Burton Snowboards revamps omnichannel operations to support DTC

A vertical retailer of snowboarding products is shifting its business to focus more on direct-to-consumer sales.

Having evolved over the years to almost exclusively focusing on wholesale to a 75%/25% wholesale/DTC mix, Burton decided to digitally transform its enterprise to take advantage of opportunities in the DTC side of its business. The company wanted to enhance the omnichannel customer experience provided by its existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform, including providing more efficient customer service, as well as obtaining a unified view of customer data to support manufacturing, product development, wholesaling, fulfillment, e-commerce, physical retail, and marketing efforts.

In addition, Burton was looking to create a knowledge hub for its customers where they could find answers to questions to help them make better product selections. The company planned to implement Salesforce Community Cloud as a mechanism to interact with customers, while creating more personalized customer messaging and optimizing marketing campaigns for its target audience.

Burton also intended to deliver a more sophisticated and customer-driven service experience across a wide variety of channels, with the ability to track all relevant data in one place, such as support cases coming from different channels.

Leveraging the Digital 360 solution from digital transformation services provider OSF Digital, Burton enhanced its omnichannel customer service experience by integrating Salesforce Service Cloud with the Salesforce Commerce and Marketing clouds. The project involved the design, technical solution, and implementation of Salesforce Service, Marketing, and Experience clouds.

In addition, Burton re-platformed its core CRM platform to Salesforce Service Cloud. This included re-platforming its phone systems to Aircall CTI and integrating the new phone solution to Service Cloud. Furthermore, Burton integrated its new omnichannel customer experience environment with an existing NewStore omnichannel platform that was rolled out across all its corporate stores. The NewStore system unifies order management, checkout, “endless aisle” inventory access, and clienteling for iPhone access, with direct integration into Salesforce Commerce Cloud. 

Leveraging its new omnichannel capabilities, Burton is able to process 1,200 daily email support cases, 1,800 daily phone calls, and close to 1,200 daily online support cases. The company also now conducts live chat-based mobile customer service interactions. 

“We are evolving to be a consumer-centric, digital-first retailer of the future,” said Josee Larocque, senior VP, direct to consumer & digital transformation, Burton Snowboards. “To get there we needed to ensure that we were able to offer an enhanced consumer and brand experience in the digital space. That’s why we engaged OSF for help with our complete digital transformation. Thanks to OSF’s multi-cloud integrations, we are gaining a 360 view of the consumer across Salesforce Commerce, Service, and Marketing and we are putting our customers first, engaging with them in more personalized communications, and delivering a more sophisticated cross-channel and customer-driven service experience.”

Based in Burlington, Vt., Burton Snowboards operates 66 Burton stores around the world including flagship, outlet and partner stores. Burton is also available via the company’s e-commerce site and in thousands of partner retailers and wholesale dealers around the globe.