Engagement platforms

Trend 16: Experience- and intelligence-driven commerce provides superior customer engagement

E-commerce activity has surged in recent years to become a critical driver of platform modernization. As consumers become more selective about their purchases, brands are investing in sophisticated commerce platforms that focus on the entire customer journey to provide better experiences and derive meaningful insights.

Traditional on-premises platforms (e.g., SAP Hybris First Gen, Oracle ATG, and IBM WebSphere) evolved through a cloud-first, microservices-based, headless approach. The latest versions of SAP Commerce Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Magento 2+, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and HCL Commerce 9+ build and deploy capabilities on the cloud with decoupled storefronts, cloud connectors, advanced search capabilities, and cloud-based platform extensions.

We expect new, cloud-born, API-first platforms such as commerce tools and Infosys Skava Commerce to bring in a broader range of microservices. They will enable an experience orchestration engine that combines omnichannel experiences and capabilities. These platforms will provide enhanced capabilities for customer understanding with more accurate predictions and faster integration of digital assets to PIMS. This will be powered by AI and high-powered Apache Solr and deliver better product visibility through elastic search. The power of headless interfaces introduces advanced possibilities with conversational commerce touchpoints in which chat and voice assistants can elevate self-service to newer levels.

Connected experiences are integrating online commerce super apps into an in-store or in-venue ecosystem, providing a seamless, context-aware phygital dimension to customer journeys.

Integration of capabilities such as quotations, negotiations, and subscriptions, along with commerce, is a key customer experience trend. This enables a connected experience for online purchases. It already has a significant impact on B2B commerce and is likely to shape B2C commerce in the coming years. Ready-to-use reference stores, vendor marketplace components, frontend app-building studios, and AIpowered functionalities speed up implementation and rollout.

For a leading American retail chain that offers agricultural and home improvement products, Infosys created an advanced commerce frontend. The frontend integrates with commerce core services and call centers. This provides digital capabilities, including a nimble and agile UI, with enhanced search and promotions. It also offers single-click checkout and innovative features such as BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store). These features are realized over platforms such as WCS, Apache Solr, IBM Sterling OMS and Call Center, CoreMedia CMS, and BI Talend. Enhanced ML capabilities of learning to rank integrated with WCS Search enabled more relevancy in search results, pushed most moving products, aided higher revenue, and offered enhanced business features. A conversational interface powered by a chatbot (Azure Bot framework) elevates customer engagement to the next level, addressing self-service and general queries.