New Generation eCommerce application – Business User Point of View

As a customer perspective we all know that what we look for when we visit an online shopping site through any channel like mobile, tablet or a computer. The key factor is that every customer would look for how easily can I find my desired product and how easily can I complete my checkout process.

In any online shopping, business objective is to attract more users and convert those users into customers. When an organization tries to improve their online shopping experience, the first priority is to enhance the customer experience through personalized offers and pages, quick navigation and search (Faceted Navigation) and easy checkout by providing various checkout features like express checkout etc.

When everybody striving hard to improve customer experience, are we not thinking about the business users like Content Admins, Merchandisers etc.?  Most of the organization must be having a legacy eCommerce application and most of them want to migrate to a latest eCommerce engine that can satisfy the new generation customer needs by using improved technologies. While organizations are putting all the efforts to do the same, most of them try to skip or de-scope the requirements from their business users. Is that fair to do so since business users needs to play a key role to make the site much more interesting once it is ‘on live’.

One of my previous customers, which we were decommissioning their legacy eCommerce application and replacing with a new eCommerce engine powered by ATG Commerce, I got an opportunity to have detailed discussion with their business users includes Merchandiser and Content Author. They were so excited that a new application is going to be ready and that will improve their experience and reduce the manual work that they are currently doing as part of the legacy application. Highly motivated business users were giving requirements and explaining what they want to see in new system and what are the improvements they want in order to ease up their daily workload.

After analyzing the business user’s requirements, we came up with effort estimation and submitted to the business leads for approval. As I said earlier, business leads’ focus is to spend money on improving the customer experience and generate revenue to the organization. They found meeting business users’ requirements is not important and decided to either de-scope or implement it on a later point of time. That means it is not going to get implemented in a near future and as a result the business user experience will not be better than the current, in fact it will not be as good as their current system.

As a business user concerns, the requirements that he had given are valid for him as well as organization. We can classify these internal requirements except the Catalog Management, Pricing etc. in simple statements.

• Change of business rules like maximum order total, maximum number of items to checkout etc. without any code release
• Change of content inside marketing slots, promotional contents etc. without any code release
• Change of static labels and instructional text without any code release
• Control over the content displayed on the site like order of appearance, style etc.
• Flexible integration with Content Management system and Merchandising Tool

Most of the business users are asking for flexibility in terms of running and controlling the online experience. When we think that in their point view, these requirements are fairly genuine. If a new version of iPhone is getting launched, no business user wants to raise a ticket to the support team and wait to get the carousel changed on the home page after a server downtime; even Business Leads don’t like that.

It is really up to the business leads to take a decision based on the value addition that the organization is going to get by implementing these business enablers. Service Provider’s business consultants need to go an extra mile and help the Organization’s business leads to understand the priority and benefits of these requirements. Business Users are also an integral part of any eCommerce application as well as the organization.

What business requires...?

As part of different assignments, I have got an extensive experience of interacting with customer that includes Business Leads as well as Technical Architects. In most of the meetings be it Technical Discussion and/or Requirement Analysis, the common conclusion of these meetings is ‘What business requires?’ and adding an action item in the tracker to the relevant Business Lead/Analyst. Here I am trying to answer this question in a way that what I understood from my experience so far.

Majority of the online shopping websites are implemented or getting implemented/maintained using multiple third party frameworks and applications. What drives an organization to decide on the framework/platform/application/product that they want to leverage to improve their business?  Answer to this question is not so easy; it is based on various factors such as

• License Cost
• Organization’s prior experience
• Product Owner’s Credibility
• Market Feedback on the products
• Sales Presentation from the Product Owner
• People’s mind

Whatever reason that drives to choose the products; the organization normally spends a lot of money in research and analysis on choosing the Product. Will that end there? No, as we aware it won’t end there. Now the Organization has to recruit able people both business and technical to enable the IT department for implementing/improving their online shopping experience. Apart from this, the major decision is to choose a Service Provider that the organization believes that the provider can do the implementation at a Minimal Cost.

What I was trying to explain here is that for enhancing the shopping experience, before choosing a service provider itself, the organization must have spent enough effort and Dollars for deciding the various products they want to use for their eCommerce engine. In some cases the organization will engage the preferred service provider during these activities also.

Once the requirement analysis and fit-gap analysis starts, one important point that every key people from the service provider must have in their head is that we are here to help the business to implement the requirements with a minimal cost. I have noticed that most of the Business Analysts have very limited knowledge on the products, and this limitation was resulting in listing down all the ‘fairy-tale’ requirements. When these requirements come to the Technical Consultants for doing fit-gap analysis, they normally mark these for heavy customization of the product or not possible categories. This will make the Business upset because they have already spent lot of money for the product and now they have to shed lot of Dollars to make it in the way that they want.

This is the real problem in any online shopping experience project. This problem is getting resulted in the question in the title of this article “What business requires?”. What business requires is very simple, every organization in this world wants their online shopping as good as Amazon.com at least, if it can be better than that, then business requirements ends there.

Though the above statement is true, business will be happy if the service provider can meet most of their requirements with a minimal cost and make it ‘live’ in a short period of time. Service Provider’s Business Analysts have to play an important role here. Rather than writing down the requirements that business team gives to you, every Business Analysts have to follow some practices that will help the business as well as service provider to streamline the requirements to enhance the shopping experience with a minimal cost.

• Business Analysts should be trained in the relevant products as a functional perspective and they should be educated about the limitations of the products as well
• Business Analysts should understand the Organization’s business and key areas
• Help business to redefine the ‘fairy-tale’ requirements to meaningful requirements that can be achieved using the product by minimal customization
• Help business to understand the cost of implementing the fancy requirements and how much can they benefit out of those requirements
• Help business to understand how they can achieve long-term and short-term goals and redefine the scope of implementation
• Engage a technical person if required

If a Business Analyst can come up with a list of requirements that can be implemented by the product purchased by the organization with minimal customization, technical team can provide a positive fit-gap analysis sheet that offers low cost to the organization. This will help to get a confidence on the service provider initially and that can bring up more revenue.

The initial phase of project is very critical and the Business Analysts have to play an important role in streamlining the requirements. In fact they have to identify “What business requires” and help the business to understand “What business really requires”.

Customer Experience Architecture

Today I was going through an interesting article about customer experience reference architecture. This document will give an insight on how new generation eCommerce application has to be modelled. Worth read for both technocrats and business analysts.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/oracle-wp-ra-customer-exp-1891281.pdf

Cheers!
Rajeev