Why e-commerce needs a shift towards customer-centred priorities

A unified customer experience across both physical and digital platforms is crucial.

PRODUCTS have traditionally been the primary focus for an effective e-commerce growth strategy. However, in today’s market, integrating customer-centric approaches across all channels has become critical for success.

Ankit Sharma, vice president of Retail Solutions - Digital Transformation, Analytics and Data Science at eClerx, underscored the need for a unified customer experience across both physical and digital platforms.

“The most important thing is to start with the customer at the centre,” he said, addressing the recent Retail Asia Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

“Customers are no longer just buying your product online, they are buying the entire experience of browsing, reaching the product, and the offline delivery,” he said. “What they're buying from you online is not just the product but the entire experience we deliver to them.”

Operational excellence and data analytics

Sharma’s strategy places significant emphasis on operational excellence, stressing the need to support strategic plans with robust operational frameworks and reliable information systems.

“You don’t get customers if you don’t back your strategy or your experience with robust operations or information,” he asserted.

In addition, Sharma highlighted the role of data analytics in refining and improving the customer experience over time. “You have to keep measuring, testing, learning, and moving forward,” he said.

“Your entire data analytics layer and your testing layer have to enter into the data to keep improving over time,” he added.

Market segmentation

Sharma also told forum participants that personalising strategies for different market segments is also crucial as customer behaviour is proven to vary significantly across different markets, especially for global brands.

“So your expectation for a one-size-fits-all approach changes, and what we also then want to do is change that strategy and localise it for specific markets,” he stressed.

Sharma then highlighted the company’s role in providing technology and consulting services to enable effective e-commerce strategies. “Start with experience, a proactive experience design. Second is customer journey mapping; map the customer journey and try to understand the emotions that the customer experiences at different stages of that journey,” he said.

“When we bring all of these things together, if this is something that’s of interest to you, if you believe that this is something you would like to talk about, we have a book outside,” he said.