Salon Service Group

About

Founded in 1987 by Gina Bardo, Salon Service Group is a leading, privately-owned distributor of professional wholesale salon beauty products. Catering specifically to cosmetologists, Salon Service Group offers an extensive range of products including color, smoothing treatments, hair extensions, hair care, and face & body care products. The company is dedicated to customer satisfaction and business growth for its partners, and it continually upholds its commitment to providing quality products, outstanding service, and building sustainable partnerships. The Salon Service Group website is designed to support easy shopping, offer educational courses, provide consultation services, and foster professional growth.

Challenge

Salon Service Group sought to expand its customer base, enhance self-service capabilities, increase order sizes, and improve customer satisfaction. They partnered with XCentium to drive a cost-effective digital transformation on an aggressive timeline.

Solution

In partnership with XCentium, Salon Service Group implemented Salesforce Experience Cloud, B2B Commerce, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, and MuleSoft to create a robust e-commerce website. Key features of the solution include:

Custom Order Management Capabilities: Supports BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick-Up In-Store), a store fulfillment interface, and a complete order-to-invoice lifecycle.
Sophisticated Product Eligibility & Discount Rules: Features customized discounts, customer-specific entitlements, tiered pricing, and coupon logic that restricts the combination of negotiated pricing with promotional offers.
Enhanced Security with OTP Login: Customers can request a one-time password via verified email or text.
Group Ordering for Stylists: Allows group ordering for multiple stylists within a single salon.
Specialized Taxation Handling: Differentiates between retail and backbar products for tax purposes.
Seamless Integrations: Over 30 integrations with third-party and legacy systems, providing hourly inventory sync across 67 store locations and the warehouse, hourly account and pricing sync, daily product and base price updates, and integrations for payment processing, tax calculations, delivery solutions, and BOPIS.
Mobile eComm App
Customers can download an app from the iOS App store or the Google Play store and shop the full catalog. The App supports face ID login, customer offers exclusive to the app, and shipping notifications for orders placed in the online store or on the App.
Einstein AI Based Product Recommendations
User activity on the experience site and via Marketing message are combined with purchasing data from all channels via an integration with SSG’s ERP. This data by Einstein to make content suggestions in Marketing Cloud to enhance marketing campaigns created by SSG.

Outcome

In the first month after lunch Salon Service Group has experienced an uplift in sales of over half a million dollars in new business sales all generated by the mobile app. The sales team now has a tool they put in the customers hands that is shifting the burden of writing orders away from the sales team. Instead, their customers are inputting their orders allowing the sales team more time plan, strategize and do business development with their customers rather than spending all their time writing orders.

Working with XCentium has been a game-changer for Salon Service Group. From the outset, their team demonstrated a deep understanding of both our industry and our customers’ needs. They designed and built a powerful new online store and mobile app that not only looks great, performs seamlessly across all devices, and has several key features that are quickly changing how our sales team works with our customers. The user experience has improved dramatically, and we’ve seen a measurable increase in customer engagement and sales since launch. XCentium was collaborative, responsive, and proactive every step of the way — truly a partner in every sense. We couldn’t be more pleased with the results.