Creating an Empathy-Driven Member Experience with Magento
13000+ new member acquisition in 4 just months by implementing a modern and robust e-commerce platform for American Chemical Society (ACS)
To grow and sustain in this digital world, membership-driven businesses need to go beyond just selling products or services—they need to have a holistic engagement solution that works according to member preferences and past activities. Having personalized and integrated content is essential to build long-term brand affinity. Business processes need to be redefined, and methods to build upon holistic data need to be established.
American Chemical Society (ACS), one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific organizations, wanted to reinvent themselves in the new digital world. They provided their members with many valuable products and benefits, but the process of selling and fulfillment was fragmented, leading to a decreasing member count and dilution of the value proposition.
ACS wanted to establish more intimate and meaningful relationships with members. There was immediate need to connect to members, deliver personalized and relevant resources and increase membership growth. However, Complicating matters, ACS had older technologies that didn’t respond to the current business needs. The applications and systems that delivered information, education, career services, professional development etc. were built in a siloed fashion. The CRM and e-commerce were primarily US-based, and not catering to their members from across the globe. The need of the hour was to build a member engagement solution that could handle everything from managing memberships and communications to delivering relevant marketing materials and selling merchandise within a single framework.
Leveraging Innover’s technology and process expertise, American Chemical Society (ACS) was able to discover a new formula for successful digital transformation and delivered empathy driven superior experience to their members. In the first phase, Innover helped ACS to recognize the need to shift to a modern and robust e-commerce platform with integrated CRM. After conducting a detailed assessment of systems and processes, Innover recommended digital solution built on open architecture and API-based integration with Adobe Magento as the core conversion platform.
Next came the ‘Art of Possible’ phase, where rapid prototyping was done to prove the value of integrated experience and frictionless conversion for executive leadership. The last phase was about getting the timing right and building and releasing an incremental solution that provides an accelerated ROI and drives successful change management. Every 2-3 months, the platform was updated by adding additional features.
Choosing the right technology was critical for the success of this project. Magento Commerce replaced the mix of existing, homegrown, and commercial systems and opened up new ways for the organization to communicate with members.Not only the solution integrated easily and smoothly with the existing ACS IT infrastructure, it also connected to other solutions, including AEM, Adobe Analytics, Target, Salesforce, MuleSoft, Eloqua, Tableau.
It was also crucial to create an implementation plan that allowed the company to build this solution with minimal impact on other priorities of the organization—Magento helped to achieve the same. This transformative change required carefully defined goals and objectives with clear success criteria, orchestrated communication, and reinforcement of value. Keeping the member experience the center of the conversation all the time helped to continuously grow this program.
The impact delivered through this transformation was huge. There has been a boost of more than 13,000 members through the introduction of in-line membership capabilities leading to increased member acquisition and growth. Other benefits resulting from the move to this platform included reducing development time for projects by approximately 50%, reducing TCO by 10%, improving privacy and cyber security controls, and introducing a framework that makes it much easier to add new features and capabilities.
A Focus on the Real-Time CDP: What makes Adobe’s solution unique
A Focus on the Real-Time CDP: What makes Adobe’s solution unique?
- AEP RT-CDP affords for the storage and querying of massive data sets — including behavioral, CRM, point-of-sale data, and more at petabyte-scale.
- AEP RT-CDP data governance tools have been utilized as part of the Adobe DMP for over a decade.
- AEP RT-CDP offers a common data model to structure data; the ability to create a robust, unified profile for every visitor to your property; create advanced attribution models; and leverage predictive analytics for digital marketing spend optimization across any channel (Adobe & non-Adobe).
Manufacturing & B2B Experience Optimization
Manufacturing and B2B organizations need to transcend their website, which may include attention-grabbing products, their services portfolio, and inspiring mission statement. Organizations need to have a robust web presence to wow the well-informed and digital-savvy customers of today by delivering relevant experiences at every stage of the customer journey. ‘Experience is possible without personalization, but one cannot have personalization without experience.’
Download and read our White Paper to get a deeper perspective on how Data, Content, and Personalization strategies can serve as an enabler for delivering Experience Optimization.
Read this White Paper and know more about how:
- Experience Optimization increases customer mindshare and attracts new customers by delivering immersive, personalized online experiences
- Experience Optimization enables real-time reporting, unified customer profiles, cross-channel coordination, and personalization at a scale
- Experience Optimization directly impacts top-line growth
Data-Driven Hyper-Personalization via A4T (ADOBE ANALYTICS + ADOBE TARGET)
Data-Driven Hyper-Personalization Via A4T (Adobe Analytics + Adobe Target) Summary
Organizations are increasingly realizing the positive impact of nurturing customer relationships that can pave the way for enhanced customer loyalty and higher customer retention. Organizations are undertaking Hyper-Personalization initiatives by leveraging omni-channel data to drive personal communication and more meaningful interactions with customers.
Download our White Paper to learn how the world’s best marketing organizations are using the Adobe A4T solution (Adobe Analytics + Adobe Target) to drive ROI via the optimization of data and content.
Read this White Paper to learn more about how:
- Integrating Adobe Analytics with Adobe Target helps eliminate reporting issues and ROI attenuation due to data variance
- A4T helps organizations connect visitor interactions across channels with a unified, progressive profile that spans an anonymous visitor to a known customer
- A4T provides a closed-loop cycle of ROI driven Hyper-Personalization
Solving Supply Chain’s Big Problems – Value Chain Visibility & Demand Matching
Supply chains, despite enhanced planning and management, are not immune to exceptional, unforeseen events. While careful planning and increased integration of technology can help in mitigating the impact and shortening delays, they are nowhere near enough to deal with global problems like the one we currently face. The Covid-19 pandemic tested and broke even the most well-established supply chain processes. However, at the same time, the challenging times also left behind some clear learnings for the industry – the need for real-time data access is one of them.
Before we look at how to fix the problem, let’s understand the main supply chain challenges most organizations face –
Customer experiences – All companies have certain commitments from the delivery standpoint to their customers; these are either bound by expectations or contracts. Any supply chain deterioration resulting from an unexpected event leads to an overall decline in customer experience and satisfaction.
Declining revenues and rising cost – demand changes due to unforeseen problems can lead to either a spike in consumer demands or forces suppliers/manufacturers to carry more inventory as demand drops. Both these situations lead to extra costs either through reducing revenues or increasing the cost of procurement through untested, new suppliers.
Pace of decision making – As an organizational supply chain starts spreading and becomes more global, it is observed that the speed of decision making decreases. This slow process reduces the ability of an organization to move quickly and decisively to counter problems.
Responsiveness – The overall built-in responsiveness to deal with outlier events is also a decisive factor that can affect the level of disruption.
On a deeper level, these challenges emerge from root causes such as –
Low visibility – organizations operate on application islands; there is no access to real-time and accurate data that cause supply chain disruptions. The overall end-to-end visibility is severally limited.
Data inconstancy – All stakeholders of a supply chain usually operate in their own organizational data silos. Within the organization, data is further segregated in application siloes. The same data is present in multiple areas, and the information doesn’t flow from one system to another. Furthermore, the definitions, granularity, and sequence vary from each organization to the other, and that makes it difficult for ALL of them to achieve a singular overview of the entire supply chain.
Exceptions – Supply chain processes are not designed to handle exceptions. Even now, the majority of data analytics is based on historical trends, which make it hard to incorporate and plan for exceptional events.
The Broader Agility Problem in Demand Supply Matching
The main issue – as highlighted by the Covid-19 supply chain collapse – is an imperfect demand-supply matching process, which affects retailers, suppliers/manufacturers as well as fulfillment and distribution part for the supply chain.
Demand signals that knows what your retailers need and how much you are going to sell are often delayed. It takes time to consolidate patterns and make them available. This forces suppliers to create inventory flexibility based on historical data, as this is as real-time it can be. However, despite these efforts, the execution still works in 4-8 weeks behind the actual event as suppliers or manufacturers need at least this much time to fulfill the inventory demand. If, during this time, the situation or the demand changes, it is impossible to fulfill it quickly. This ultimately leads to expensive delays and additional costs all across the supply chain.
Suppliers are trying to use more and more data and ML to optimize their processes, but disruptions like Covid-19 highlighted the core problem – If you can’t see real-time rise in demand, how can you expand your supply chain and fulfill the demand.
For example, during the pandemic, hospitals were struggling to cover PPE shortages, but the needed agility wasn’t built into the systems. The demand fluctuations were so high that the traditional supply chain wasn’t able to manage it. While there were suppliers that could fulfill the demand, but many of these were outside the traditional supply chain and couldn’t be brought on board quickly. In fact, many transactions were carried out using phones and spreadsheets, which made it difficult to track, monitor, or analyze inventory in a transparent manner. Even information like the amount of inventory, shipping state, and location of the material was hard to get in real-time.
Blockchain for Smarter and Resilient Supply Chains
Current processes and data infrastructure are siloed with each institution or application independently retaining duplicate data sets. This leads to expensive data reconciliation, time-consuming process breaks, and higher latency and operational overheads.
The solution is to enable a common source of truth within and between enterprises. A Blockchain-based solution that enhances data trust and maintains privacy will overcome the challenges elaborated above.
Putting all stakeholders on one secure platform will eliminate time-consuming and expensive data reconciliation, and enable new, shared business processes. All transactions can be tracked, from quote request to final delivery, from one portal. This includes shipping status as well. Working under one portal will also lead to data consistency in the long run and reduce the duplication of effort and time spent on party onboarding by different company ecosystems.
Moreover, a golden source of information built on the solid foundations of blockchain technology will also make the auditing process simpler. Information such as who is processing the contract, what equipment is entering the country, which country is it coming from, custom regulations, etc. can be funneled directly to regulatory bodies in a set format – ultimately reducing compliance work.
Innover built a Blockchain solution in record time to overcome medical supply shortage for hospitals during Covid-19. The mobile-friendly portal constructed an interconnected economic network that allowed businesses to seamlessly connect regardless of their individual underlying technology infrastructure.
The application used smart contracts deployed on a blockchain network to define data sharing and privacy at a granular level. It allowed sellers, buyers, shippers and other stakeholders of the ecosystem to interact on a common platform. Products and sellers were onboarded centrally, and buyers could raise quotations and place orders with them on one marketplace-like portal. The whole workflow and history (including cargo chain and delivery) are tracked and archived, which gives the users the added bonus of extracting business insights from the data too!
Get in touch with us to know how you can incorporate a similar tool in your ecosystem.
New Age Economic Resiliency Imperatives: Empathy Driven Experience and Frictionless Commerce
In the last few years, the breakneck, rip-and-replace digital transformation phase has evolved into a more strategic customer-first activity. Gone are the times when millions of dollars were allocated for large-scale digital transformation agendas, now organizations are evaluating tools and products more holistically and concentrating on maximizing ROI.
In the new Covid-19 impacted economic reality, the need to balance budgets with tactical advantages takes on new meaning. While businesses are looking to build economic resiliency through digital or data-led initiatives, the talk is all about providing enhanced consumer experience. CX is no longer a business differentiator but rather a business imperative.
To deliver enhanced customer experience companies need to facilitate three critical aspects in unison.
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- They must gain better insight into customer journeys.
- Develop and deliver a personalization content strategy.
- Back their business model with scalable technology rather than patchwork of digital tools.
When it comes to consumer-centric business models, no one does it better than B2C e-commerce platforms. Direct consumer channels were already on the rise, but the Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the trend substantially. In 2020,
E-commerce channels were expected to show a 16% growth, now it has jumped to 20%.
However, B2B organizations usually lag behind their B2C e-commerce counterparts on the CX front - this is usually because unlike simpler retail products their offerings are more complex, have a high cost of sales and comprise multiple product layers. However, they must also learn to leverage matured customer experience digital strategies to offer better CX and grow their business.
Here are some digital strategies that are a must-have for both B2C and B2B players -
Streamlining and optimizing data
As organizations pivot towards creating better customer experiences, they must ask themselves - Are we gathering data properly? Are we analyzing that data to create insights to fine-tune our CX? And do we have the technical depth or a scalable platform that is responsive enough to handle the changes we make?
Companies must put in place a data-gathering process along with an analytics framework that ensures a robust and contextually relevant data pipeline.
Unifying data streams to create a centralized system for unlocking insights
As customer experience comes to the forefront, breaking out of siloed systems has become the new mantra. Global enterprises are thinking about bringing centralized customer data – with diverse departments such as IT, marketing, and finance coming to the table together and reprioritizing their entire process and tech stack.
Data from diverse touch points must be consolidated with context to deliver product information and experience to customers wherever they are in their customer journey. All channels must be connected; every touch point integrated.
Tools such as Adobe’s Magento can be leveraged to allow data to flow from system to system, while technologies like AI and ML can help companies know their customers better and serve up more personalized content and products.
Provide value throughout the customer journey
Experiences are a continuous process. While creating consistency of brand and experience is the next big trend, immersiveness and personalization are strategies that will lead from the front.
For this, organizations have to use digital to show customers what the value of their product is. To do that they have to understand where the customer is in his/her sales lifecycle, what they want, and what they value. It is not just about making a sale. It is about building a deeply intimate experience/relationship with the customers using their own data.
Applying tech with a deep understanding of business challenges
Choosing the right digital product is the next crucial step. Brands are aware that they need different products. The problem is that the decision regarding these products gets made independently and at different points of time. Now organizations are looking at it centrally or holistically. It’s not about a CRM system vs. a marketing product or a CMS. They want digital transformation as a tiered cake with the customer on the top.
Here it is important to note that technology is just the execution layer. It has to carry specific business objectives but management must decide what these business objectives are; what is the customer journey; and define what the experience needs to look like. For maximizing ROI they must match the business decisions to the digital product.
Intelligent Digital Transformation is Incremental, Outcome Based and ROI Focused
Digital transformation can only be successful if it is about solving specific business problems. Organizations must look at the bigger picture and find the right piece of technology keeping in mind a business problem or outcome. You don’t have to rip and replace entire architectures, and technologies like AI are not an automatic panacea for all problems – digital transformation can be as simple as an app.