maio 27, 2024
If anything is clear, in the current lexicon of retail transformation, the word “agility” is going to be the word of the day every day. At Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, the defining annual event on composable commerce presented by commercetools, retail industry leaders gathered en masse around the critical importance of building lasting customer relationships, all while exploring emerging technology, evolving consumer preferences and global trends.
During the summit, which took place April 16-18 in Miami Beach, Valtech, a trailblazer in ecommerce solutions and digital innovation, took a prominent role leading insightful conversations about the exciting possibilities that composable technologies bring to the customer experience table.
Chipping away at the monolith
At the session “ISC2’s Evolution — Transitioning from Monolithic to Composable with Valtech,” Michael Rasmussen (VP, Composable Practice, Valtech) enjoyed a candid conversation with Richard Shandelman (VP, Technology, ISC2) about the decision-making process behind ISC2’s desire to transition away from a dependence on multiple monolithic platforms and their move towards a more adaptable composable architecture. Specifically, how going from platform-first to customer-first is unlocking value for ISC2.
Rasmussen pointed to multiple detours on their customers’ journey in the past: the reliance on separate platforms for purchasing memberships, signing up for courses, and paying for professional certification exams. It created a disjointed process that saw customers having to go to different sites to manage different parts of their relationship with the company. For Valtech, the solution lay in leveraging a single commerce platform that can support all of those different journeys, folding it all into one experience.
“For example,” says Rasmussen, “the simple idea that if you sign up for a class and a certification, and you can add both of those things to your cart at the same time, maybe I can give you 10% off. But I can also say, ‘Oh, and by the way, now that you’re in the cart buying this course, you probably want to become a member,’ so you can upsell into a membership opportunity. They couldn’t do that before because they’d have to send you to some other tool on some other platform.
“So really, this story is about how [Valtech is] starting to lay the foundation for streamlining the customer experience and the interactions… those things that really drive revenue.”
Smoothing bumps along the customer journey
In the Q&A “Composable Commerce & Organizational Design — Building an Organization After Embarking on a Digital Transformation to Composable,” Rasmussen and fellow panel members delved into how to build an engineering organization that aligns with composable thinking. They touched on the reasons why engineering organizations and retailers are maturing away from the idea of building a team around a monolithic platform.
The predominant theme that came out of the discussion was that the engineering team members on the panel were not organized around rigid platforms anymore. They were organized around features and capabilities, and rather than trying to figure out how to adapt a platform to their business, they were figuring out how to be customer-first.
Take the example of an organization that decouples the engineering team from the platform that they’ve been focusing on. That enables the team to turn their attention to developing features — perhaps a better checkout or catalogue experience for the customer — and building analytics-based, data-driven solutions that tell them where customers struggle and don’t convert as often.
If an engineering team can say, “This tool that we’re using isn’t working very well to solve this problem, let’s go get a different tool to solve this problem, let’s swap in parts and pieces,” they’ve got a significant competitive edge, says Rasmussen. “Which is really the composable story to begin with. If something isn’t working, I can take out this small thing and put in some other small thing that works better to smooth this particular part of the journey.”
3 key takeaways
1) Composable architecture allows organizations to abandon restrictive monolithic platforms in favour of a platform that can quickly pivot to deliver customer-first solutions.
2) Leveraging a flexible platform in a composable environment means that the customer experience can be streamlined and simplified to drive revenue.
3) Especially on the engineering side, because of composable architecture, organizations can quickly leverage customer data that has been collected to make meaningful decisions.
Accelerate your retail strategy by staying engaged with the captivating and ever-evolving conversation around composable commerce. Find out more about the latest trends, insights, actions and events by checking out the Valtech blog regularly.