Support of a Salesforce Portal for a Consumer Products Company

Summary

An international consumer products manufacturer used a Salesforce B2B portal to stay in touch with the retailers that buy its goods, but the portal's poorly structured pages and many tabs made information hard to find and hurt the efficiency of its promotions. With its in-house IT lacking the Salesforce know-how, the company engaged INNERLUXES to administer and improve the portal. INNERLUXES restructured the pages and tabs, added dedicated pages and a mobile event calendar, and used HTML and CSS to make the portal mobile-friendly — improving usability and supporting better brand promotion.

About the Client

The end client is an international consumer products company headquartered in the United States. A major consumer-goods manufacturer, it sells its products in more than 180 countries.

A B2B Portal That Was Hard to Navigate

The end client used a Salesforce B2B portal to keep in touch with retailers purchasing its goods, providing information on products and their characteristics, upcoming releases, and promotional events. However, the way information was organized lacked user-friendliness — poorly structured pages and numerous tabs of product information and prices — which harmed the efficiency of its promotional activities. Because its in-house IT department lacked the Salesforce knowledge to make the needed UI improvements, the company turned to INNERLUXES for Salesforce expertise.

Restructuring the Portal With Standard Salesforce Configuration

After analyzing the portal, INNERLUXES's Salesforce administrator concluded that the key usability gains could be achieved by configuring standard Salesforce functionality, and improved the experience step by step:

• Reorganized navigation — reconfigured the interface with separate user pages and built dedicated pages such as Products and Trade Rules, while optimizing the existing tabs so users could more easily reach product information, detailed descriptions and prices, and the distribution rules authorized dealers must follow.
• Mobile-friendly pages — used HTML and CSS to adapt the portal's pages for mobile.
• Knowledge and quizzes — developed new layouts for the end client's knowledge articles and quizzes, which the administrator regularly uploaded to the portal.
• Event calendar — created a dedicated, mobile-adapted page with structured information on upcoming promotional events, prize draws, and more, helping users keep track of what's coming.

A More Usable Portal and Better Promotion

• The end client gained improved B2B portal usability thanks to better-structured pages, optimized tabs, and the event calendar.
• Mobile view for the portal's pages added further convenience.
• The improvements enabled better promotion of the end client's brand and more efficient management of relationships with its customers.

Technologies and Tools

CSS, HTML, Salesforce 1 mobile app.