The digitisation of your eCommerce business

The strategic implications of digital transformation involve ensuring exceptional and personalised customer experiences through the use of new technologies. The B2B eCommerce market is projected to be twice as large as the B2C market. Moreover, an annual growth of 11.1% is expected from 2018 to 2025, reaching up to $24 billion by 2025. This phenomenon can be associated with:

• Increased use of mobile devices and the internet in the industry
• The use of advanced eCommerce solutions for managing the customer experience

Salesforce defines digital transformation as “the process of using digital technologies to create new business processes, or modify existing ones, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.”

“For all major companies, digital transformation is the top strategic priority (50%)” – Forbes Insights.

 

Certainly, the economic situation produced by the global pandemic will accelerate the speed at which companies adopt digital transformation. From those companies whose websites do not meet the minimum expectations of their users, to businesses that do not have a digital presence. That is to say, this is the time to transform your brand and open your products to a digital audience.

“Over the past few months, online sales have shown an upward trend in sales of 20.3%”  Attentive

Personalisation is the key to digital transformation

77% of consumers would prefer to choose, recommend or pay more for brands that provide a personalised experience. The data shows that personalisation builds trust with your customers by bringing real value to their experience. Meanwhile, 75% of customers expect companies to recognise them by name and remember their previous purchases.

Consequently, the phenomenon of “Amazonisation” in eCommerce has pushed companies to implement personalisation solutions to improve back-end and data analysis. Brands can no longer rely on outdated solutions or silos to maintain their businesses. The way online sellers are selling needs to match the way buyers are buying.

Five steps to digital transformation in eCommerce

Step 1: Identify your digital transformation goals

Firstly, digital customer experience is a vital part of your transformation story. In fact, when redesigning or improving your business model, you should take focus on the following areas:

• Improve the end-user experience to increase productivity and customer retention
• Reduce operating costs and differentiate services
• Update infrastructure and operations to improve profitability and flexibility
• Enhance business efficiency and gain a competitive advantage through data analysis

Step 2: Managing your customer experience strategy

Moreover, the customer experience (CX) is determined by all the relationships that the user has with a brand, including factors such as customer service, engagement on social networks, product quality, reviews, etc. Most importantly, by using a personalisation platform like Recommend, you will have access to real-time statistics and detailed information about each user, to improve and personalise the experience.

Step 3: Implementation of new technological solutions

The next step is to implement new technologies. Actually, AI-based solutions, like Recommend, will help you not only understand who your consumers are but also optimise your website and implement eCommerce personalisation, including product recommendations, people and context analysis, and machine learning for automation and collaboration.

Step 4: Take a new trip to virtual platforms

In addition, leading eCommerce brands are recognising the potential and investing in immersive technologies to enhance the customer-centric experience. For example, virtual cabinets, real-world experience of product colour, size, and measurement, visual and voice search, and more.

Step 5: prepare for digital innovation.

Future electronic eCommerce platforms will be based on a highly virtualised and technological ecosystem of services. To ensure personalised, digital customer experience, you need a toolkit with omnichannel capabilities, customer experience management, and data analytics.

Benefits of digital transformation

As stated above, digital transformation not only improves the customer experience and relationship with a brand but positively affects team productivity and business profits. It is the combination of ideas and strategies with the right technological tools that will result in the best performance.

Among the benefits of digital transformation are:

• Access to more detailed metrics. The ability to drill down and collect numbers helps you better understand your business
• Develop a reputation for being an innovator, rather than a follower
• Offer consumers genuinely personalised shopping experiences
• Reduce costs. A personalisation platform like Recommend will allow you to automate processes and manage your marketing activities from one place.
• Customer satisfaction. In addition to a unique experience, buyers want to be heard. Companies seek to provide answers as soon as possible

Therefore, the challenge is to be more flexible and adaptable in a dynamic business environment. As a brand, you must be able to identify and take advantage of opportunities, navigate risks and respond quickly to changes. Above all, streamlining operating processes reduces costs because tasks take less time to complete in addition to providing timely data for decision-making.