On all fronts, Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™, commercetools’ first annual conference dedicated to composable commerce, was a resounding success. From the powerful keynote presentations to the compelling breakout sessions, the Expo experience and after-hours social gatherings, the event provided learning, inspiration and networking for business and technology leaders from across the globe. The speakers included major brands, SIs, ISVs and commerce analysts, each one providing their unique perspective on the evolution of commerce along with guidance on leveraging composable commerce to drive business success. The highlight for many attendees was having the opportunity to connect with brands across diverse industries and business models who are successfully navigating the future of commerce.
Here, we share the top 10 customer insights focused on CX, commerce trends and digital transformation.
With the countless channels and touchpoints consumers can explore today, you can no longer predict how your customers will meet your brand or products, or the path they will take. The consensus of the speakers was to look at the journey holistically and remember the battle cry, “Meet the customer where they are.”
While no consumer journey is truly linear anymore, at least having the intentionality behind the consumer journey when you design it end-to-end really helps. Think about all of the different interactions and touchpoints that might exist with the consumers so you can make sure that there are no dead ends, and that each part fuels the other parts of that journey.
GLOBAL DIRECTOR, RETAIL & D2C, MARS WRIGLEY
Regardless of whether your customer is a professional buyer or a consumer, build your journey in a customer-centric manner.
When you deal with a buyer, they have the same interests, the same desire for a seamless shopping experience, the same needs in their business work as they do in their personal shopping. So, the thing that they want is a seamless, intuitive, fast experience. Now they may have certain other requirements to do their job that are different than somebody just shopping online — that is where I think the differences come in. But, in terms of the experience and how they want it to feel, they want it to feel just as good as they feel when they're on a site where they shop for themselves.
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER AND CO-FOUNDER, TEKTON
Right now, there is a lot of focus on improving the digital experience, adding features to differentiate themselves from the competition. However, it’s important not to forget the basics like site performance. Customers are not willing to wait; if your site takes too long, they’ll go elsewhere.
For me, one of the most important things is one of the easiest and most basic, and that is respecting the time of our pet parents. At the end of the day, if you don't know how your site is performing at every step of the customer funnel, you really don't know if you're getting better or getting worse. As everyone here knows, the milliseconds can have a material difference in customer conversion. So, establish metrics around performance conversion. We all have our beliefs about what works and what doesn't. The benefit with eCommerce is that you can actually just test them and let your customers tell you what works and what doesn't.
EVP & CTO, PETSMART
Consumers have made it clear that they’re not willing to give up the brick-and-mortar experience. Brands are discovering that by merging physical and digital strategies to create a phygital journey, they can deliver better omnichannel experiences.
Guests are engaging with beauty outside of our store and then coming into the store to interact with the product. We want to make sure that that's seamless. So, from an in-store perspective, our app has become very important to us. For our most loyal guests, we're taking up real estate on their phone so we need tools and experiences for them to leverage the in-store experience. We want to make sure they can easily activate offers, find out what promos are available and what will get them to the next tier status. Because what's most important once they get to the store is they can act with that companion and then get the human connection.
VP DIGITAL EXPERIENCE & OPS, ULTA BEAUTY
The path to building brand awareness and loyalty has changed. While marketing and advertising should be components of your strategy, creating a brand story is equally important today.
In addition to convenience, the younger generation has values like sustainability and social responsibility. In addition to ads for products they should buy, they want to see what the company is about, who the employees are, how they behave and what they're doing. We are pretty active on all these social media channels usually doing ads, but what we’re switching to and have been doing for a few months now is creating stories. Let the customer look behind the curtains of your brand because it will build more of a relationship with them than just placing ads on social media.
TEAM LEAD APPLICATION & DATA, MEDIASHOP GMBH
It’s common knowledge that composable commerce offers flexibility that is impossible to achieve on a monolith platform. At Elevate, speakers called out the MACH® architecture that composable systems are built on as key to making it fast and easy to deliver incremental innovation.
The world is our oyster. We've just changed from a ‘no’ business to a ‘yes’ business. No one wants to work in an organization where people have really good ideas and you can see them getting frustrated, because every time they want to do something, the technology won't allow it. It doesn't have to be massive things, but little things that we couldn't ever do before. Now everything's possible — all that stuff we couldn't do with referrals, loyalty, gift cards, etc. Now we're saying yes, but we've got to start prioritizing because there's so much we can do.
CIO, INTERFLORA AUSTRALIA
This isn’t the first time we heard that once you migrate to commercetools Composable Commerce you no longer have to stress over this holiday period or any other big event. However, since it has been a challenge for retailers for such a long long time, it bears repeating.
Something dear to my heart, obviously, is Christmas peaks, and we've been through two of those without any issues at all. The last Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we did 1.2 million units picked, packed, and dispatched, and we hit a peak of 5.9 orders per second. Also, unfortunately, on Christmas Eve at 5:00 PM every single year, you’ll find me watching all these monitors and metrics to launch our Christmas sale. But you know what? That's a comfort factor. I just watch it happen and I still wonder whether something has gone wrong. I've got nothing to do, but that's a good thing.
PLATFORM & OPERATIONS MANAGER, JOHN LEWIS PARTNERSHIP
Replatforming used to be a long, painful process so usually, businesses did whatever they could to avoid it. At Elevate, multiple brands shared stories about how they went live with composable commerce in under six months, and in the process were able to customize features to meet their specific needs.
We were thinking, ‘OK, let's build it ourselves’ because we also do a lot of custom software, for example, for our subscriptions. Then one of our engineers was investigating vendors and came across commercetools. He looked at the APIs and thought, ‘Oh, this looks really good, the data models look good, the documentation looks good.’ He read about MACH and thought, ‘This is what we are doing, but it’s way better described and we're not following every rule, so maybe we should also follow those rules.’ Once we talked with somebody at commercetools we realized this is exactly what we need, so why develop it ourselves? We were scheduling a project of six to nine months and, instead, we implemented within four.
LEAD E-COMMERCE TECH, VISION HEALTHCARE
When you’ve finished your digital transformation and are running a best-in-class digital commerce experience, it can feel pretty good. However, if you want to retain a competitive edge, you can’t rest on your laurels.
Rapid digital transformation is really made possible with a combination of people, process and strategy. But, it's really a journey of continuous improvement. We're constantly innovating to meet and exceed customer expectations. When we launched our eCommerce solution, we primarily catered to existing customers. A lot of what we're looking at in the future is really on the awareness and research side as we continue to scale and also cater to new prospective customers.
DIRECTOR OF ECOMMERCE, CEPHEID, DANAHER GROUP
As #9 established, just because you finish a digital transformation project doesn’t mean you’re all set for the future, because things are constantly changing. This is why it's important to maintain an ecosystem that can help you meet new challenges.
The rate of change is increasing. It's not going to go backward, it’s just going to accelerate. We need to put ourselves and our businesses in positions where we can react or be ahead of that change curve — and we need to be able to anticipate what's coming and react to what's in front of us. When you think about the ecosystem around commercetools and the other technologies here [at Elevate], you start to see that nobody solves an entire problem, but the ecosystem collectively helps you frame the problem, solve the problem, and then helps you get better and get ahead. So, that's where the ecosystem is valuable.
VICE PRESIDENT - DIGITAL, DAWN FOODS
To explore additional content from the event, including videos and customer testimonials, visit the Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit website. Check back frequently as the page will continually be updated.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.