In an ‘emotion economy’, having a great product alone cannot help in providing a competitive advantage. Other than products, customers expect a richer shopping experience which is immersive in nature and can offer solutions to their ever-evolving behaviours. Every year some new brands create ripples in the market and take a leap of ranks to further attain a leader’s status. For instance, Nykaa ventured into 2012 and within a span of 10 years, the company is now valued at USD 8.3 Billion. The success story of Nykaa draws emphasis on the relevance of customer experience that holds the trump card to making a brand a big success.
According to Morgan Stanley’s research projections, eCommerce is expected to raise $5.4 trillion with a market share of 27% in total retail sales by 2026. This report highlights two crucial findings — One, these numbers are set to rise with digital penetration, and second, businesses need to double down their efforts to engage with customers.
Let’s dive deep and try to understand how omnichannel brands can use a customer-centric approach to constantly evolve toward offering a unified, hyper-personalized, and human-centric customer experience.
Why the Human-Centric Outlook is Crucial for Omnichannel Brands
A Mckinsey Report suggests that a one-point improvement in customer experience (CX) on a ten-point scale corresponds to a minimum 3 per cent increase in revenue growth. Therefore, CX is a critical aspect of success. For instance, Nykaa focussed on multi-digital channels to connect with their target audience. They gave special attention to customer reviews, freebies and personalized offers to create a loyal customer base in a highly competitive cosmetic industry. This approach has led Nykaa to reach the top ranks of a highly successful and lucrative unicorn startup.
The Solution Lies with the Digital Commerce Platform
The Digital Commerce Platforms draw the focus by separating the frontend (interfaces, IoT, social commerce) from the backend (pricing, infrastructure, integrations, checkout options, etc.) infrastructure of a website or app. These solutions infuse freedom and flexibility to create a platform that offers stellar customer experiences.
These futuristically designed platforms are emerging as an architectural paradigm to help eCommerce businesses deliver more engaging shopping experiences across every channel and touchpoint wherever customers interact. Futuristic digital commerce platforms help businesses deliver hyper-segmented, personalized omnichannel commerce experiences for B2B and B2C buyers. The architecture of these platforms offers unparalleled flexibility for businesses to pick and choose out-of-the-box microservices. These microservices use customers’ pre-built experiences to build curated digital journeys for enhancing their eCommerce experiences.
The Uniqueness of these Digital Commerce Platforms
The uniqueness of digital commerce platforms is benefitting companies with remarkable gains. It is important to highlight that digital commerce can drive more than $15 billion in annual eCommerce gross merchandise value.
Organizations like Amazon are using unique features of digital commerce to sustain their leadership status. A focused approach to adopting innovative technologies to drive unprecedented customer service is the reason for their success. They have easily transformed their digital commerce across marketing, merchandising, e-commerce, store operations, supply chain and customer service through key offerings of these digital commerce platforms: Microservices, Commerce, Experiences, and Marketing.
Benefits of the Futuristic Human-Centric Solution
Digital Commerce Platforms hold a plethora of benefits for eCommerce businesses targeting any customer segment like – B2B, B2C, B2D etc. Let’s have a look at the major advantages of these platforms.
Customer Experience Excellence
These platforms facilitate consumer brand interactions by empowering brands to deliver unmatched customer journeys that avail the advantage of emerging social, chat, voice and augmented reality commerce channels. These futuristic digital platforms blend digital customer experiences with physical experiences to create highly satisfying phygital shopping outcomes. With phygital customer experiences, customers use digital ways of shopping but get close to real experiences like digital mirrors. These channels make the overall shopping experience more customer-centric.
These days businesses cater to international clients. Therefore, focusing on creating sites that can accommodate the complexities of multiple languages and currencies sounds more relevant.
The unique, deeply localized features create real-time promotions with the platform’s simplified business user tooling and workflows that require no major changes to the application code or configuration.
Scale and Flexibility to Match Shopper Demands
Digital commerce platforms are rich with their superior technology architecture, better performance, and high-class security, which is the best in class. With futuristic platforms’ industry-leading cloud-native, microservices-based, API-first architecture, brands will only need to meet consumers’ evolving expectations.
These platforms can deliver a rich repository of mutually exclusive and exhaustive microservices to integrate with an existing or new platform to deliver headless commerce capabilities. Moreover, organizations use several commerce models within their business like B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C, and C2M. Therefore, these microservices enable the commerce models to integrate with other platforms seamlessly.
Relevance Through Innovation
These platforms deliver an integrated ecosystem of capabilities, from the shopping experience to operations. It helps businesses to deepen their customer relevance throughout the commerce value chain. To optimize retail execution, the platform puts the shopper at the center of the business’ commerce strategy. This helps businesses to deploy segment-specific, user experience innovations on-demand.
Digital Commerce Platforms make the progression of commerce-as- a- service by adding microservices or starting a new commerce channel to engage with both B2B and B2C through a common platform that provides a 50+ per cent faster speed to market than any other solution. By using these platforms, businesses can draw real-time insights for their marketing programs. This puts omni channel brands in a better position to drive more personalized and meaningful customer experiences.
How can Businesses Make the Best of eCommerce Growth Spurts?
For a memorable omnichannel experience, businesses need to focus on three parameters –
- Adapting a human-centric approach to decision-making: that addresses the present set of needs and mitigates the futuristic complexities.
- Upgradation of scalable digital architecture with time: Provides scalability and easy adaptations like MACH-X, etc.
- Add an integrated ecosystem: It enables enterprises to leverage omnichannel status.
This will make brands address customer needs more efficiently. It will enable customers to interact with businesses directly, drive personalized recommendations, and blend online and offline worlds through ‘phygital’ capabilities across all the consumer touchpoints to create exceptional experiences. For a better understanding of our services, you can click here.