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Revitalizing e-commerce excellence: a comprehensive digital transformation journey
Our client, a leading global B2B parts retailer, has expanded globally through both organic growth and strategic acquisitions. The company offers a wide range of products with a focus on exceptional logistics and customer service.
However, their legacy application architecture, which has been adapted in bits and pieces over time to meet evolving business and client needs, has resulted in a complex and unmanageable IT landscape. This complexity has resulted in suboptimal system performance, limited agility, increased manual errors, and challenges in managing the outdated infrastructure.
In response, the company has launched a comprehensive digital transformation program to future-proof the organization. This initiative involves aligning the technology architecture, refining processes, and optimizing the overall organizational structure.
Challenge
Approximately 80% of the client’s revenue comes from online sources, particularly 75% from e-commerce. Therefore, the impact of the new back-end application, and more specifically its integration with the e-commerce system, is significant. To tackle this, the client sought support in designing new order-to-cash (OTC) processes, identifying technical gaps, and translating these insights into customer-centric designs.
The transformation of the back-end systems presented an opportunity to revamp the outdated e-commerce platform and deliver an improved customer experience. The major challenge with the legacy e-commerce platform was its poor performance, which resulted in extended load times and customer dissatisfaction. Furthermore, the system and the design did not meet customer needs. During the checkout process, the client was lacking information on the final freight cost and delivery date. Instead of selecting a desired shipping option, they needed to select a specific carrier from a long list.
Customer feedback highlighted the need for a more convenient freight method selection and increased transparency regarding freight cost and delivery dates. With a commitment to excel in customer-facing capabilities and stand out in the market, the client aimed to address these challenges. Innovation and adherence to market standards were prioritized to ensure a superior customer experience.
We assessed end-to-end processes, challenging the existing approach. We pushed for global standardization and simplified processes, ensuring a seamless customer experience aligned with their needs.
Approach
We employed our proven six-step approach to define and roll-out a modern, customer-centric e-commerce platform:
AS-IS Diagnostics: Assess the current e-commerce setup and customer journey, as well as define the client’s vision and strategy on the future of e-commerce for its organisation. Identify current value drivers and areas where the client stands out in the market, serving as focus for the TO-BE.
Map New Processes: Analyze and define new order-to-cash (OTC) processes through workshops. Establish uniform global processes and articulate a common understanding of customer experience, through customer journeys, that will ensure alignment across business stakeholders.
Design + Feasibility: Design e-commerce platform mock-ups with a specific focus on the OTC funnel. Take into account both technical constraints and opportunities presented by the new back-end system, while never losing sight of the customer impact throughout the design process.
Iterative Client Validation: A key success factor was to work in small increments, and iterate frequently on the designs with key stakeholders, so adjustments could be made quickly.
Implementation: Continuous alignment with the client’s implementation partner during the build and roll out the new e-commerce platform. Not only to track project progress, but to ensure questions, constraints and risks were addressed quickly. Furthermore, this allowed to test the e-commerce platform and its integration with the back-end systems first hand, ensuring quality before moving to User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
Go Live + Next Steps: After the go-live, keep track of flaws due to technical immaturity and outline next steps for design optimization in later phases. Start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and prioritize continuous innovation to stay ahead in the market.
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Impact
At the start of the project, the impact of the transformation on e-commerce was unclear. Crucial stakeholders like the e-commerce team and UX designers were initially left out. Recognizing their importance (as the core revenue stream), we addressed the gapsand conveyed e-commerce expectations. This led to refined user journeys for an improved e-commerce platform UX.
We assessed end-to-end processes, challenging the existing approach. We pushed for global standardization and simplified processes, ensuring a seamless customer experience aligned with their needs. Amid this transformation, maintaining this customer focus was crucial.
Other achievements from the project:
Freight cost and delivery date transparency: At one glance a customer can see the different shipping options, the according freight cost, as well as the delivery date of the goods.
Free shipping bar: We introduced a free shipping bar, showing the customer what he must add to their basket to get free shipping.
Scheduled orders: The new system allows customers to plan their orders, thereby making sure they can receive their order on arrival.
Faster conversion thanks to a straightforward and self-explaining checkout. The number of steps is reduced, and we used high customization. By automatically filling in their preferences (shipping address – shipping method – payment method) the checkout process goes very smoothly, creating a platform that can be used efficiently for placing orders.
Order tracking: Once the order has been placed, the customer can easily follow up his order thanks to the visuals and links to track-and-trace codes. When a problem occurs with an item or an order, this is communicated and followed up via the e-commerce system.
