5 Steps to Digital Transformation For E-Commerce Businesses

You have been hearing a lot about digital transformation. It's probably the hottest topic for e-commerce businesses, b2b industry leaders, and of course technocrats. The B2B e-commerce market is projected to be two times bigger than the B2C market in 2020. In fact, it’s expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.1% from 2018 to 2025 and will reach up to $24,265.12 billion by 2025. The rise of the global e-commerce market can be associated with the following factors including:

• Technological advances in the e-commerce industry
• Increasing usage of mobile and internet in the industry
• Advanced e-commerce solutions for customer experience management 

Digital transformation is accelerating the market context for every e-commerce business. Digitalization is the main cause of large-scale business transformations across multiple platforms of b2b business, ensuring unprecedented opportunities for profit creation and market capture. E-commerce companies across the world are taking benefit of the strategic implications of these digital transformations for their b2b e-commerce organizations, industry ecosystems, and business operations.

Digital Transformation for b2b commerce means ensuring exceptional customer experiences powered by new technologies. Here's what you should consider for a successful digital transformation:

5 Steps To Digital Transformation in E-commerce Industry

Step 1: Identify Your Digital Transformation Goals

As you look for digital transformation in your e-commerce business, it’s important for any business to look at its strategy in terms of profits and outcomes. Digital customer experience is also a vital part of your transformation story. When re-designing of your entire business models, businesses should focus on these following areas:

• Aim to improve your end-user experience to increase productivity and customer retention.
• Focus on digital transformation processes to reduce operations costs and differentiate services.
• Gain insight and control over digital assets to reduce complexity in business operations.
• Improving your infrastructure and operations to improve cost-effectiveness and flexibility.
• Control over analytics to gain insights for improving business efficiencies and gain competitive advantage.

Step 2: Managing Your Customer Experience Strategy

The customer experience (CX) is the outcome of the efforts you made to make a customer happy. It impacts the entire lifetime relationship of a client with your brand including the key factors such as customer service, social connection, product quality, post-purchase feedback services, etc. But the important is how memorable these experiences are for your customer.

Thus, it’s important for e-commerce companies to ensure the best customer experience management through customer experience management tools like CEM for tracking and organizing all consumer interactions. These tools have the capability to achieve it through its integration quality with other software solutions such as personalization tools and A/B testing tools, content management systems, recommendation tools, customer data platforms, usability tools, etc. 

It will help a business to focus on the needs of its customers. The customer experience strategy is meant to fill the gap between the desired customer experience and the actual customer experience. To help with this, here are top CEM software that you can use to collect and analyze customer feedback. 

Gainsight: A SaaS-based application that collects customer data from multiple sources and turn them into insights and actions to give you measurable business outcomes.

Qualtrics: A software for collecting customer feedback and analyzing their comments and recommended actions to help organizations for continuous improvement.

Genesys Engage: The omnichannel and multi-cloud software solution that ensures the best customer experience management for large-scale businesses.

Zendesk: A customer engagement software that is easy to implement and quickly scales to the business changing needs for customer experience management. 

Step 3: Implementing New Technology Solutions

The next step to consider for your digital transformation is to implement new technology in your e-commerce business. You should also be fully aware of how to leverage the benefits of technology in the b2b market. Look beyond your old stack of tools and implement the new-gen technologies including AI for product recommendations, personas, and context, machine learning for automation and human-machine collaboration, the Internet of Things for connected devices, cybersecurity for secured transactions, and wearable devices. 

The cybersecurity solutions are the most important technology trend to consider in 2020 for e-commerce companies because when new technologies are not secure to use, the cybersecurity solutions allow you to implement appropriate security controls.

In addition to these more recent technologies, wearable technologies and cloud is evolving rapidly and embracing broader concepts of data storage such as software-enabled data centers. All these new and evolving technologies now serve as the fundamental blocks of a digital transformation ecosystem of on-demand services. Hence, it is vital to implement these technologies to your e-commerce for digital transformation, as they can help your business to maximize benefits and unlock new forms of benefits in the years ahead.

Step 4: Execute a New Journey to Virtual Platforms 

For a digital e-commerce business, the key facet of success is the virtual reality that allows you to see whatever you may think of in a virtual showroom. However top e-commerce brands are investing heavily in virtual tools based on the customer-focused strategy like virtual wardrobes, real-world experience of product color, sizing, and measurement. All this has really impacted digital transformation in the e-commerce business domain.

Beyond this, the implementation of virtual reality is also useful for customer service and hence this is something that you may have to consider for digital transformation in your business.  Finally, in terms of virtual platforms, business leaders from the e-commerce industry don’t have to reinvent business models to execute digital transformation initiatives. You can use existing VR/AR tools to complete innovation mechanisms for a new level of interaction for customers. 

The virtual platforms give you customers the ability to understand how your store will physically look that they can visit by pressing a button and see it for themselves.

Step 5: Be Ready for Digital Innovation 

Having digital transformation for e-commerce business as described earlier, organizations will select the appropriate disruptive and emerging technologies based on their specific business needs. The future e-commerce platforms will be based on a highly virtualized and technology-enabled ecosystem of services. The digital innovation services will be selected for role-specific business models and as per business needs. 

In addition to this business leaders can, therefore, select from the array of options based on their specific needs. For example, for having the digital customer experience you need a set of tools with omnichannel capabilities customer experience management and data analytics. 

Speaking more broadly, choosing the set of technology will be based on an understanding of the key attributes of an e-commerce business. This will ensure a world-class experience as required for the digital transformation in the b2b e-commerce industry.

Final Words

All e-commerce companies should know about these 5 steps to digital transformation. These steps aren’t static, but supports an ongoing process that is always in demand. That’s why it’s of utmost importance and your team keeps learning about these steps all the time. These steps should be the core focus of your company for a successful digital transformation.