Once you’ve waded through the glossy brochures and the promises to select your software solution(s), you will have taken the first big step down the road to ensure your commerce success. But pretty quickly you’ll realise this is just the starting point.
So what are the other ingredients you’ll need? We call them the six Ps and want to help you navigate why each is an important factor for your business to consider.
People
We all need a champion with clarity of vision, and relentless focus on customer experience. If you can combine this with an experienced solution implementation partner, like Aligent, you have a combination that can achieve great results. However within client organisations much of the internal team knowledge can be latent and unrecognised, and it requires the champion and SI combination to extract it for the project’s success.
Process
Start with your vision for success, and then work to define where value will be delivered in your business processes and customer relationships. Identify low-value interactions for opportunities to increase efficiencies and high-value interactions that can be enriched to strengthen relationships. It’s worth actually talking to customers as well – understanding how they want to work with you can provide valuable insights.
Plumbing
There is no perfect, standalone “one tool to rule them all” – unless you are willing to compromise your customer experience to instead suit the software’s native flows.
Instead, a well-architected system using “best of breed” applications with a deep understanding of their integration capabilities can enable you to achieve your unique customer experience. This has been recognised in the rise of composable commerce.
“By 2023, organisations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80 per cent in the speed of new feature implementation.” – Gartner.
Patience
Don’t try and boil the ocean – it’s ok, and even prudent, to have a multi-phase delivery plan. This allows you to incrementally build value through the process of ‘plan, do, check, act, and repeat’ with data and learnings informing your decisions.
Persistence
There will be obstacles. There will be unexpected elements. You will need coffee. Work with an experienced solution implementer to identify risks, and prepare your stakeholders early and frequently to offset panic of the unknown. Vertically slicing work can also offset risk by building incremental, testable components that can be validated and give stakeholders reassurance of progress.
Partnership
Relationships are built on trust which requires transparency and vulnerability – but if you’re all working to the same goals and measurements of success, having the hard conversations doesn’t need to be avoided. Choosing a solution implementer can be a lot like hiring a new employee: experience counts, but finding cultural alignment can ensure a long-term partnership.
Who is Aligent?
Awarded 2022 VIP Agency Partner Of The Year, Aligent is a team of 115+ e-commerce experts, delivering world-leading experiences for audiences of all different backgrounds and requirements.
The company has a recognised strong track record of well-engineered, performant and scalable e-commerce experiences that deliver best-in-class performance at every level and have been internationally awarded year after year.
About the author: Joel Sanders is sales and marketing manager at Aligent Consulting. contact@aligent.com.au. www.aligent.com.au
