Adidas has launched its new app — adidas Sports & Style — that is available in the U.S. and U.K. and uses Salesforce technology to deliver a personalized shopping experience.
The app offers an experience tailored to the consumer’s preferences and behavior, providing access to adidas online store product offerings and customized product recommendations.
“This is what we see is going to be the future,” Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said Monday of the app while presenting with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce software conference. “We think by cannibalizing our industry, we can completely change this industry. And that’s why having software capability in our organization is fundamental beyond the capability to design the coolest products.”
The Salesforce technology in the app includes Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. With the commerce platform, consumers can make purchases through Apple Pay and Android Pay that is integrated in the app.
“Adidas is operating in a diverse world, and that ability to build it once and deploy it globally means that for every language and every currency, they can replicate that site,” Stephanie Buscemi, EVP, Product Marketing at Salesforce, said at Dreamforce.
“That means they’re relevant in the markets they serve. They’re relevant to those individuals. And when those individuals come onto the site and have it in the language they prefer, in the currency they prefer, they also get served up only the things that they’re going to like.”
The Marketing Cloud allows adidas marketers to deliver “one-to-one personalized journeys,” according to Buscemi.
The app gets to know the consumer’s preferences, learning from his or her behavior and interaction with adidas across all digital touch points, adidas head of digital brand commerce Joseph Godsey said in a statement. Personalized news stories, articles, blog posts, videos and events announcements appear on the app, taking into account preferred sizes and colors and showing availability based on the country location.
And with Service Cloud, users can chat with 24/7 consumer service by texting in a live two-way conversation with a bot that can handle changes of everything from the shipping address to the color of a product.
“Now with the power of the Service Platform and Einstein built in, when you talk to those agents, they’re smarter and more productive than ever before,” Buscemi said. “Einstein bots are transforming the world of service. They are the ultimate helper.
“Adidas is using Salesforce Einstein bots to power their service interactions. It is able to do everything. It is able to handle all those repetitive tasks, those actions — whether you want to make a return, or you want to exchange something.”
When those repetitive tasks are automated, human agents can devote time to larger issues, according to Buscemi.
Kasper said in a video at Dreamforce that this sales technology platform gives adidas a “competitive advantage.”
“By using your technology, we can understand who the consumers are,” he later told Benioff. “When we sell 1.2 million pairs of shoes a day — last year it was a million a day — we are completely driving or killing all process we have in the organization. The more we know about the consumer, the better we can serve the consumer, and that is why Salesforce has been so fundamental for us.”
