Empowered Customers and the fragmented brand experience

Today's customers are increasingly empowered, participatory, and are actively embracing new technologies as part of their daily lives. As a result, new touch points and interaction models now define and fragment the customer journey forcing companies to change the way they market, build relationships, and deliver brand value.

Mobile
Mobile Internet penetration is reaching a critical mass with over 22% (eMarketer) of the US population and 17% (Forrester) of Western Europeans accessing the Internet on their mobile devices. This number is even higher in the Nordic region. Smarter and faster phones provide powerful capabilities that are reshaping the way customers interact with brands expanding beyond mere information exchange to online commerce.

Social Interaction
There is no disputing the power of social participation. Over 75% of US shoppers and almost 50% of European shoppers socially participate in the shopping process through ratings, reviews, communities, and branded social networking sites. According to IBM's CEO study of 1130 CEOs around the world, top executives realize that the key to success in these rapidly changing markets is to listen to and collaborate with their customers. “These new—and existing consumers—are more demanding and knowledgeable than ever. With the billion-user Internet, customers can broadcast their opinions about a product. They can link up with like-minded consumer groups and sway public opinion, not to mention company behavior.”

The new Marketing paradigm
These key trends and the fragmentation of the brand experience have replaced the traditional marketing funnel and ecommerce as we know it with a new paradigm -- an extended web of influence that traverses new interaction mediums and is being executed across numerous touch points. Today's marketing engines must therefore be designed to handle all of these formats in a single campaign: web, mobile, SMS, email, social, etc. capitalizing on the unique role and strengths of each element to deliver the optimal brand experience.

WebSphere Commerce version 7
WebSphere Commerce version 7 is designed to address these trends enabling companies to build rich customer relationships, execute marketing campaigns, and provide consistent, contextual experiences that span channels, touch points, and social interaction models. This represents the realization of our strategic vision which is to be the market leading “Customer Interaction Platform”, enabling companies to deliver a consistent, customer-centric experiences across multiple channels and touch points

Cross Channel Precision Marketing
The foundation of the WebSphere Commerce v7 solution is based on the new Precision Marketing engine that enables companies to support rich, customer-centric “dialogues” across channels and interaction models (including social commerce and widgets). Built from the ground up, the Precision Marketing engine orchestrates interactions across web, mobile, cross-channel, 3rd party services (such as ratings, reviews, communities, email, etc) and other interactions enabling marketers to centrally control the digital experience both today, and into the future. Marketers can finally respond to new interaction behaviors such as rewarding shoppers after they have written their fifth review or assign shoppers to personas based on real time interactions such as the specific community they are participating in. Marketers can schedule and execute campaigns that span all of these touch points from the same interface (and write even the most complex campaigns without any IT assistance.)

Mobile
WebSphere Commerce 7 provides full mobile support including:

Social Commerce
Pre-integration of social commerce solutions from Bazaarvoice, Pluck, and Lotus Connections via a standardized widget approach. This accelerates time to value and more importantly supports SEO by making social content crawlable. As outlined above, this also enables retailers to track and respond to social participation such as writing reviews, interacting with communities, blogs, micro-blogs, and supports an integrated social profile.

Web 2.0 Stores - (RIA)
IBM has embraced Web 2.0 technologies, concepts, and best practices to transform the brand and shopping experience. WebSphere Commerce was the first packaged E-commerce application to offer a Web 2.0 store first launching this capability in April 2007. Version 7 features an updated Web 2.0 store based on new best practices in experience design, shopping cart, and check out. We have offered both a B2C and B2B version -- companies may leverage widgets from one or both of the Web 2.0 stores to accelerate their deployments.

Cross Channel: Cross Channel Integrated Processes (Buy Online Pick Up in Store)
According to IBM studies, 50% of all shoppers switch vendors when they switch channels. As a result, we are focused on increasing “stickiness” and closing the cross-channel transaction with Cross Channel Integrated Shopping Processes. These processes utilize an open Web Services approach to support scenarios such as buy/reserve online, pickup in store. This same technology can be used to hand orders off to partner stores or distributors in B2B2C models.

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Nordic e-Commerce Group
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leveraging ibm software