December 13, 2024

The key to growth for manufacturers: Unified commerce

Online channels that augment and empower sales teams are the secret weapon of manufacturing's fastest growing, most agile players.

Amazon casts a long shadow.

These days, thanks to the success and ubiquity of the online retail behemoth, everybody expects consumer-grade customer experience (CX)-and that includes buyers for B2B companies. They may be purchasing high-tensile-strength steel in hundred-ton lots, but they've come to expect the same convenience, discounts, and upsell-offers they receive when shopping online for a sweater. In B2B sales, buyer convenience now rivals price as a factor in closing sales.

Given this cultural shift, it stands to reason that manufacturers are seeking to make their buying experiences more consumer-like. Generative artificial intelligence and other technologies now offer manufacturers an opportunity to improve CX and increase revenue by shifting from an e-commerce mindset to unified commerce, in which account management, configuration, pricing/quoting, and order management are rolled into a single entity. These changes also result in a happier, more productive sales force.

Here we'll look at the benefits of unified commerce, and the best areas in which to start deploying it, based on the experiences of clients whose transitions to unified commerce are well underway.

Benefits: moving beyond e-commerce

Unified commerce-the concept of unifying various sales channels-has existed in the B2C space for some time. Porting this idea into the B2B arena increases transparency, giving customers and salesforce greater confidence in the transaction. Everybody's looking at the same data, and everybody knows it.

It gets better. Measured from the baseline of modern e-commerce, unified commerce also:

• Personalizes product discovery. Conversational interfaces personalize product information, making it more accessible to a larger range of buyers. By deploying AI-powered chatbots not only on brand websites but also on platforms like WhatsApp, manufacturers can transform product discovery into an interactive experience, fostering a deeper connection and driving brand growth.
  
  
• Enables cross-channel selling. Using integrated data flows, customers can initiate product inquiries on any platform, then easily transition to the manufacturer's main webpage to complete their journey. This interconnected approach saves time and boosts customer satisfaction by making it easier for customers to discover products and express their interest.
  
  
• Empowers partners with real-time inventory and supply-chain data. Partnership dynamics can be shifted by providing real-time access to inventory and supply-chain data through robust APIs. This transparency empowers partners and major customers not only to make informed decisions and place orders autonomously, but to strengthen the supply chain through demand generation insights.
  
  To illustrate: we partnered with John Deere, a leading farm-equipment manufacturer, to implement a global Inventory Visibility system that centralized the record of all sellable merchandise across the manufacturer's inventory nodes: distribution centers, e-commerce fulfillment centers, stores, direct store vendors, and third-party logistics providers. The new system improved the accuracy and timeliness of inventory data, enabling John Deere to guarantee inventory for customer orders, consistently and economically. The results? Better inventory management, reduced stockouts, and improved customer satisfaction.

Getting started

So where should manufacturers start with their unified commerce initiatives? From our experience assisting global leaders we've identified several areas with upside that can yield quick results across an enterprise.

• Research and validation: virtualized pre-sales chat agents. Manufacturers can elevate B2B sales by using gen AI to understand and translate client searches into precise product selection criteria. This boosts conversion rates by automatically tailoring product titles, descriptions, and other parameters to meet the preferences and expectations of individual customers. Chatbots powered by gen AI can also be used on e-commerce sites to provide answers to complex product questions directly, allowing for seamless, intelligent sourcing by clients.
  
  
• Quoting and ordering: automated contract generation. Here gen AI is used to scan customer documents, translating structured or unstructured requirements into precise product specifications. This streamlines the quote-to-cash process with automatic quoting, dynamic pricing based on the historical effectiveness of discounts, and automated workflow management.
  
  
• Post-sales: predictive customer service. Manufacturers can use gen AI to create a single, intelligent "window" for account management. This integrates systems and summarizes account-level insights, which are then used to recommend cross-sell and upsell opportunities. This keeps customers informed about re-orders, while allowing manufacturers to personalize customer interactions and provide always-on relationship management via automated email and text-message follow-ups.​

Principles of success

Through our work with leading manufacturers and global businesses in other industries, we've developed the following best-practices guidelines:

• Think outside-in. Centering the commerce strategy on the needs and preferences of the end user ensures that solutions are intuitive, efficient and engaging. By leveraging AI not only to analyze user behavior and feedback but drive personalized experience, manufacturers can boost customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue.​
  
  
• Involve cross-functional leaders early and often. Successful initiatives often occur when requirements are driven by IT, sales, marketing, and customer service. This diversity of expertise improves offline and online communication, while cross-functional dependencies optimize the overall customer journey and reduce the cost of implementation.​
  
  
• Good data is a must. High-quality, comprehensive data is the foundation of effective AI-driven experiences. Ensuring data accuracy and consistency allows AI to generate meaningful insights, predict order variances, and personalize experiences, ultimately enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of commerce operations.​
  
  
• Integrate, integrate, integrate. Integrating commerce tools with existing systems (CRM, ERP, etc.) ensures a seamless flow of information and a unified view of customer interactions. Effective integration enhances operational efficiency, breaking down silos and enabling real-time decision-making, which is crucial for delivering cohesive and responsive commerce experiences.​

Rather than focusing on improved e-commerce solutions, manufacturers seeking to be industry leaders should integrate account management, configuration, pricing/quoting, and order management into a consolidated entity that can deliver better experience and more revenue-in short, unified commerce. With gen AI enabling massive change and promising more of it, embracing unified commerce is the key to improving both CX and sales-force morale, all while increasing revenue.

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