While many stay-at-home orders have been lifted, consumers’ new digital buying behaviors and habits are here to stay. Watch our panel discussion on the accelerated need for commerce and learn how commerce and content can transform our digital economy.
Topics include:
-What is the “experience economy” and how do you leverage it? -If you move beyond product and price, what’s next?
-How business models have shifted and what you can do to break down silos and leverage new processes to capture the digital dollar.
-How organizations have built agile teams to address the ever-changing needs of customers, including responsive approaches that address the omnichannel consumer.
-Technologies that are best suited to enable your business and customers – and how headless commerce has changed the game.
-How the future of commerce is changing, and what you should do now to prepare.
Our panel features Jordan Jewell, IDC Research analyst known for his insight into the commerce industry. Joining him from Perficient is general manager Brian Beckham, who brings deep expertise in content management and empowering organizations in their digital transformations. Rounding out the panel is Episerver’s Joey Moore, who has spent the last decade helping organizations across the globe advance their digital maturity.
3 Minutes
I’ll quickly walk through these. For each slide, I will present IDC’s opinion, and accompanying research, and then open it up to Brian and Joey to provide their input on behalf of Perficient and Episerver.
#1 – Will look at survey data IDC has on COVID and the future of business
#2 – We’ll drill into the future of digital customer experiences specifically and about how empathy is critical in the current market
#3 – From there we will define the experience economy and how
#4 – Next, we’ll walk through the chapters of digital transformation according to IDC, and how digital experiences align to this model
#5 – As we all know, COVID had drastically changed to the trajectory of many markets – we’ll look specifically what the impact has been on digital commerce
#6 – With this in mind, we’ll look at what technologies organizations need to to provide engaging digital experiences
#7 – For our final panel discussion, we will choose the most important factors in delivering digital experiences
#8 – I’ll walk through some predictions for the content and commerce market
#9 – Provide takeaways from this presentation
All of the slides with a red ring will be panel discussion.
Transition – With that in mind, let’s walk through how IDC envisions the future of business
3 Minutes
Jordan: These graphic represents how IDC looks at the future of is business. In the midst of COVID, survey respondents highlighted the importance of delivering excellent (digital) customer experiences sown at the top. Noteworthy:
FOCC – my group
FODI – in house development of solutions
FOW – huge implications from COVID and WFH
FOT – Security and data ownership
We conduct a bi-weekly survey at IDC. On the right we see results from one of those surveys early on, just before most of the US initiated a lockdown. Organizations were asked to assign an importance ranking, between 1 and 4, for each of the areas on the left. Unsurprisingly, customer experience programs showed up as the 2nd most important area, only behind operational resiliency. Organizations clearly understand that
Transition – With this backdrop, let's look specifically at the "Future of customers and consumers" area.
5 Minutes
Jordan: Overview of FoCC, survey responses.
Joey: Agility as a strategy
Hand off to Brian
Brian: Empathy at scale and delivery of pizza
MENTION: Breaking down of siloes
Transition -
5 Minutes
Jordan (IDC POV)
This term is thrown around a lot and everyone is talking about everything in the theme of “experiences”. But what does this actually mean?
This may surprise many of you, but the term “Experience Economy” was first used in 1998 – long before digital experiences were a formal strategy.
Vs. industrial, services, product economy
When I think about the experience economy, I think about Disney and about how Disney as a company is designed to make you feel. Disney doesn’t aim to deliver products, it aims to deliver joy. It does this with content, customer service, and components that go beyond the shopping cart.
Brian:
Hand off to Joey
Joey:
(end by talking about digital transformation)
Transition -
6 Minutes
Jordan: Need to summarize
IDC defines the 3rd Platform as the third stage of IT (following mainframe and client server), founded upon four pillars: cloud, social, big data/analytics, and mobile.
The 3rd Platform era kicked off around 2007, and IDC has outlined three chapters of the era. The first chapter, experimentation, describes the stage when technology forces like cloud computing and mobile were new to market and businesses and consumers began to realize the benefits. In the realm of digital commerce, this is when SaaS applications began to see adoption, and more flexible commerce deployments were developed on mobile devices and the like.
The experimentation chapter led us to the "multiplied innovation" chapter, where we currently stand. In this chapter, the potential of the 3rd Platform is being realized, with technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), and natural language processing are beginning to provide value to businesses and customers alike. In the multiplied innovation chapter, digital transformation (DX) efforts have become mainstream, with nearly all savvy businesses investing heavily to change the way they conduct business. IDC expects DX spending will only continue to grow, with total spend forecast to double over the next five years.**
The next chapter, which IDC calls "autonomy," will begin around 2023 and will be defined by innovative technologies having more scalable impacts that affect the entire organization, including all customer and employee interactions. Because of increasingly complex business and technology environments that have been constructed in the global economy, autonomous systems will become essential for B2C and B2B sellers to make educated decisions — decisions such as which product to recommend, what to discount, and who to target. The autonomy chapter will lead to most human decisions coming on top of or being assisted by machines. In the commerce world, a business might have millions of current and prospective customers to appeal to — autonomous systems will make this task more feasible.
This increasing rate of innovation can also be expressed by the speed with which technology is produced. Between 2018 and 2023, IDC forecasts that new technology platforms, more developers, agile methods, and the re-use of code will lead to the creation of 500 million new logical applications. This 5-year total is equal to the number of apps built over the past 40 years (IDC #US44403818).
Joey: For many of these technologies very much innovation phase to understand what is possible. Covid likely to have a two-fold impact on that.
Negative side, organizations will be more risk averse and focusing on BAU to get through current crisis.
Orgs that have been able to successfully invest will have given themselves a competitive advantage
Brian:
Transition – COVID has clearly fundamentally changed the makeup of this forecast period and how companies will adopt technologies. Let’s look at how the commerce market specifically is being impacted.
6 Minutes
Jordan: While retail sales do not encompass the entire market (especially not B2B), the US share of retail rales online is a good indicator of where the market is moving. Prior to COVID, eCommerce already acted as the growth driver in the retail market and was have a similar impact on other industries. Over time, we were working our way to a higher and higher share of sales occurring online. COVID accelerated this trend (as shown). We essentially “jumped” ahead of the original forecast
I have also included results for the first half of 2020 (it’s very hard to forecast by quarter) and brick-and-mortar retail took an obvious big hit. My main takeaways are that although COVID has had unpredictable impacts in the short term – this was always the long-term trend we were forecasting at IDC and organizations needed to take steps to support digital commerce – it just happened a lot more sudden that anyone predicted.
Joey: Quote UK jump in eCommerce sales
How customers will interact with businesses and organizations has undergone a seismic shift. In reality an acceleration of what was likely to happen much later on. Some of these consumers will revert back to brick and mortar but many others will enjoy the convenience that digital commerce has brought them.
Brian: (Talk about B2B commerce?)
Transition – With these data points in mind about where the broader commerce market is going, let’s home in on
5 Minutes
Jordan: This is a somewhat commerce-centric view of the digital commerce platforms space. The main takeaway here
Joey: What makes up a comprehensive platform is ever evolving so be sure to understand your vendors roadmap but also the understand how the platform can be extended to meet unique requirements for your business and your customers
Transition – Now that we have talked about the functional applications that act as building blocks to build a digital experience platform. Let’s zoom out at a high level about the areas IDC sees as the most important in delivering a great digital experience.
8 Minutes
Jordan gives overview – all of these are important to deliver a captivating digital experience.
Jordan’s highlights (2 minutes):
Omni-Experiences: Need to deliver experiences that feel the same across different touchpoints
Security & Trust: Trust is the main currency in the digital economy
Frictionless Commerce: B2B and B2C buyers expect easy buying experiences, where they can find what they want quickly, without having to browse the whole catalog, and checkout. Strong search, product information and content, payments, and order flexibility play towards frictionless commerce.
Joey (2 Minutes)
Personalization: 2-fold effect on customer experience and the ability to scale experiences
Content Intelligence: You have to understand if what you are creating is resonating with your audience and then use that intelligence to drive…
Content Engine: It’s the way organizations can differentiate. What you say and what you do is your brand.
Brian (2 Minutes)
Content Engine:
Development Tools:
Single Customer View:
Transition: Now is the time to invest in wholistic experiences. There’s a landgrab for the polarized consumer, those that shop purely on price and those that don’t. Pick one but pick wisely. You can’t do both and price only goes one way. We are now going to provide some predictions about how this market will play out.
3 Minutes
2 Minutes
6 Minutes
Jordan: While retail sales do not encompass the entire market (especially not B2B), the US share of retail rales online is a good indicator of where the market is moving. Prior to COVID, eCommerce already acted as the growth driver in the retail market and was have a similar impact on other industries. Over time, we were working our way to a higher and higher share of sales occurring online. COVID accelerated this trend (as shown). We essentially “jumped” ahead of the original forecast
I have also included results for the first half of 2020 (it’s very hard to forecast by quarter) and brick-and-mortar retail took an obvious big hit. My main takeaways are that although COVID has had unpredictable impacts in the short term – this was always the long-term trend we were forecasting at IDC and organizations needed to take steps to support digital commerce – it just happened a lot more sudden that anyone predicted.
Joey: Quote UK jump in eCommerce sales
How customers will interact with businesses and organizations has undergone a seismic shift. In reality an acceleration of what was likely to happen much later on. Some of these consumers will revert back to brick and mortar but many others will enjoy the convenience that digital commerce has brought them.
Brian: (Talk about B2B commerce?)
Transition – With these data points in mind about where the broader commerce market is going, let’s home in on