You might have a great e-commerce front-end, but what happens once your buyer clicks the buy button? Modern data science and cloud technologies are making it possible for organizations to re-think their Enterprise Systems by extending features and functions with retrofittable digital technologies.
The 2020 Pandemic Has Changed Buying Behaviors (Probably Forever)
The global pandemic has caused consumers and business decision makers to realize that the world has turned a corner. Our consumer economy has moved online with more people working and shopping remotely.
So reports Statistica—in 2019, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 3.53 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 6.54 trillion US dollars in 2022.
According to the latest B2B research from Gartner, up to 80% of the enterprise buying process now happens online. Every company needs to be part of that story. But what happens once your new customer portal or website processes a request?
In most businesses today, the slick customer facing website doesn’t mean that same level of integration and automation exists in the back office.
Online Business Models Demand a more Integrated Enterprise
When customers click on the buy button, they assume everything that happens behind the scenes is automated. That’s not strictly true for 4 out of every 5 businesses. Transitioning from historical business models to ecommerce sites and self-service portals has created disconnects and broken links in the back-office, the consequences of which are:
- Fewer fully-automated processes
- Lots of document and human-in-the-loop driven process steps
- A reliance on the goodwill of workers to keep the wheels of processes from breaking
- Lots of spreadsheets and ‘filler’ SaaS apps
- An over-usage of email as a workflow engine
- High staffing levels
The cold hard truth is that many e-commerce sites push out a request that ends up being passed to a human in one form or another, often as a paper form.
Integration-Platform-as-a-Service
The latest generation of cloud-born technologies to streamline the back-office and smooth out the wrinkles of suboptimal processes. The technical term for the genre is ‘integration=Platform-as-a-Service, but it’s generally being described as glueware because to most normal people, that’s a better description for the value it brings.
GlueWare bridges between your website and existing back-office systems of record used to manage your accounts, customers, logistics, service, etc. It creates automated information flows by gluing together your systems into one effective digital ecosystem; deeply integrating your front-office (i.e. where your customers go to shop and serve themselves), with your back-office (i.e. where requests are processed and fulfilled).
From a tech-stack perspective, GlueWare is cloud deployed technology that exists as an umbrella across your enterprise systems to federate data, glue systems together, and overcome the challenges of harvesting, normalizing, enriching and connecting across systems.
GlueWare:
- Makes light work of automating machine-to-machine workflows
- Removes re-keying, key-fill tasks, document workflows and human-in-the-loop task.
- Eradicates spreadsheets and ‘SaaS sprawl’ by mimicking the activities of humans, or the need for apps they use to get tasks done
- Installs digital assistants to monitor key trigger points in your processes to report on the health and performance of critical processes
Gartner’s “Market Share: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 2018” analyzes market share data for ITSM vendors as part of overall IT operations software revenue. This market has grown from an estimated $1.3 billion in 2010 to $3.5 billion in 2018.
Final Thoughts
There are many benefits to adopting GlueWare technology. Chiefly it allows companies to:
- Maximize customer experience and minimize back-office costs
- Release your team from key-fill and data entry tasks
- Auto-populate back-office systems directly from your website
- Create transparency across your processes with alerts and dashboards to see activity and comparative performance
- Reduce human-in-the-loop processing and improve integrity of operations (and move to 24/7 customer support)
- Remove data loss risk from using spreadsheets
- Enrich solutions with AI, RPA, BI, Blockchain, etc.
Does your business need it? That depends how many of your processes require re-keying or documents to drive them. If you’re one of the 4 in 5 companies we’ve spoken to in the last year that have experienced their e-commerce program outstripping their operations resulting in a two-speed order or service fulfilment process, then you most probably do.
