The key digital commerce adoption drivers have been:

• Business innovation
• Revenue growth
• Cost optimization
• Customer engagement

All the retailers, legacy brick and mortar and digital commerce included, now understand the need for software applications and their importance on various segments of retail; from customer acquisition, making sales transactions and providing post-delivery engagement to retaining the customer for longer periods of time.

Retail is one of the few domains that has seen tremendous growth in the last 5 years, the COVID-19 pandemic brought a demand for digital transformation in the brick and mortar retail sector, businesses were expected to bring about a change at breakneck speed as per the needs of the competitive market.

The retail IT system is highly dynamic and involves critical applications that take care of various functions at the front-end like social media, POS, website, mobile and back-end like inventory, product management, service and delivery cycles. The ever-evolving customer demands require retail organizations to continuously deliver and deploy new services and features.

In order to do that, software testing became imperative to ensure nothing that is broken goes to production. To cover a large area in the shortest possible time, just software testing would not suffice, this is where automation testing comes in. With automation testing, retail companies can harness the merits of digital transformation while managing the risks.

Benefits of Automation Testing in the Retail Industry

Quick feedback on build: Automation testing when utilized to create a regression suite and executed on the test environment will provide quick feedback on the code, thereby helping in making an informed decision on the deployment of the production code.

Enhance the coverage of omnichannel applications: The omnichannel availability of the application though is good from a customer engagement perspective, is difficult to test in a limited time owing to the sheer volume of platforms, screen sizes, and OS combinations. Automation testing with emulator combinations provides the solution to mitigate quality risk in the least possible time to validate application behavior on different platforms.

Heterogeneous environment: Retail platforms consist of an amalgamation of various systems and sub-systems such as UI, Payment Gateways, 3rd party APIs, Data-Warehouse, Reporting Tools, Middleware, etc. Testing of all these systems is difficult but mandatory to ensure there is no break in the entire process. This testing is done in an automated way, and yields requisite coverage within the short timeline, and provides a view of end-to-end use cases.

Smart Automation Testing: AI/ML enabled automation testing has further improved the quality, efficiency, and speed of risk mitigation and achieving business goals. Self-healing frameworks have the capability to optimize the test scripts in case of changes in GUI web elements on the screen, thereby reducing the efforts needed for script maintenance.

Non-Functional Automation Testing: In addition to functional testing, non-functional testing is very much needed for retail platforms and applications to cover performance, security, and accessibility scenarios, as impact in this area directly leads to degrading usability and customer experience causing customer turnover. Automation testing can be implemented for non-functional testing to get shift-left of non-functional testing and finding & fixing issues earlier in the lifecycle.

Why IGT?

IGT with its Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) is well placed to provide value-added services in automating the testing services for retail domains. The pre-built accelerators for the retail domain with 2000+ use cases covering customer management, customer journey mapping, product selection, cart management, payment etc. cover the entire gamut of retail operation testing.

Our advisory services on automation testing on the retail domain, automation test strategy and choice of automation frameworks spread across open source domain as well as licensed tool segments empower you not only to completely harness benefits of automation testing but also achieve better ROI from overall Quality Engineering efforts in retail organizations.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

Sources: Gartner

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However, Gartner predicts that by 2022, 50% of the brands may fail to unify their customer engagement channels, providing a fragmented customer experience that lacks cohesion, reliability, and context. To win business from customers undeniably influenced by the quality of brand interactions, it is now pivotal to invest in an omnichannel experience strategy that can make frictionless and personalized engagement possible for multiple touchpoints across their journey. It empowers enterprises to inspire customer delight by proactively offering more purchase and fulfillment options and successfully navigate channel disruptions to defend the integrity of their diverse revenue streams.

Extracting the optimum value of customer experience

So, considering its mission-criticality, how should a company that intends to go to market with an omnichannel experience delivery plan for its customers trigger the required transformation? Essentially, such a shift calls for a reimagination of how an organization approaches customer experience from a technological and cultural standpoint. It involves investment in top-line digital engineering skills and design thinking expertise that can meaningfully decode the brand-consumer dialogue across channels and attach the patterns of preferences to profitable business outcomes with confidence. True omnichannel experience is the sum of a host of incremental changes that include:

Re-engineering the CRM fundamentals making the landscape agile enough for deep API-backed integration with multiple channels. An intuitive and connected CRM is the heart of an impactful omnichannel CRM strategy that can deliver a 360-degrees view into customer behavior by assimilating sources such as social media activities, emails, incident tickets, and service desk cases into a single source of truth. This integrated approach is key to weaving personalized experiences that are holistic and resonate with actual customer needs.

Bringing insights from live customer interactions across channels to optimize the experience and providing a seamless omnichannel experience.  Today’s customer journeys aren’t straightforward and linear but an inter-connected series of handoffs between traditional and modern digital channels that can vary significantly. Providing a seamless handoff across all channels and ensuring that we have a customer 360 view is of paramount importance to ensure customer delight. This approach leverages cognitive technologies like Machine Learning, Natural language processing (NLP) and AI which helps create a personalized customer experience and plays a decisive role in improving customer satisfaction & brand recall and trimming the persisting marketing overheads.

Implementing customer analytics on top of the omnichannel CRM database, tailoring bespoke reports and customized dashboards that can permit various end-users within the value chain to be more customer-centric. Customer Experience Analytics, Retention Analytics, and Marketing Analytics offer end-to-end visibility into the brand-customer interactions across multiple channels, allowing marketing decision-makers to discover latent trends for realigning strategies.

Augmenting agent productivity with the proper training and tools that allow team members to embrace the culture of omnichannel commitment to the customer. It involves breaking down silos and sharing leads and customer information across the marketing ecosystem. Also, in an omnichannel environment where enterprise systems are integrated with third-party applications to enhance productivity, operating on multidimensional customer data needs adequate guidance to prevent the breach of customer data protection and privacy norms, mitigating security and reputational risks.

Business Impacts

A decisive move towards delivering seamless omnichannel experiences can unlock a new horizon of business opportunities, transform customer loyalty and convert them into promoters. Apart from this it helps improve operational efficiency, reveal new business streams, and elevate during and after-sales service quality. While ensuring round-the-clock availability, an omnichannel strategy can address the conventional inadequacies of face-to-face interactions like the short attention span of agents by distributing the workloads across various channels improving overall customer satisfaction.

Also, merging all digital marketing channels into a composite CRM with a customer 360 offers a complete view of the user persona, allowing marketing campaigns to be fine-tuned to relevance. Further, the availability of cross-channel customer datasets allows limitless analytics, equipping marketers to understand customer behavior patterns better and preempt foreseeable changes.

Conclusion

The omnichannel experience, while complex to orchestrate, is a critical differentiator in a closely contested market. Here, partnering with a digital engineering leader that can seamlessly converge the best of digital and in-person customer interactions to drive experience delivery is no short of strategic advantage. It can empower organizations to be nimble and pull ahead of the curve by delivering on overt customer requirements and subliminal expectations reflected through behavioral cues.

Sources: Salesforce, Gartner

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Consumers’ expectations are at an all-time high, and the upsurge in demand is currently driving the buying frenzy. Today’s tech-savvy consumers would prefer ordering over e-commerce stores to doing retail shopping. After a relatively lower sales period in 2020 due to the pandemic and stress, consumers and funds are now back to the pre-Covid era.

Going Digital in our Daily Lives

From small businesses to large, every business needs to undergo digital transformation to gain a competitive edge and to sustain itself in the long run. Digitalization aids in integrating technology in all aspects of business that helps improve productivity and deliver business value to customers.

According to Statista, the global spending on digital transformation is estimated to be 2.4 trillion USD. Simply put, every time you replace a physical process with a digital strategy, you engage in a digital transformation. When you decide not to cross a cheque for your mortgage payment and instead do an Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), you become part of digital transformation or Digital Commerce with one simple click!

Factors Driving Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is now an essential ingredient to stay in business. B2B and B2C companies now compete against each other in the online world. The whole competition is now taken over using MarTech firms that deliver outcome-based results while keeping consumer behavior and data insights in mind.

With most social media channels enabling e-commerce marketing strategies today, you can not only post online ads for your business but can also directly interact with customers and prospective clients.

Here’s why you need to embrace digital transformation to evolve into an “e-business” or e-commerce store if you haven’t:

Rising Customer Expectations

The rise in adoption rates of new and next-gen technologies like cloud computing, machine learning, AI-based algorithms, Robotics, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices have increased customer expectations.

The role of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is still underutilized by businesses today. Its diversified capabilities serve as an excellent opportunity to enhance customer experience by bringing the “store to the customer”.

A survey by iXtenso magazine found that virtual reality was important for 22% of its respondents during brand shopping as customers are now empowered with value-added unique shopping experiences. For example: expecting virtual experience while trying fashion apparel and accessories.

Strong Online presence for Brands

Brands need to have an online presence as it helps attract more customers and generates user engagements. Furthermore, the brand is capable of creating customer awareness and strengthening its credibility.

According to Salesforce.com, about 87% of shoppers seek product information and helpful reviews online — even if their final purchase plan is through a retail store. Consumers expect to find a brand’s updated information, including contact information, seamlessly while approaching them.

It furthermore found that e-commerce sites get 75% new search queries monthly and that 69% of customers expect new products irrespective of shopping online or at a retail store. This strongly emphasizes the need for brands to “keep it fresh” and ensure a seamless shopping experience for users while enhancing customer relations.

Rise of DTC (Direct to Consumer) selling

The direct-to-consumer selling strategy has exploded during the Covid times and changed the view of doing business. Today, enterprises can talk to their customers directly rather than through a third-party channel or platform.

In another survey by iXtenso magazine, more than 55% of shoppers want to buy directly from brand manufacturers.

OEMs that have progressed towards omnichannel marketing to deliver a seamless experience across devices make more sales. Companies who go with DTC control their customers’ experiences from start to finish, giving them the tremendous power to improve consumer satisfaction. Customer feedback, rating, and advocacy define your market dynamics on the ground since many first-time consumers watch for the feedback before adding to their shopping cart on your online store.

Digital Commerce Sales Accelerators

Technology advancement and inventions are fueling digital commerce the most. Certain innovations clubbed with customer behavior, and experience has ensured considerable jumps in sales figures for brands that went ahead with these accelerators.

For example:

• Today, big data has a significant role in enhancing personalization, storing massive sets of native data in a data lake for creating insights to predict consumer apprehensions. Large ecommerce brands like Amazon have used big data to provide consumers with highly personalized shopping experiences. Selling Alexa and other IoT/AI devices at a lower price opened up a stream of personified data collection for Amazon.
• Headless and API-driven ecommerce solutions are allowing continued innovation at a much faster pace one could imagine. You order at dinner and get the item delivered before lunch the next day; how quick and seamless the integration has become.

Tools and Platforms for Digital Transformation in Ecommerce

There has been an upsurge in companies offering tools and platforms to support and drive digital commerce. Few of these are categorized as FinTech startups with a SaaS whose product offerings are imbibed with seamless integration of various payment methods for a consumer.

Smartphones are a great tool to help users buy anything now. From AR-supported software that emerged as game-changers to enable seamless buying of furniture and clothing online or to order your favorite Cappuccino from Starbucks, digital transformation has made lives easier.

Recent data gathered by Statista predicts that in 2021, nearly 73% of ecommerce transactions will take place on mobile devices. Consumers mostly have a choice that if you don’t offer a fluid experience, they’ll simply shop elsewhere.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is a continuous process where you won’t be saying, “Alright, we can’t go beyond this.” It is an ongoing journey, and you will need to build many partners both on the supplier and consumer sides.

Digital commerce is where brands have bet enormous and reaped huge benefits from an online presence in terms of consumer sentiments, market share, and driving profitability while keeping the operational costs to the minimum. Ecommerce has been a clear winner way before the pandemic began. Economists predict retail ecommerce sales to reach 476.5 billion dollars by 2024, up from 279.7 billion dollars in 2017 for the US market alone.

There is still a plethora of opportunities available in the digital scope. Businesses’ capabilities are accelerated, and it is anticipated that they shall reap significant rewards by attracting investors, thereby changing the face of digital commerce in the coming years. 

Sources:
Ixtenso, RetailDive, Statista

Author :

Gaurav is the Practice head for Enterprise Solutions at IGT and also the SME of Retail, CPG and Ecommerce verticals.

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A Single Source of Truth

A great experience that can convert over 90% of the first-timers into brand loyalists is the sum of a broad spectrum of data points, including primary customer attributes, behavioral and attitudinal records, transaction history, and much more. CDP technology simplifies the task for the customer services teams by harnessing the required data from different sources, accelerating the journey towards exceptional service personalization. Investment in CDP assets can pull in a host of enabling capabilities for companies, allowing them to ingest customer data at the scale and speed of business, combine and orchestrate omnichannel feeds, and deliver real-time outcomes for stakeholders beyond marketing, in sales and UI and of course ensure compliance. Applying machine intelligence and Advanced Analytics on top of such a deep and comprehensive customer data processing ecosystem can bring forth the information advantage and functional ease, positioning organizations to be highly competitive in closely contested landscapes.

Enabling The CDP Outcomes

While CDP is an indispensable component of the modern marketer’s toolkit, organizations looking to transform can either opt for Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products or build their CDP stack. Although being substantially costly due to the hefty licensing overheads involved, the pre-packaged solutions can enable a rapid time to market due to their plug-and-play features. However, building a CDP from scratch can bypass the avoidable expenses and allow the flexibility to bring customized flavors that suit the marketing taste of a particular business, realizing value within merely 3-6 months. Notwithstanding the path a company is intending to walk, a CDP worth the investments in enriched CX should be able to deliver:

Simplicity: In the US, the estimated cost of customers switching due to poor service quality is $1.6 trillion annually. Also, Salesforce reports that 83% of the service agents acknowledge the desperate need for assistance to do their job well. When shifting customer expectations and business demands are already testing the limits of the service teams, next-gen data solutions must improve their access and maneuverability. For example, a CDP should neatly organize the available data for immediate use. Also, its setup and maintenance should discount the technical complexities otherwise involved in traditional data warehouses, and its outputs should be fit for consumption, even by a non-technical audience.

Single Customer View: 84% of businesses are more likely to purchase from vendors who understand their goals better. Also, 66% of the customers across B2B and B2C segments want their brands to be emphatic about their unique needs and expectations. This heightened state of awareness is only possible through a 360-degree view of the customer that a CDP should build on the data harnessed and assimilated into individual data profiles of each user. Further, it should read customer and related master data from semi-processed data sets, enrich data from multiple sources and merge various customer profiles and hierarchies to provide golden records. Finally, the validated CDP outputs should answer fundamental questions around how the end-users consume products and services and how successful they are in meeting their purchase objectives.

Customer Data Unification: Diversity is the cornerstone of a successful omnichannel CX delivery strategy, and today, more than half the businesses use at least eight channels to interact with their customers. A CDP should be capable of spearheading an effective information fusion strategy, pulling data from all channels, using event-based triggers into a single, interactive repository. The information pool should provide a reliable base for powering a broad spectrum of marketing use cases, from customer segmentation, acquisition, conversion to retention.

Data Sharing: The data contained within the CDP environment should be accessible to the other MarTech applications operating downstream. For instance, the demographics data correlated with the cost sensitivity insights of the prospective customers in CDP should guide the Campaign Management System on how to best appeal to the target audience.

Limitless Analytics: On top of all the digital engineering complexities under its hood, a CDP should be layered by enabling analytics. In fact, 90% of the global executives are dependent on data analytics to drive great CX, and 65% consider it vital to mission success. The visibility layer of CDP should enable enterprise decision-makers to discover a nonlinear correlation between divergent trends and patterns, allowing brands to connect meaningfully with customer requirements.

CDP In Action

But how can CDP bring the desired strategic and tactical depth for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging personalized CX? Perhaps this can be best understood in the context of the highly competitive Hospitality & Travel Industry manifesting solid signs of recovery as the COVID wave ebbs down. Here, customers interact with businesses across multiple touchpoints, including reservations and ticketing, check-ins, baggage information, airport information, passenger refunds, notifications, payment information, website traffic, and social media analysis, generating massive volumes of data in real-time or near real-time.

In the pre-travel phase, if a customer tweets or posts inquiring about beach destinations in an open social media forum, CDP can quickly align it with their previous bookings and purchase history and the trending beach destinations data to target the customer with preferred beach destination-related campaigns or offers, improving the conversion probabilities. Similarly, an airline can enrich the in-flight experience by tapping into the past ancillary bookings data and discovering attributes like the customer’s preferred cuisine, seating orientation, travel companions, and budget. Then, suitable offers can be pushed upfront to ensure that the traveler makes purchases that are most likely to make the trip enjoyable.

Also, CDP running on actual event-based scenarios can play a pivotal role in pre-empting negative experiences or compensating them early to prevent adverse brand impacts. For instance, in case of flight delays, customers can be offered relevant gift vouchers based on their social media activities as compensation, or their cab and hotel bookings can be auto-adjusted accordingly to deliver a one-order experience. Cost-conscious travelers considering themselves overcharged can be given a proactive price alert on their next booking, and apology emails can be issued to prevent a dip in the CSAT score.

Conclusion

The potential of CDP is not just limited to delivering a single customer view but helping organizations with the insights to put it into effect, elevating brand image. It helps companies target the right customer segments, user journeys, conversations, and response timing to improve customer lifetime value (CLV) and prevent churns. However, in an omnichannel environment, with an experienced digital engineering and analytics partner, businesses can effectively shape their CDP assets into a tool for revenue growth, even amidst wide-scale market disruptions.

Sources: Emplifi.io, v12data.com, sharpencx.com, Salesforce, Zoominfo, Forbes, hospitalitynet.org, Gartner.

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The year 2020 has been a point of inflexion, triggering an irreversible shift in how businesses and their customers interact and how value is perceived. Salesforce portrays the switch, reporting that 60% of interactions are currently taking place online, and 83% of customers expect flexible shipping and fulfillment options. Consequently, digital commerce, which was already in a solid stride before the COVID-19 landfall, has been thrown into top gear by the pandemic-induced changes, creating massive opportunities for growth and leaving businesses clamoring to keep pace. For instance, according to ‘DigitalCommerce360’, online retail sales surged 39% in Q1 2021. In response, enterprises must rapidly adapt by reinventing their organizations, culture, and technology landscapes to deliver agility and relevance.

Businesses are indeed alive to the demands of the New Normal and are not shy of joining the Digital Commerce bandwagon. Hampleton Partners observed accelerated M&A activities in the space, recording a phenomenal $117 billion in disclosed transactions. For example, a study using the EY Embryonic Platform found that May to July 2020 pulled in over $10 billion worth of investment into the retail vertical covering diverse initiatives including expanded logistics capabilities, asset-lite facilities, dark-stores established exclusively for online shopping, and digital leverages like AI and Blockchain.

Digital commerce and online buying behavior steering the shift in retail

In a closely contested space like retail, now twice as many insiders identify digital commerce as a long-term strategic priority compared to the pre-pandemic era. The trend is reflected by the fact that despite rising vaccination rates, collapsing daily average infections, and economies across the states consistently opening up, Americans are still bullish on online shopping channels, accounting for at least 20% of all retail purchases. Clearly, the businesses are in for a long haul, and HBR notes that retailers need to look beyond just investments and find out the enabling customer experience (CX) that can differentiate them against the competition.

With the decade’s worth of projected growth materializing within a quarter in 2020, the ground realities are, of course, lucid and remain primed for disruption. Here retailers looking to recalibrate their digital commerce roadmaps and elevate revenue stands to benefit from integrated solutions that can constantly contextualize and deliver customer-centric experiences with the evolving focus of the buying behaviors and market dynamics like:

Ease of payment: With more than 77% of the Gen Z-ers looking for new ways to consume existing products and services, purchase decisions are made by much more than just affordability. Price is no longer the only deciding factor in how an online retail customer perceives a brand. The ease of payment, integration with the customer’s preferred banking channels and wallets are also emerging as significant determinants for customer stickiness. In fact, ‘CustomerThink.com’ found that nearly 50% of consumers who can’t use their preferred payment method are likely to abandon a purchase. Further, 70% of the online shoppers confessed that the checkout experience is their most persisting pain point.

Here investments in integrating with multiple payment gateways at a lower per dollar spent commission can improve the checkout experience for the customers, keeping them engaged and loyal. Also, Gartner reveals that seamless digital payment methods, discount vouchers, and hassle-free refunds to the actual source of payment can instill higher confidence in online shopping for at least 36% of the customers.

Last-mile fulfillment: The New Normal has indeed raised the bar higher on the door-step delivery of products and services, and consumers today are equally focused on accessibility and convenience as they are on affordability, if not more. Fitness equipment, streaming devices, white goods, etc., were traditionally purchased offline after a thorough comparison of their price and features. But at present, there has been a pronounced spike in the purchase of these products through digital commerce and online delivery channels.

A study found that 79% of the US consumers are not ready to compromise on the delivery of their purchases due to COVID-related disruptions, indicating that it is no longer a reasonable excuse for service outages and unavailability. To stay competitive, retailers can no longer consider fulfillment in isolation and must imagine it as the cornerstone of high-quality customer experience. It calls for integrated logistics support and WMS availability across geographies that can be leveraged on-demand to ensure end-to-end coverage of the fulfillment workloads with high reliability.

Omnichannel engagement: In the pre-pandemic years, consumers preferred to speak with a customer support agent for clarifications. But in the New Normal, since there are fewer support agents accessible due to the inherent change in the nature of work, most of the queries are being serviced by websites/mobile apps and chatbots. However, this has also made the customer extremely aspirational. Now they expect to engage with the brands of their choice via mobile or web, online marketplaces, or even via social platforms.

Today, 83% of customers want to interact immediately with a service agent while connecting with a brand, up from 78% in 2019. Also, 68% of the customers expect businesses to demonstrate empathy. In fact, now, customers turn to an average of nine channels to browse product listings, get educated and make purchases. Therefore, the retailers must resolutely invest in an omnichannel CX strategy. Digital solutions that can successfully establish a single source of truth for engagement across all channels and make the personalized and contextual delivery of experience possible can improve customer satisfaction and improve churn rate.

The contemporary omnichannel world promises exponential growth in businesses’ opportunities to engage, sell, and improve revenue realizations. Nevertheless, retailers must understand that each digital commerce channel will present its unique challenges in improving customer experience. Website designs may allow only so much content to drive informative conservations among consumers for high-consideration purchases. Mobile commerce might limit the branding elements necessary to build ongoing affinity. A lack of tech maturity might undermine efforts to deliver a good experience via social marketing.

The challenges can be further aggravated by the choices and preferences of the customers who are likely to engage with businesses in multiple formats and across multiple touchpoints, making the pursuit of an excellent customer experience one that needs to weave together information from disparate sources. Here a business can pull ahead of the competition with the right digital engineering acumen and impactful experience delivery capabilities that strikes a chord with the customers, evoking positive brand sentiments, compelling them to revisit, and of course, repurchase!

Conclusion

The happenings of the last 18 months have driven one of the sharpest growth in the digital commerce vertical. They have projected broad-based and observable shifts, from payment methods, supply chains, and distribution networks to consumption behaviors. For example, several manufacturers turned to Direct-to-Consumer platforms with uncertainty in the supply and distribution operations. Likewise, as more and more brick-and-mortar stores went online, even consumers adapted by opting for curbside pick-up trends across different categories. But regardless of how consumer behavior and preferences continue to evolve, to stay competitive, the retailers must attempt to use the current tailwind brought by the new digital commerce dynamics to foster enduring customer relationships that can stand the test of a disruptive future.

Sources: Salesforce, DigitalCommerce360, Hampleton Partners, Harvard Business Review, CustomerThink, Shopify, Gartner.

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