW Reid
LW Reid was quickly expanding — their offering now included over 60,000 SKUs — but without the operational systems to sustainably manage the growth. LW Reid approached Cloudwerx to partner with them to develop a scalable solution to handle the next evolution of their B2B engagement.
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Solution
Starting with ‘success’
As always, Cloudwerx began the process by looking at the end result first. In this case, LW Reid defined ‘success’ as a streamlined order management process that mirrored a B2C commerce experience, eliminating the heavy reliance on manual processing. In addition, the team needed to create a unified 360-degree customer view that removed valuable customer data from its silos and offered comprehensive, rich insights to everyone in the company’s sales and service teams.
Examining all processes
Cloudwerx kicked off the project with a rigorous, two-week exploration of the LW Reid business: from their existing commerce solution to their underlying systems, application and data architecture. They then documented their order-to-cash process and created a roadmap that would achieve their goals, and set them up for future expansion.
“We’re really lucky to have done this many times before. So we have a deep understanding of what makes B2B — whether that’s manufacturing, distribution or retail — we understand what makes them tick. And we don’t believe in one size fits all. We do have off-the-shelf solutions for many of these customer problems, but we want to make sure that everything is customised to this particular version of those problems.”
Jarrod Myers, Senior Sales Director, Cloudwerx
Integrating customer service
In moving LW Reid’s entire ecosystem to Salesforce, all order histories and customer interactions would be freely available and easily accessible within the same interface — from chat, fax, email, and of course, website interactions. This meant that LW Reid would be able to offer a significantly richer service proposition to their customers than ever before — an offering akin to the (extremely high) B2C standards. The team could also leverage Salesforce Einstein to access AI-powered insights that reduced the need for manual reporting and sped up service delivery. From there, LW Reid could quickly and accurately identify areas for improvement or upselling, seamlessly recommend complementary products throughout the customer journey and run personalised marketing campaigns for optimal engagement.
Innovating for the future
Cloudwerx’s suggestion to invest in the latest Lightning Web Runtime version (LWR) of Salesforce Commerce Cloud turned out to be a true game changer for LW Reid. Once implemented, they became one of the first global companies to release both B2B and D2C storefronts using this cutting-edge technology. Today, they are maximally positioned to benefit from any future Salesforce developments, whether selling to other companies or directly to consumers.
Results
One of the biggest areas of improvement was a boost in the adoption of online sales. Before beginning the project, LW Reid estimated that around 60% of their orders were processed online. In the six months after the project wrapped up, they saw that figure increase to 68%. This uptick in adoption is likely attributed to their new seamless, integrated digital commerce presence, offering clients an experience akin to B2C standards.
Internally, LW Reid is now saving enormous amounts of time and resources as their product mapping (which previously took up to four hours per day) is now completely streamlined. They are also prepared for their next evolution, with a platform that can quickly scale as their operations grow. It’ll be exciting to see what LW Reid does next!
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