Three Strategic Shifts to Reinvent Your Commerce Operations

How do you know when a prospect is in the market for your product or service, right now? You have to deeply understand customer context and act on it to gain trust. Trust, not attention, is the competitive advantage in today’s market. 

Customers are wary of organizations' disruptive tactics to gain attention. Instead, they want relevance and to feel heard through authentic communication, leading to customer trust and loyalty. The benefit to organizations is clear—customers who are emotionally connected to an organization have a 306% higher lifetime value¹.

Organizations must focus on quickly understanding and acting on customer context to gain trust. As digital interactions become more nuanced and informed by customer intent, traditional commerce architectures struggle to keep pace. If agility isn’t possible with your current commerce architecture, it’s time for a new solution.

HCL Commerce+ is a composable, context-aware solution enabling intelligent engagement without sacrificing performance or scalability. Our integrated, composable commerce solution allows you to launch new experiences quickly, seamlessly integrate with existing systems, and stay ahead of change—all at an optimized TCO.

To chart a path forward, you must first understand what’s holding you back. We’ve identified common signals that your current platform might be limiting your growth.

Signs Your Platform Is Holding You Back

To improve conversions and build lasting relationships, your commerce solution must rapidly interpret complex customer signals and deliver real-time, personalized responses while respecting privacy. However, it’s difficult for traditional architectures to carry out these actions. Monolithic platforms lack the agility to respond quickly, while microservices introduce operational complexity that impedes innovation.

If your organization experiences any of these challenges, it’s time to consider a shift:

• Performance bottlenecks: Slow response times and frequent downtimes, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
• Limited scalability: Difficulty handling peak traffic, expanding to new regions, or supporting new business models.
• High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Rising costs due to licensing fees, custom development, and maintenance expenses.
• Lack of omnichannel capabilities: Inability to integrate seamlessly with mobile, in-store, and marketplace sales channels.
• Difficult upgrades and maintenance: Monolithic architecture requires extensive resources for updates and enhancements.

Don’t let your architecture hold you back. You need a solution that delivers a minimum viable product in a fraction of the time, allowing you to realize value while iterating in response to customer interactions. HCL Commerce+ provides this solution, augmenting your commerce solution through one of three shifts.

Architectural Shift

Legacy monolithic platforms are limited, while microservices are complex. Shifting your architecture enables you to adopt a composable solution with modular Packaged Business Components (PBCs), such as HCL Commerce+, for faster deployments and flexible scaling.  A PBC is a self-contained, prebuilt, reusable unit of capabilities designed to carry out a specific business function. PBCs offer the benefits of composability without the overhead of managing multiple isolated services. A PBC has six defined dimensions:

• Headless: Reduce cost and time to market with included storefronts supporting B2B, B2C, and B2B2C
• User tooling: Persona-based experiences for all component workflows
• SaaS: Reduce costs for implementation and operations with a cloud or hybrid deployment, and always operate on the most updated version
• Integration: Faster time to value with easy integration to other commerce components
• Multichannel: Increase revenue by reaching customers where they are and acquiring new customers
• Composability: Reduce startup and implementation costs by optimizing your technology budget

Interoperability is at the forefront of HCL Commerce+. API-first integration across all PBCs ensures communication and functionality across all installed components, regardless of vendor. Use the components that meet your needs while enjoying the option to integrate best-of-breed capabilities where it matters most for your organization. 

Engagement Shift

Our goal is for you to achieve velocity from idea to implementation, with the lowest possible risk in the shortest possible time. Our collaborative engagement shift follows a strategic roadmap, aligning business and IT in every phase of transformation to ensure the best outcome for your organization.

Our strategic roadmap includes:

• Define the end-state solution: Gather input from multiple stakeholders to understand your vision and goals.
• Assess current software: Determine what is working, what you need to replace, and what you are not using.
• Cloud deployment: In many cases, our customers deploy on our SaaS solution to enjoy automatic upgrades and simple usability. However, we offer flexible deployment methods.
• Optimized TCO: Align your software capabilities and deployment method with your business goals and needs to ensure you only pay for what you need.

Examples of how your organization may leverage our solution to gain velocity include launching new products and markets, targeting new business models, preparing for competition and industry disruption, or optimizing organizational efficiency. The HCLSoftware team works with you when your organizational outcomes are well-defined to ensure you get the most out of your software investment.

Operational Shift

Keeping pace with customer expectations and market changes is a significant challenge. A strategic shift in your commerce solution allows you to focus on customers and innovation. With HCL Commerce+, you have options for operating your commerce environment.

• Composable SaaS: Manage your environment internally with our fully integrated solution. Enjoy reduced downtime with automatic upgrades, embedded AI/ML to boost conversions, role-based dashboards, and seamless integrations.
• Build: Your team works alongside our experts to define, design, and implement commerce experiences that fit your organization’s needs.
• Run: Our experts maintain your environment, backed by SLAs, to ensure security, optimization, and updates.
• Operate: Optimize your resources, enable easier scalability, and focus on innovation and customer experience when you partner with us for end-to-end managed services.

Leveraging professional services enables you to focus on driving value and delivering an exceptional customer experience while deploying a flexible solution in a way that best fits your needs.

The Power of Shifting

Reinventing your commerce operations doesn’t require a complete overhaul, but it does require strategic shifts. With HCL Commerce+, you can unlock agility, optimize costs, and build trust that drives long-term loyalty. Whether you’re reimagining your architecture, your engagement model, or your operations, we’re ready to help you shift with confidence. See how easy it is to shift with HCL Commerce+ - schedule a call today.

References:

1. https://martech.org/7-ways-to-boost-customers-emotional-connection-and-loyalty-with-your-brand/