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With MuleSoft and Salesforce now together as one company, we now have an unparalleled opportunity to collaborate on new products and solutions to deliver joint value for customers. This has been a key area of focus for us, and we are excited to announce our first joint solution, MuleSoft Accelerator for Salesforce Service Cloud and B2C Commerce Cloud.  

What is a MuleSoft Accelerator?

MuleSoft Accelerators enable businesses to implement critical integration use cases for Service Cloud and B2C Commerce Cloud, faster and easier than ever before. The solution includes production-ready APIs, connectors, and integration templates that help unlock critical data from external systems such as SAP, ServiceNow, and Jira; all the while guiding you to adopt best practices synthesized from thousands of customer implementations. These assets can be used as is or extended to meet your company’s unique needs.

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By using Accelerators, you can: 

  • Reduce implementation time by 60%: Accelerate critical Service and Commerce projects by using pre-built connectors and integration templates.
  • Tailor customer interactions with unified, real-time data: Enrich Salesforce with customer and product data unlocked from SAP, ServiceNow, and more.
  • Adopt battle-tested best practices: Start from a proven foundation, synthesized from customer and partner implementations.

What’s included in the Accelerator?

MuleSoft Accelerators will include the following:

Which use cases will the Accelerator cover?

We interviewed customers, partners, SMEs, and Salesforce product and implementation teams to determine the most common, industry-agnostic use cases for the first release. For v1, we will start with the below, following these design principles. 

Service use cases

Service reps impact every moment of the customer journey from pre- to post-purchase. This has also changed the expectations customers have for them, as 78% of customers expect service reps to have the same information about them and help them answer complex questions beyond simple issue-resolution. 

However, with siloed systems holding different pieces of customer data, this can be a challenge. Agents need to toggle between different monitors that have up to 50 different applications loaded just to support a single customer. Restricted agent access to certain systems compounds the situation. The results are that the agent can’t provide the necessary support, hindering their productivity and the customer does not receive the personalized, streamlined experience they expect. 

The goal of MuleSoft Accelerator for Service is to provide service agents with direct access to critical data they need to service the customer, all within the Service Console. We’ll also provide them with the ability to trigger actions in other relevant applications they may not have access to, but need to be connected with.  

Within Accelerators, we will provide assets and guidance to enable: 

  • Service Cloud and ServiceNow/Jira integration:
    While creating a Case within Service Cloud for a customer service agents will be able to route relevant issues within the case to ServiceNow, if it is an ITSM issue, and Jira, if it is a bug issue. Once the ServiceNow and Jira tickets are created, the agent will also be able to see any updates made to that ticket — whether new comments are added or the status changed — all within Service Cloud.  
  • Service Cloud and OMS integration:
    Without having to toggle to a separate application, service agents will be able to see real-time order history and order status information from an external order management system (OMS) within Service Cloud.  

Commerce use cases 

Modern consumers expect all shopping experiences to be relevant, personalized, and seamless across channels. Gone are the days of bulk uploading and updating data on a weekly basis. For retailers, this means customer, product, and inventory data needs to be connected in real-time across all systems and channels. 

To help manage this, we are providing best practice assets and approaches for two main use cases: 

  • B2C Commerce Cloud and PIM integration:
    Ability to search for product deltas in a product information management (PIM) system and reflect those changes in Commerce Cloud on a scheduled basis, set as appropriate for your company. 
  • B2C Commerce Cloud and SAP (ERP) integration:
    Ability to search for inventory availability data in SAP, as an example ERP, from Commerce Cloud on a scheduled basis, set as appropriate for your company. 

In addition to the above, we will also provide best practice assets and documentation for common services, which will include:

  • API implementation template: These templates will ensure best practices are consistently followed by all members of your org. It includes:  
    • Standardized naming conventions
    • Configuration elements in one common global file
    • Pre-built YAML files for properties configurations 
    • Secure properties configuration for password encryption
    • Externalized error handler imported into the template
    • Pre-built connectivity to the Notification API from the error handler to send error notifications
    • Embedded audit logs using JSON logger
    • Externalized transformations using DWL files
  • Logging service: This logging service will be available as a connector component and will produce logs in a consistent JSON format across all the Accelerator API assets. It captures some of the commonly needed information for troubleshooting, such as tracePoint, correlationId, and elapsedTime.
  • Notification service: This service will ensure notification is sent to various individuals or groups through your preferred channel – whether SMS, email, or push notifications. 
  • Scheduling service: This service will run and perform API calls. The benefit of having a single scheduling services is that you can have all integration-level schedules maintained in one place.  

As you can see above, a key benefit of the Accelerator is that we will be providing a variety of assets and best practices that any customer can leverage, even if you aren’t a Commerce or Service customer yet. 

And this is just the beginning! We will continue to evolve Accelerators, so please let us know if you have any suggestions by leaving a comment below. 

How can I learn more?

If you’ll be at Dreamforce, check out the below sessions. We would love to meet you in person!  

If you aren’t able to attend Dreamforce this year, no problem! Leave us a comment here or Tweet us @MuleSoft, or directly to me @ahyoungan, and we can continue the conversation.