Intelligent Experiences with Composable Commerce

Ask a retailer about their data, and you’ll likely hear about problems relating to data management, data usability, and data culture. Data is siloed and there’s no single source of truth. Business users are entering and storing data in different ways. And no one is really shepherding that data.

What kind of data is valuable when it comes to evaluating and migrating to a composable tech stack?

It’s important to have solid analytics and key data points in hand before replatforming so that you can determine if you’ve moved your KPIs in a good direction post-deployment.

Why data value matters so much

Commerce sits at the core of solving many of these data challenges, as businesses try to drive better outcomes, more personalized experiences, and higher throughput. So how can companies best utilize data to increase customer lifetime value?

Organizations have a wide range of options when it comes to evaluating and choosing a commerce solution.

Build - A business can build its own commerce solution. But that comes with a lot of risk and expense, and very few retailers have the capability to build something that works in an optimal way. Those retailers essentially become technology companies.

Monolith - Popular from the mid 1990’s and into the early 2000s, these all-in-one solutions were effective for optimizing one channel. But now, as companies expand across many different channels, monolith isn’t necessarily the best option. Out-of-the-box features may no longer be effective or relevant.

Headless - This type of solution allows a retailer to decouple the front and back ends. With a headless solution, a company has the ability to fully customize the visual design of its front end, on top of a CMS. Different touch points, different experiences.

Composable - The next step in this evolution allows a company to not only decouple the front and back ends— the entire stack can be decoupled. That provides the ability to build unique experiences by combining different technologies that perfectly align with a retailer’s needs and goals. Composable makes it possible to leverage best-in-class technology for each and every aspect of the commerce solution.

Composable technology is cloud native, component-based and tech agnostic. Let’s break that down:

1. Cloud native - Software built for the cloud, in the cloud with all functionalities natively integrated with core components.
2. Component-based - Software that consists of modules, each of which can be developed, deployed, and maintained independently. The modules don’t rely on each other for their functionality; they can be updated or replaced without affecting the rest of the system.
3. Tech agnostic - The solution can be developed using a variety of different technologies and platforms. Software developers aren’t tied to a proprietary or specific programming language or skillset.

Composable is important for organizations that want to keep moving at pace and have the ability to utilize best-of-breed technologies.

Launched by Kin + Carta, the Integrated Commerce Network (ICN) is a curated group of software partners that enables transformation across commerce, marketing, and customer experience. Intended to accelerate organizations’ time to value with a modern and future-proofed commerce tech stack, the ICN includes these partners:

• commercetools, a robust and flexible foundation with unlimited scalability that supports all commerce operations. It offers all the components needed to build and run shopping experiences across all digital and physical touchpoints, and adapt to changing market dynamics and customer preferences.
• Bloomreach, an Al-powered e-commerce personalization platform that includes a marketing automation solution enabled by BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse. The Bloomreach customer data engine seamlessly integrates with the Google Cloud partner ecosystem to help create engaging customer experiences and increase conversion rates.
• Quantum Metric, a customer-centered digital analytics platform that provides a simplified approach to monitor, diagnose, and optimize the digital journeys that matter most. The Quantum Metric platform offers in depth customer understanding, quantified and tied to core business objectives.

The ICN will continue to expand to include complementary partners to help businesses activate data and unlock new revenue.

What does Google Cloud bring to the ICN? Google is always looking to do things from an industry lens; with its large base of customers in the retail space and a history in marketing and advertising, a retail-focused commerce solution was a good fit. Google’s Industry Value Network (IVN), a group focused on building industry solutions, helped to develop the ICN to make it truly best-in-class retail with Google Cloud.

Upleveling the commerce conversation

Traditionally, each one of these commerce technologies would be the purview of a particular buyer. For example, Quantum Metric would be of interest to someone responsible for their company’s website and customer experience. Since the ICN offers a solution across the entire stack, it uplevels the conversation to a more strategic level, the C-level.

The ICN is, itself, composable

The ICN not only provides the flexibility to work with one, two, or all of the partners, it offers the flexibility to add other technologies. It also gives retailers the power to own their own data, unify multiple data sets, and learn from a number of different technologies— all powered by Google Cloud.

Personalization is a strategic, competitive advantage. In this day and age, the consumer has so many options; if you don’t provide a personalized experience in real time across the channels where the customer wants to engage with your brand, you’ll lose them to competition.

Personalization is really the hot button of data and the culmination of where data comes together.

In the last 10 years, there has been a proliferation of channels on which customers are engaging with brands. What has also happened is that companies have been buying more and more disparate technologies that don’t talk to one another– and that’s where a key challenge lies. While companies want to deliver personalized experiences, they are inhibited from doing so.

The ICN makes it possible for organizations to deliver highly personalized customer experiences via Bloomreach’s Al-powered e-commerce personalization platform.

Choose your own pain point

Retailers are experiencing a number of pain points that are difficult— even impossible— to solve at pace and at scale with a monolithic or aging commerce platform. These include:

• Stagnating online sales
• Struggle to attract and retain customers
• Inability to manage and analyze data from multiple touchpoints
• Competitors offering more engaging and personalized experiences
• Inability to adapt to emerging market trends and customer preferences

The ICN’s goal is to be able to support this broader commerce experience and data experience by bringing together many different aspects of the customer journey into an analytics vision.

As part of the ICN, Kin + Carta built the ICN Accelerator, an assessment designed to help organizations unlock value and improve customer experience in as little as six weeks. By targeting a high-ROI use case, we provide a blueprint for modular, repeatable workload integration, through strategic opportunities for real-time BI, federated governance, and streaming analytics. modernize storefronts and data foundations in Google Cloud.