Explore B2C Commerce Customer Support

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

List three ways you can interact with Salesforce B2C Commerce customer support systems.
Explain what the Trust site provides.
Describe two ways of interacting with known issues.
List four types of information available on the Trailblazer Community site.

Welcome to B2C Commerce Customer Support

Salesforce B2C Commerce Customer Support is a worldwide team of support engineers in Asia/Pacific (APAC), the Americas (AMER), Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA), and Japan (JP). This team provides support 24/7/365 for severity 1 incidents, and to all other types of tickets during normal business hours, excluding regional holidays.

Map of the world in dots.

Support team members are dedicated to providing product support for B2C Commerce customers, partners, and employees, ensuring the highest levels of satisfaction and service. They work closely with Commerce Cloud back-end teams using a case management system.

This team is there to help you run your B2C Commerce storefront after it goes live, whether it’s down time or implementing an awesome new feature. You also get access to the Salesforce Trust site where you can check the health and status of your B2C Commerce instances. Then there’s the Trailblazer community where you can get immediate access to documentation, an extensive knowledge base, release notes, known issues repository, and an idea exchange.

So how does B2C Customer Support apply to you and your organization?

Take Cloud Kicks, for example, an imaginary company that specializes in high-end custom sneakers. Two of their key employees, Linda Rosenberg, an admin, and Vijay Lahiri, a developer, have very different technical support requirements.

Linda Rosenberg, Cloud Kicks admin

Linda, as the admin, manages storefront data, such as catalogs, products, pricing, promotions, and marketing content. She creates and manages users, imports and exports data, and moves data and code from one instance to another, ultimately to production. When she has a problem, she tries to fix it. If she can’t, she creates a customer support case and escalates it. One thing she doesn’t do, however, is deploy new code. That’s Vijay’s job.

Vijay Lahiri, Cloud Kicks developer

Vijay works on a sandbox with developer tools to create and enhance the storefront application. His job is to make sure the application works perfectly. Once he’s finished, he deploys the application to a development instance, and Linda takes over from there. When he gets stuck on an issue, such as sample code not working or needs help implementing a new feature, he creates a case directly with Salesforce developer support engineers.

Designated Support Contact

Central to the support escalation process is the designated support contact. Each merchant must have at least one support contact, and it’s the company’s responsibility to notify Salesforce if they decide to transfer this responsibility to someone else. An identified point of contact eliminates redundant communication and speeds resolution.

Here’s what the designated support contact is responsible for.

Overseeing their company’s support case activity
Developing and deploying troubleshooting processes within their organization
Requesting accelerators

Because Linda is involved in the day-to-day operation of the storefront, she is the designated customer support contact for her storefront’s technical issues, and the primary liaison between her company and Salesforce for technical support.

Cloud Kicks’s success depends on Linda having what it takes to do the job. It’s important that she understands the applicable support services so she can work with Salesforce to analyze and resolve technical issues. For example, she uses the jobs capability to import pricing data. When her import failed after a software update, she created a support ticket to find out why. She knows how to use the jobs feature, and knows what to do when things go wrong. It’s important that she understands enough about each case at a technical level, so she can reproduce the problem to help Salesforce with diagnosis and triage.

The Salesforce B2C Commerce Trust Site

When Linda troubleshoots a problem, sometimes it helps to know system status. That’s when she turns to the Salesforce Trust site, the Salesforce community’s home for real-time information on system performance and security. She uses this site to:

Check the health and status of her B2C Commerce instances
Review historical data
Analyze maintenance logs
Subscribe to email notifications about issues or maintenance

Anyone in her company can self-subscribe to the site’s trust notifications and tailor their subscription settings to the instances and types of events they want to be notified about. Linda accesses the site for information about system status, Salesforce security practices, and the standards with which Salesforce is in compliance.

The Systems Status area of the site shows a visual representation of the health of the POD (point of delivery) that contains the merchant’s instances. A POD is a group of compute, storage, and network resources contained in multiple equipment racks within a data center. A single POD can support anywhere from one to 50 customers, depending on how large those customers are.

While some of the instructions here are for Salesforce Systems, others require access to a B2C Commerce instance. In this module, we assume you are a B2C Commerce administrator (or developer) with the proper permissions to access Account Manager, an online tool for creating, maintaining, and disabling B2C Commerce instances. If you’re not a B2C Commerce administrator, that’s OK. Read along to learn how your administrator would take these steps in a sandbox instance. Don’t try to follow our steps in your Trailhead Playground. B2C Commerce isn’t available in the Trailhead Playground.

If you have a B2C Commerce sandbox instance, you can try out these steps in your sandbox. If you don’t have a sandbox and you’re a customer or partner developer, ask your manager if there is a sandbox that you can use.

Here’s how you access the Salesforce Trust site.

Open the Salesforce Trust Status page.
Select B2C Commerce Cloud (B2C Commerce).
Select a region.
Click a POD.
Click Subscribe and enter your email address to be sent notifications about the POD. You will be sent a sign-on link.
Click the Realm Status link (Salesforce commerce cloud login) which redirects you to Account Manager for authentication.
Log in with your Account Manager credentials.
Click Subscribe To Updates.
Save your notifications preferences (email or SMS).

Not sure what POD you're on?

Salesforce sent your realm and POD information to your admin when your realm was provisioned. To get a POD#, you can:

Ask your admin.
Access the Realm Provisioning case in the B2C Commerce Support Portal [login required] (it's the oldest case).
Open a new case requesting your POD.

Trailblazer Community

Linda takes advantage of the Trailblazer Community to investigate existing product functionality and to keep up to date on new B2C Commerce features and enhancements. She searches the Known Issues repository when she encounters problems and enjoys contributing to the IdeaExchange.

Documentation

Linda can access the B2C Commerce product documentation from Google or from the Trailblazer Community portal. Here’s how to access it from the Community portal.

Open the Trailblazer Community.
Click Community > Salesforce Help.
Click the Commerce tile.

Knowledge Base

Linda looks to the customer support portal’s knowledge base for its wealth of valuable information that’s curated by Salesforce support engineers from working with customers.

She uses the search bar to find information such as:

Known issues
How-to articles
Common questions
Compliance documentation

Salesforce B2C Commerce Customer Support

Top articles also appear on the left side of the home page for her convenience. This knowledge base represents the collective experience information to date.

Release Notes

B2C Commerce release notes provide release specific details on new features, enhancements, and bug fixes requiring a customer action. B2C Commerce Release Notes are just another awesome place on the Trailblazer Community Documentation page.

Known Issues

The Salesforce Known Issues repository informs merchants about known bugs. With this process Linda can:

Look up known issue status at any time by entering a bug number.
Subscribe to a known issue and get email notification when the issue is fixed and released.

Customer support can close a case once engineering has confirmed the issue is a bug and a known issue record is created. Take a look at known issues here.

IdeaExchange

When Linda has great ideas on how to improve Salesforce products, she turns to the IdeaExchange in the Trailblazer Community. Because her success is Salesforce’s success, Salesforce engineering considers all submitted ideas when planning for future releases.

At Salesforce, two core values are growth and innovation. Salesforce focuses on customer success to drive mutual growth. When Linda succeeds, Salesforce succeeds.

Not only can Linda submit her ideas, but she can also vote on other merchant ideas that are submitted to help drive innovation and mutual success.

You can post ideas, vote for ideas, and add comments to the Customer Support portal.

Next Steps

You learned about the dedicated support contact role, and how you can investigate issues or questions on your own via resources such as the Customer Support knowledge base, known issues, and the Salesforce Trust site. You can submit your great new ideas and vote on other ideas submitted by the community. Next, you dive deeper into key Premier Success Plan details.