In a time of cautious consumer spending and rising regulatory complexity, how can brands build sustainable, future-ready customer experiences in China? Salesforce
On June 11, CLD, in collaboration with Salesforce, Alibaba Cloud, and ChatLabs, hosted an exclusive executive salon — “Future-Proof Your Brand” — at The Portman Ritz-Carlton Shanghai. The invite-only gathering brought together senior leaders from luxury, fashion, and beauty brands to reimagine how customer experience is being rebuilt from the ground up in China.
Salesforce × Alibaba Cloud: AI-Powered Engagement, Built for Compliance
Claire Wang (Alibaba Cloud) and Ivy Li (Salesforce) shared how brands can deliver AI-driven customer experiences while maintaining full compliance and data residency through Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud.
The CXG AI Connector provides native integration between Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen large language models, enabling brands to rapidly deploy LLMs and interact with them using their own business data.
Fireside Chat Recap: How Dolce & Gabbana Rebuilt Its CRM Strategy for China
During the fireside chat, Maggie Wong, Senior CRM Manager for Dolce & Gabbana Asia Pacific, offered a candid and insightful look into the brand’s challenges and transformation journey in deploying a CRM system tailored for the China market.
She began by highlighting the cultural and operational disconnect between global HQ structures and the realities of the local Chinese market: “Headquarters cannot understand why customers in China don’t read email, don’t answer phone calls, don’t use WhatsApp… but this is how they live. They live in WeChat.”
At one point, the session moderator Omid Pourmomen illustrated the disconnect with a touch of humor: “You want a CSV file with thousands of QQ email addresses? No problem—we can give you that. But the truth is, no one actually uses them.”
Faced with this disconnect, Maggie led the effort to localize and rebuild their CRM approach. She explained that the original system was hosted in Europe and not only suffered from delays but was also incompatible with the digital touchpoints critical to the Chinese customer journey:
“The data is not real-time. Our data is in Europe, but our customers are in stores in China.”
“The headquarters CRM system is centralized and doesn’t support Chinese touchpoints like POS, WeChat, or Mini Programs.”
“There’s a lot of data, but frontline staff can’t see the customer.”
Another structural gap was the absence of clear client ownership logic: “Who owns the client? Who should follow up? There was no logic in the system.”
With support from the CLD team, Maggie and her team successfully deployed Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud in China, developing a localized framework that addressed these pain points.
This restructured system connected core Chinese touchpoints like POS, WeChat, and Mini Programs, empowering frontline staff with real-time visibility into customer status and journey data. It also streamlined rules for client ownership and follow-up—improving both efficiency and experience.
Maggie’s journey reflects a clear takeaway: to make CRM truly effective in China, global brands must deeply understand local customer behavior, integrate native systems, and empower the frontline with the right tools and insights.
ChatLabs: Bridging the Post-Click Drop-Off in Social
ChatLabs’ Chief AI Innovation Officer, Archer Li, posed a direct challenge: “You spend millions on social ads. The user clicks. Then what?” He pointed out that most brands still send social traffic to static sites — which lack storytelling and conversion continuity — leading to sky-high bounce rates and weak engagement.
ChatLabs’ solution? Replace static landing pages with AI-personalized, swipeable social-style feeds that match the user’s intent and behavior.
Impact delivered:
- 3X increase in social-to-ecommerce conversion
- 60% lift in ROAS on campaign landing pages
- 30% uplift in CRM opt-ins
Final Panel: Systems, Data, and AI Must Be Built Together
To close the salon, leaders from CLD, Salesforce, and Alibaba Cloud came together in a panel discussion on the future of customer experience in China.
“Many brands think they can simply copy-paste their global Salesforce instance into China. But the challenge isn’t the technology — it’s the workflows and the cultural fit.”
——Omid Pourmomen, CLD
“Predictive, automated journeys will become the norm. Brands must start building high-performance data infrastructure now.”
——Claire Wang, Alibaba Cloud
“Unified data, flexible architecture, and locally-built experiences — that’s the foundation for sustainable growth.”
——Ivy Li, Salesforce
As the moderator closed the session:
“Compliance doesn’t hold innovation back — it unlocks it.”
Whether you’re bridging the intent gap in social, rebuilding trust through data, or rearchitecting systems for local realities, the future belongs to brands that deeply understand Chinese consumers, operationalize AI intelligently, and empower their frontline teams.
