Automating Corporate Gifting Payments with ChargeOn & Salesforce Sales Cloud
Introduction:
The client is a Canadian corporate gifting business that specializes in delivering luxury gift baskets and curated gift boxes. Their strong focus is on employee recognition and client appreciation. Their product catalog features gourmet, spa, and holiday-themed baskets sourced from local vendors.
A large portion of business was generated through B2B gifting contracts and seasonal campaigns. To support this, the company needed a scalable and streamlined way to manage payments within Salesforce while improving internal efficiency and client experience.
Reason for Collaboration:
The client had been using third-party tools to manage payments into their Sales Cloud. This created a challenge in tracking payment status, sending payment links, and processing scheduled or recurring transactions. This manual setup was slowing down operations, increasing errors, and impacting customer experience.
The client contacted our team to recommend a seamless solution that can be natively integrated within Salesforce. Considering their requirements, we implemented ChargeOn and integrated Global Payments, a leading payment gateway platform.
Challenges:
1. Disconnected Payment Process:
Their team was processing payments outside of Salesforce using third-party tools. This created a disconnect between Sales orders and payment confirmations, leading to delays in updating order statuses and inconsistencies in customer communication. Internal teams had to manually coordinate and reconcile payments with CRM records, making it both time-consuming and error-prone.
2. No Option for Recurring or Scheduled Payments:
Their business model offered to accept payments in phases, like deposits and final payments for large gifting contracts, or to charge clients automatically on recurring schedules. The current setup lacked this flexibility, pushing the finance team to manage reminders, invoices, and follow-ups manually, increasing the risk of missed payments.
3. Manual Payment Link Sharing:
Sales and service reps had to manually generate and send payment links via email, often copying them from third-party gateways and embedding them into templates. This process was not only inefficient but also prone to mistakes and inconsistencies, mainly during peak seasonal demand.
4. No Payment Tracking in Salesforce:
The team needed real-time visibility into the payment lifecycle, whether the transaction was successful, failed, or refunded. The sales and finance team had to switch between platforms to verify payment statuses, creating communication delays in customer service and financial reporting.
Solutions:
We streamlined their payment operations by enabling automated payment link generation, recurring and scheduled payments, and embedded payment history directly within Salesforce Sales Cloud using ChargeOn and Global Payments.
1. Automated Payment Link Generation:
Our experts implemented ChargeOn to natively connect the payment lifecycle with the Sales Order object in Salesforce. Now, every transaction, whether it is successful, failed, or refunded, is automatically recorded and linked to its corresponding order. This allows teams to track payment status instantly without switching tools.
2. Support for Recurring and Scheduled Payments:
Connecting Salesforce and Global Payments using ChargeOn, their team can now configure recurring billing cycles (weekly, monthly, annually) and schedule future payments for specific dates, right from Salesforce. This flexibility supports high-value B2B deals and seasonal campaign billing without manual intervention.
3. Embedded Payment History in Salesforce:
Payment links are now generated automatically inside Salesforce whenever a Sales Order moves to a specific stage (e.g., “Processing”). These links are stored with the Sales Order and auto-sent to customers through branded email templates, ensuring speed, consistency, and reduced manual work.
4. Payment Tracking Linked to Sales Order:
All transaction data is now captured directly on the Sales Order record. Both sales and finance teams have a unified view of payment activity, eliminating the need for cross-team checks or external platform logins. This also improved audit-readiness and operational transparency.
Benefits:
- Automated payment links reduce manual work and errors.
- Easy tracking of payments linked to each Sales Order.
- Supports scheduled and recurring payments for flexibility.
- Faster payment processing improves customer experience.
