e-Commerce

In 2015, Professor Klaus Schawb, founder and chairman of world economic forum, introduced the phrase “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. He envisaged that emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Robotics, IOT, Blockchain, etc. will be bedrocks of this revolution and will transform every walk of our life. Moving forward 4 years, we can see the impact of these technologies across industries. They provide better customer experience and create superior value for the stakeholders.

Voice enabled commerce is one of the success stories of the fourth industrial revolution. It has the potential to completely transform ecommerce as we know today. Powered by advances in the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation, voice assistants are getting better at interpreting and understanding human voice commands.

What is Voice enabled commerce?

Voice assisted commerce is a form of conversational commerce, in which a user interacts with a business through voice recognition technology. Unlike the traditional ecommerce, where a user either must type in search query or select by pointing and clicking, the voice assisted commerce works on voice command of a user. Popular examples are Amazon Echo, Siri, Cortana, and Google Home.

Voice assisted Commerce is here! Trends & Forecasts

Voice search is revolutionizing the way people perform searches on web and mobile devices. It has made finding products online simpler and provides a personalized shopping experience. Key industry trends corroborate the optimistic outlook.

• By 2020, 50% of all the online searches will be voice based search, reported by ComScore.
• 500% more spend by current voice assistant users over next three years, according to a study released by Capgemini in year 2018.
• According to OC&C report, Voice shopping will touch $40 Billion by 2022, a 20 fold increase from 2018.
• By 2021, more than 20% of world population will use voice assistants.

Technology behind Voice Assisted Commerce:

When a voice command is given to AI assistants, such as Amazon Echo, voice is converted into text, which then is analysed and processed and basis the nature of interaction, the response from the assistant is generated in the form of reply or placing a shopping order.

Voice assistants, which power Voice commerce, uses NLP (Natural Language Processing), a form of Artificial Intelligence. NLP enables machines to understand and learn from the languages, we human speak and write.

What has triggered the growth of Voice Assisted commerce?

A paradigm shift is happening in the way we perform searches, as more and more users are turning to voice to find products online. These changes in virtual shopping behaviour are primarily because of below factors:

• It is easier and more convenient – voice search can be performed hands free and you can perform other tasks at the same time.
• It offers personalized customer experience and has decision support.
• Experience is closer to the in-store interaction with the sales executive.
• It brings the point of sales closer to the users.

Voice assisted commerce presents a huge opportunity for retailers as

• They need to invest less in customer services.
• The steps required to make a purchase shorten the sales cycle.
• It presents a chance to leverage customer data to provide more personalized services.

Using voice data to continuously train and learn, Voice assistants can analyse and recognize buyers’ shopping pattern. Hence repeat orders are rendered within seconds by AI assistants.

Below chart depicts percentage share of voice shopping by product categories

Challenges Voice Assisted Commerce must overcome

The potential of voice commerce is beyond doubt; however, it must find answers to some pertinent questions before it becomes mainstream.

• Technology readiness: Unlike typed search queries, voice search commands are conversational, spoken in natural languages. This increases the complexity of interpreting, understanding and rendering correct responses manifold. Even the state of art virtual assistants by tech giants such as Google, Amazon, etc. are mostly deemed to be suited for repeat orders. For new product discovery, buyers currently switch to traditional online shopping.
• Privacy concerns: Voice assistants wait for voice commands and capture conversations happening around them. This raises privacy concern among the people, who fear that these smart devices are always listening. Privacy concern is one of the main reasons many households do not want to have likes of Amazon Echo in their home.

Despite of certain concerns such as technology and privacy, future looks bright for voice commerce. Voice recognition technology is improving at a rapid pace, making the voice assisted platforms smarter. Privacy policy such as GDPR can address security and privacy concerns of consumers.

Are you game for this new advancement? Read on for better clarity and check our other blog pieces in the e-Commerce space for clearer insights.

As more and more retailers are embracing ecommerce for their B2B operations, it is imperative to have the correct set of features that would increase its acceptance to its buyers. The overall business goal should be a happy and delighted customer. While, features like fast loading time, attractive and simple UI, great content management system, scalability, security are standard requirements, the below five when added to these will make it a complete solution.

Range Purchase:

In retail, especially in case of fashion and FMCG, there will be multiple variants of a single product within a huge list of product offerings. As B2B buyers will buy in bulk and will generally buy the similar products for a good time of their purchasing history, it’s useful for them to create a reusable template of the products they tend to buy rather than going to the PLP for each category again and again. This template will essentially work as a curated catalogue for them for their next purchases. This can save up to 30% of their buying time.

Personalization:

Your customers don’t need to see all your offerings, they just need to see the ones which are useful to them. You may also want to entice them differently with targeted promotions, special pricing and discount offers. The solution to all these is customer specific catalogue, wherein each B2B buyers sees a personalized catalogue built just for them

Multiple warehouse ordering:

This feature enables buyers to buy from multiple warehouses based on their urgency. The feature offers a look into stocks of all the warehouses for any product and the associated delivery dates in their locations. This helps them to plan their sales with much higher accuracy than waiting for a longer and sometimes and speculated time of delivery if ordering from a single warehouse.

Pre order:

In FMCG and fashion industry, new products are launched frequently which all the institutions would like to have their grabs first. Sellers can offer the buyers an option of pre ordering wherein those who place a pre order will have the first shipments when the products are launched. This will help the buyers an upper hand in comparison with their competitors.

Integration:

Integration to existing IT landscape is one thing that’s importance can never be less. Especially when the seller has a robust ERP and CRM solutions in place. This will help them to seamlessly fulfill orders, update offerings, prices and run promotional campaigns to buyers. This also helps to manage the entire operations with more efficiency and effectiveness. The ecommerce suite just acts as an add-on on top of the seller’s existing system.

Know more how we are helping B2B retailers with their digital commerce needs

IT infrastructure such as ERP, CRM, and digital commerce platform has become the backbone of enterprises, operating across industries. Fully operational and well managed IT systems are essential for business continuity. Firms often face the dilemma, whether to maintain an in-house IT team or to take services of an IT support partner. The decision in not outright simple as firms have to consider various factors before deciding the model best suited for them.

In house IT support team:

If the complexity of the IT systems is not high, building an internal support team makes sense as the team members will be on-site and will have knowledge of company-specific system and setup. Being on-premise is an added advantage as they are available immediately in case of a potential emergency. However, given the growing complexity of IT systems and business models, more often than not, it is prudent to leverage the services of a specialist IT support partner.

IT support Partner:

IT support partner also known as managed services partner (MSP) is a third-party company, which has expertise and experience in managing complex IT operations requirements. According to the 2016 global survey conducted by Mordor Intelligence, global managed services spending will rise to $296 Million by 2023 at a good looking CAGR of around 11%.

IT support services offered by partner firms itself has matured over a course of time. Below are the types of support services offered

• Fixed capacity: under this model, MSP provides agreed number of resources (people) for the project. It does not consider other important factors such as time of support requirements, the number of issues resolved.
• Shared support: It is a matured support model
  • Fixed number of hours: Support services provider is contracted to support IT systems for a stipulated number of hours.
  • Fixed number of incidents: The third-party service provider is contracted to resolve a fixed number of issues. If the number of hours needed to resolve the issues is less than the contracted number of hours, then additional asks, such as enhancement, upgrade, are assigned to the managed services partner.

Advantages of Managed Services partner over an in-house IT support team

Cost-effective:

Generally outsourced IT support services are cost-effective as a fixed amount is to be paid for the contract. Whereas maintaining a large in-house team is costly due to higher wages of employees and the cost accrued in training them. In case of the sudden departure of internal IT support personnel, the business may hire a consultant at a high cost to ensure business continuity. Another major aspect is that IT partner can provide most of the support services remotely and needs to deploy an on-premise team to handle critical tasks only. Providing remote IT support services is a big cost-saver.

Reliable:

Managed services partner have a pool of specialist for the role and in case of absence of a particular resource deployed on the project, they will have a replacement to ensure that business continuity is not affected. On the other hand, in house support is susceptible to sickness, attrition and knowledge gaps. Basis the business requirement, a business can contract 24*7 support for 365 days from the support partner.

Expertise:

Managing complex IT systems in-house is not an easy task and there may remain some knowledge gap among internal support team, which can have an adverse impact on the services provided. A professional IT support team will have skilled support personnel in its ranks with a range of experience and qualification suited for the managing IT systems for the firm.

There may be some concerns around data privacy and data ownership while outsourcing IT support to a partner firm. Such apprehensions can be addressed by utilizing the services of top IT managed services partners. Their hiring process is like any other top IT companies, which screens and recruits after careful evaluation. Another aspect one can look at is whether they have international quality certifications such as ISO 27001 for IT security & ISO 20000 for IT services.

Leveraging IT support services through a third-party managed services partner (MSP) is the way forward for the enterprises. By partnering with a reliable and experienced IT support partner, they can focus on the strategic business needs rather than worrying about managing IT systems.

Read more about Sonata’s SAP Hybris support services.