Next Generation Ecommerce Customer Experience Requires Enterprise Automation

Many fast-growing companies expanding their ecommerce business are challenged with converting shoppers to buyers and offering an exceptional online experience. Providing the next generation ecommerce customer experience that can scale requires enterprise automation. Ecommerce unified with operational business systems allows for easy tracking of customers, orders, inventory and other key data.

Enterprise automation gives companies a critical view of where their business is, what areas to improve and how to take business to the next level while ensuring customer experience is optimized at each stage of the journey across all channels.

By adopting a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, a company gains a central hub of ecommerce operations that can connect their virtual and brick & mortar storefronts, marketplaces, POS systems, 3PLs, and warehouses. Integrating the ERP with core operations (including inventory and order management, financials, and customer support) results in a single source of truth for multiple business processes.

Myers-Holum customers focused on taking their ecommerce customer experience to the next level often identify the need to eliminate data silos and error-prone manual activities, reduce the use of spreadsheets as well as the inability to easily gain insights from their data. Behind the scenes, customer data and customer interactions span applications and departments. The order-to-cash process can be fragmented between different endpoints.

Business process automation is the single most effective way to resolve these pain points and deliver first-class customer experiences. As we all know, the ecommerce industry is growing fast. The latest figure at $5.7 trillion in 2022 is forecast to climb to $8.1 trillion by 2026 so getting this right early is a priority for high-growth companies. At Celigo, Sr. Content Marketing Manager Laurie Smith recently wrote an article, “How to Drive Ecommerce Growth with Enterprise Automation” in which she maps out how to automate your ecommerce business excerpted below:

How to Automate Your Ecommerce Business

Establish a cultural shift in your company with the goal of an automation-first mindset and digital transformation. Make sure your teams understand that automation does not replace employees; it empowers employees to do their jobs better and more efficiently, allowing them to spend more energy on making high-value business impacts. Ecommerce automation best practices call for thoughtful planning and expectations:

• Map out your ecommerce processes and list all the applications needed to execute them.
• Identify the most critical data that must be 100% accurate, even during your transition period.
• Highlight processes that typically take up the most time, resources, and manual work.
• Calculate ROI — including labor and the costs related to mistakes or flawed business decisions — to decide what to automate first.

In most ecommerce operations, the processes to focus automation on first are:

• Order-to-cash
• Retail and supply chain EDI
• Retail and supply chain EDI
• Customer 360
• Payout-to-reconciliation
• Data warehousing

Check out how Wayfair implements integration and ERP automation to scale its home furnishing business into new channels at efficient and scalable speeds.

Expanding Your Ecommerce Business

In today's changing environment, with consumers switching brands more often, brands focus on strategies that make the customer experience a competitive differentiator. Automating ecommerce business processes is fundamental to enhancing customer experience while ensuring your business can scale.

Automation facilitates a flawless customer experience, ensuring data fidelity to provide meaningful business insights while creating alignment to mitigate business risk. Companies that embrace enterprise-wide ecommerce automation have no limit to how much they can grow.

Implementing a new ERP system

Let's find out where you are in your automation journey. Contact us to discuss your next project to synchronize data, automate processes, and streamline operations into one unified system.