How Composable Commerce Supports Omnichannel Strategy - Part One
In the first of a two-part series, experts from BigCommerce and Feedonomics explain how composable commerce enables modern omnichannel CX
Customers have had it up to here.
They’re tired of having to introduce themselves to your brand over and over again. They’re fed up with repeatedly telling your brand what they’re looking for, what size they are, or the frustrating details of whatever problem it is that you still haven’t resolved for them despite their own numerous attempts to explain it to you.
The people have spoken (again and again and again), and they’ve had enough.
In a survey of British consumers, 75 percent said their top customer service frustration is having to repeat themselves, whether it’s online, in-store or over the phone. The second biggest annoyance (cited by 73 percent) was a lack of cohesive service experience, especially when trying to resolve a problem through various channels of the business that (literally) couldn’t get their act together to fix it.
As Gartner grimly declared in a 2021 research report, customers “are struggling with the current state of CX across digital channels. They suffer from cumbersome, disconnected processes and having to deal with companies that don’t seem to know who they are, resulting in time wasted or irrelevant experiences.”
What today’s brands need, according to the 2023 Pulse of Retail Survey report, is “frictionless omnichannel CX,” which it defines as “a customer beginning a journey in one channel (in-store or online) and subsequently continuing this journey in a completely new channel.”
The problem, based on the survey’s findings, is that only 11 percent of retailers can provide truly frictionless omnichannel CX. Gartner again weighed in this issue, blaming siloed tech architecture.
“Complex, extensive, and interconnected technology stacks based on monolithic applications are preventing organizations from delivering truly seamless digital customer experiences across multi-experience touchpoints in the customer journey,” Gartner noted.
“Siloed user experiences have become a point of friction,” Gartner added, “with many organizations asking themselves: ‘How do we unify all these disjointed experiences into a seamless and frictionless customer experience?’”
For an increasing number of brands, the answer is composable commerce. We spoke with experts from BigCommerce to understand how a composable commerce architecture can enable and support the omnichannel experiences customers now expect.
Limitations of a monolith
A single-vendor platform might sound like a no-brainer for delivering unified, seamless, omnichannel experiences. The obvious assumption is that everything is already integrated to work together perfectly. But that’s not always the case, particularly when monolith vendors offer add-ons to their existing platforms, says Aaron Sheehan, Director of Competitive Strategy at BigCommerce.
“What you’re really getting is whatever solution that conglomerate [vendor] bought to fit their M&A strategy five years ago. You’re not getting the best-in-breed offerings that help you do all of the things and orchestrate all of the customer experiences you need to create. You’re often getting a very substandard version of that where the pieces don’t actually talk to one another,” warns Sheehan.
He says other potential limitations of a single-vendor monolith might include:
- cumbersome third-party integrations (since the platform isn’t built with the flexibility to handle them)
- a domino effect of repercussions throughout the entire stack when even small changes are made
- stifled experimentation, innovation, and growth due to fear of that domino effect
“What I have with a monolith system is a big black box. I can only grow as much as the slowest piece of the big black box that I can support,” says Sheehan. “The more painful it is to adapt to change, the less incentivized the business is to change.”
How composability supports omnichannel
Composable commerce enables and supports omnichannel CX simply by virtue of its architecture. Instead of being boxed in by one-size-fits-all infrastructure, brands can select the modular, open, specialized solutions that best fit their unique omnichannel strategy.
“They have to have flexible, agile, composable technology that can hook together, take data from one place, and transform it to go into the place that it needs to go based on the functional requirements of their omnichannel strategy,” says Sharon Gee, Senior Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at Feedonomics, a full-service data feed management platform acquired by BigCommerce in 2021.
“That openness is what is required in order for you to be able to choose the best-of-breed technologies that you need to actually meet your shoppers’ needs, as opposed to the 80 percent of use cases that [a monolith vendor] dictated that you should care about,” she adds.
With many brands venturing further into multiple digital channels, this flexibility is more important than ever for crafting an omnichannel strategy that meets each brand’s specific requirements. For example, a beauty brand may have an active influencer strategy on social channels like Instagram and Tik Tok, but that might not make sense for a giant CPG company with a huge media budget and 30 years of heritage brand name recognition.
“Composable gives you agility because every brand’s omnichannel needs are different. There’s no one tech stack that can solve all of those use cases, no matter how hard some monolithic vendors try,” says Gee.
A cookie-cutter tech stack can’t craft the omnichannel strategy a brand needs to create customer-centric digital experiences, nor is it agile enough to adapt when customer demands or market conditions change.
In Part Two, we’ll wade deeper into the technical weeds of this issue, exploring the importance of data in omnichannel strategy, how to choose an initial composable commerce use case, and how composable commerce design principles can support omnichannel success.
Christine Wong
Senior Technology Staff Writer, Orium
I've been telling enterprise technology stories for almost three decades in print, online, and on television. I started out in journalism, covering the telecom boom, the birth of social media and the emergence of digital commerce. I'm always looking for the human angle in every technology story I write.