Adopting a smarter commerce strategy

Smarter commerce recognizes that the sale is just one aspect of the experience. As with traditional commerce, the customer is at the center of all operations.

The term “chief executive customer” comes to mind. More and more customers are using social networks, mobile devices, websites and influencers to make their buying decisions. There’s a digital explosion out there, and there’s no turning back. This is a $130 billion-plus market opportunity.

Marketers today continue to be confronted by a daily flood of customer data waiting to be sifted through for nuggets of intelligence, everything from Internet searches to purchase histories to Twitter comments. IBM research estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day ― so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

Once customer data has been obtained, there is the question of how it should be integrated into, and across, business processes and domains.

Many organizations have already integrated the various stages of the supply chain to reflect customer demand, drive up business agility, and drive down costs. But have they applied that idea on a larger scale, linking customer information obtained in one domain to other domains entirely ― such as marketing and customer service ― in order to create as much customer-defined value as possible?

To see how this can happen, consider the commerce cycle in terms of four essential stages: buy, market, sell and service. Smarter commerce strategies put customer interests at the center of all four.

Here are a few examples of companies that are taking a smarter commerce approach to selling by gradually reorienting the entire business model ― from how a company approaches innovation to how it designs its operations ― based on deep customer and market insights.

NS Shopping, working with IBM Korea, accelerates its enterprise-wide smarter commerce transformation with leading mobile and analytics technologies. IBM’s technology and services enable NS Shopping to uncover data insights about individual consumer preferences while developing mobile applications to deliver a consistent, connected customer experience across multiple devices. NS Shopping, which is currently selling its merchandise via television, catalogues and online, will allow the company to more easily reach shoppers wherever and whenever they prefer to browse and purchase products. This new strategy will expand significant opportunity from a broadening set of sales channels where consumers are actively connecting with retailers and providing seamless integration with the company’s operations and back-end systems.

With IBM WebSphere Commerce, NS Shopping will be able to derive insights to provide shoppers with personalized product recommendations, enabling smarter marketing and engagement with each individual consumer.

NS Shopping will be able to draw a centralized, real-time view of customer and product data from across the company to better manage its supply chain and ensure effective order fulfillment. This visibility will give NS Shopping the insight and abilities it needs to further expand its product assortment to solidify its leading position as a one-stop shopping option.

Rolling out these new capabilities is also a critical step in expanding the company’s omnichannel sales platform and achieving its long- and short-term growth agendas. Using IBM’s MobileFirst Platform, NS Shopping developers are able to expedite the application development lifecycle to quickly deliver valuable mobile services to customers, thus improving customer satisfaction.

A critical aspect of improving customer experiences will also be led by IBM Interactive, a leading global digital agency, which will strategize and implement improvements to the user experience on NS Shopping’s online properties.

IBM Interactive will focus on both the creative and digital components of NS Shopping’s Web-based and mobile platforms and will design a renewed look and feel to not only deliver a differentiated shopping experience, but also strengthen the retailer’s brand image and customer engagement.

Best Buy needed to synchronize the view of the customer in real time and link it back to call centers and personalize their attention, offers and services to the customer. They needed to understand the specifics in local markets and analyze it. So, Best Buy turned to IBM to help create an operating model that can take advantage of this intelligent data in a way that allows them to serve customers in a differentiated fashion.

After Best Buy adopted Unica, IBM’s software solution for marketing automation, it has improved speed-to-market by defining, establishing, testing, implementing and analyzing all kinds of marketing programs via email, direct messages, call centers and the Internet. It also increased the size of its campaigns and improved functions from marketing campaign support to predictive modeling, which can be flexibly expanded according to the growth of the organization.

Companies need to invent new ways to engage with people beyond merely selling products and services. CMOs also need to understand how a company’s values and purpose impact the brand and consider the company’s culture as part of their portfolio. For instance, IBM launched a Customer Experience Lab which blends research innovation with business consulting to serve the priorities of its top executives.

The lab also helps gain customer insights to make better business decisions and offer optimized and consistent customer experience within the smarter commerce cycle. For example, the IBM Industry Solution Lab ― Retail Center of Excellence in La Guade, France, conducts research on universal imperatives that every retailer has to get right to play a winning game. It also offers solutions for smarter shopping experiences, smarter merchandising and supply networks and smarter operations for our clients in the era of individual customers.

The true value with smarter commerce is connecting all the key processes to make the business flow smoothly, efficiently and to provide a consistent customer experience. As part of its smarter commerce initiative, IBM has also released several solutions aimed at delivering a consistent experience across multiple retail touch-points to “omni-channel” shoppers ― or consumers who expect a consistent sales and marketing experience across all channels they use.

One size does not fit all, however. IBM’s long-term strategy is to continue to develop and offer integrated smarter commerce solutions that address the specific “buy, market, sell and service” functions that make up the overall commerce process.

It’s this combination of big data, cloud, mobile and social business ― all enabled by technology ― that lies at the heart of better business performance for companies in 2013 and beyond.

By Kim Young-ho

The writer is a partner and smarter commerce leader at Global Business Services, IBM Korea. The opinions reflected in the article are his own. ― Ed.