Customers.com Technologies

Our 2009 Update on Key Ecommerce Suppliers and Products

We’ve been publishing quarterly customer service supplier and product updates for the past five years. These reports have been quite well received by our readers and by the suppliers that we cover in them. Now that we have our ecommerce research ramped up to a full set of product reviews of the offerings of the leading ecommerce platforms, we thought the time was right for an ecommerce supplier and product update. The suppliers were a bit reluctant to participate in quarterly updates but were all behind an annual one. So, this week, we publish the 2009 Ecommerce Supplier and Product Update.

Like our customer service updates, the ecommerce update examines the ecommerce market and the customer growth, product activity, and company performance of the leading ecommerce platform suppliers. The leaders are (alphabetically) ATG, Demandware, Elastic Path, hybris, IBM, and Venda. It’s a diverse set of companies with a diverse set of ecommerce platform offerings. There are some similarities. For example, both Elastic Path and hybris offer platforms designed for heavy customization and deep integration. Coincidentally, both also make great use of open source components, and both offer on-premise and hosted deployment. Demandware and Venda are also similar. Both target retailers with a hundred million or so in online revenue. Both offer hosted multi-tenant deployments. The platforms are reasonably similar in functionality, too. ATG and IBM are the graybeards of the space. Both have offered ecommerce platforms since the mid-1990s.

Come to think of it, I’m a graybeard, too. My first product reviews of ATG Dynamo Commerce and IBM Net.Commerce were published in 1996 and 1997. Yikes! That makes me an analyst and an historian.

2009 was a very good year for ecommerce and for all these suppliers across all three dimensions of customer growth, product activity, and company performance. Get the details in the report.

On the topic of those details, I am so appreciative of the ecommerce suppliers’ willingness to share sensitive data about customer growth and company performance. The publicly held suppliers, ATG and IBM, don’t disclose this level of information in their regulatory filings. The privately held suppliers don’t typically disclose any of it. Perhaps all of them wanted to “strut their stuff” after a very good year. Whatever the reason, thanks to all of them. We now have a benchmark to help calibrate ecommerce performance in the future.

Enjoy the report!

Venda Enterprise: SaaS Ecommerce Platform

I just reviewed Venda Enterprise, the ecommerce platform from NY-based Venda. Venda targets brand-conscious retailers and businesses selling direct to consumers with annual online revenues from $5 million to $100 million. To date, 140 of them have deployed their stores—hosted multi-tenant/SaaS style—on the platform. Many of Venda’s customers do not have large technology organizations. Business users can configure and do most of the set up for their Venda ecommerce sites. You’ve got to consider it seriously if you’re an online retailer.

I found an advantage to SaaS deployment in my research on Venda Enterprise. In addition to using the product documentation, speaking with customers, and speaking with developers, product marketing managers, and executives, I got “hands-on” the product. Venda gave me credentials to access a sample site that was a replica of the BBC shop. I used the Venda Control Panel (VCP) to create and modify categories and products, to manage promotions, to build Web pages—all the tasks that administrators and merchandisers perform to deploy and maintain a Venda Enterprise site. The experience took me back to when I installed and used every product I evaluated—RDBMS, app dev tools, and ecommerce platforms.

I found Venda Enterprise to be a very appealing platform. It supports most of the ecommerce activities that customers want to perform with packaged, configurable, or easily customizable services and data. It packages a wealth of the mechanisms that merchandisers need to influence customer behavior, not only the promotions and content targeting that we’ve come to expect, but also a recommendation engine and facilities to support affiliates and referrals. Venda Enterprise also packages an almost-complete Web content management system that includes a very large set of reusable Web content items. Web content developers might not be needed to deploy a store.

The platform is not perfect. It's missing reports that you need to monitor, analyze, and refine its rich services and merchandising. Also, it doesn’t support customer segments very well.

My evaluation is more than sixty pages long. Don’t be daunted. It contains the information and analysis that you’ll need to evaluate Venda Enterprise. Here’s my approach. First, I state the ecommerce requirements for supporting customer activities and merchandising activities. Next, I describe and then analyze the platform’s services, data, content, and customizable facilities that address those requirements. The result is a complete, comprehensive, and actionable evaluation. I take the time to understand the product. I don’t ask vendors to fill-out feature-function questionnaires. I don’t rely on their demos. I prove everything we state. No generalizations. No unsubstantiated statements. No fluff.

Venda Enterprise
Excellent Merchandising and Customer Service with SaaS Deployment for Retailers
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, February 11, 2010

http://www.customers.com/Venda_Enterprise.aspx

Deep Dive: ElasticPath Commerce—A Serious Canadian Contender for Your Ecommerce Platform

What do these companies and their Web sites have in common?

• Aeroplan

http://www.aeroplan.com/mrch

• Avis Budget Group

• Bond+Bond

http://www.noelleeming.co.nz/

• Comcast

• Comark

http://www.bootlegger.com

• Cort

• Garmin

• Hockey Canada

• Hudson’s Bay Company

• Jaguar

• Netshoes

http://www.shopcruzeiro.com.br
http://www.fascar.com.br
http://www.promo.netshoes.com.br

• New York City Ballet

• OTE

• Sony Ericsson

• Time Inc.

• Trygg Netthandel

• Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

http://www.vancouver2010.com/store-us

• Symantec

• Wholesale Sports

They all use ElasticPath Commerce as their ecommerce platform. These companies chose to build their ecommerce sites on Elastic Path Commerce, leveraging its packaged functionality and open source components but customizing its facilities to address specialized requirements. ElasticPath is available in on-premise, hosted single-tenant, our outsourced deployment options. The best fit for this offering would be organizations that want to do customization and integration and are comfortable with Java and open source development, yet are happy to have business users configure and manage merchandising, assisted service, and personalization.

The packaged functionality includes a nice administration and configuration toolset called Commerce Manager (CM). It’s easy to learn and easy to use. Administrators use it to configure Elastic Path Commerce software and administrators and merchandisers use it to create and manage just about every ecommerce resource—customer accounts, products, and promotions for example. CSRs use the tool to perform a wide range of assisted customer service activities. The Commerce Manager tool reduces the role that developers have to play in deploying and maintaining an Elastic Path Commerce store. It allows developers to focus on customizing ecommerce services and integrating external applications.

We found the packaged assisted service capabilities to be quite comprehensive: CSRs can edit orders, split orders, handle returns processing, place orders on hold, remove holds from orders, among other things. Other features worth mentioning:

Elastic Path’s Dynamic Content allows personalization of content and offers based on business rules. On the surface, personalization takes the typical rules-based content targeting approach to personalization that other ecommerce solutions offer, but Elastic Path’s Dynamic Content is easier to use and more flexible and more powerful than other personalization systems that we’ve evaluated.

Merchandising features are reasonably robust, including:

• Product Bundles which allow merchandisers to combine several Products in a single Product offered for one price.

• Price Lists which separate pricing data from product data and allow merchandisers to offer different prices to different customers using pricing rules.

The biggest missing capabilities? There’s currently no support for customer segmentation. While you can target offers based on gender, age and search terms, there’s no way to create reusable customer segments.

Read the full report.

Two Hot Trends in Customer Service Technology

By Mitchell I. Kramer
Sr. VP & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

What are the two hottest trends in customer service solutions? 

1. The ability to integrate social networking conversations into your self-service and assisted-service knowledge bases and case management

2. The ability to integrate assisted-service with contact center technologies

Here is our 3Q2009 Customer Service Product and Company update. Yes, it’s a little late, but two of the ten suppliers we track, IntelliResponse and Salesforce.com, end their quarter a month later than calendar quarters.

3Q2009 was another good quarter in KM-based customer service, the second quarter in a row, even though third quarters are typically seasonally soft for all IT suppliers. All of our vendors showed improvement in at least one of the three areas that we track—customers, products, and company. Four of them improved across all three and earned Customer Service Stars (alphabetically): Consona CRM, IntelliResponse, RightNow, and Salesforce.com. This is the first Customer Service Star for Consona CRM. Its acquisition of SupportSoft, KCS v4 verification, and new versions of its case management and knowledge management offerings position it well for continued success.

The two hot trends are integration of social media and integration of contact center-based assisted-service. Customer service is increasingly cross-channel. Facebook and Twitter have become important interaction channels as customers use them to communicate with their suppliers and with each other to seek answers and solutions. Facebook Fanpages are a knowledge source for customer service. Make sure that you’re on the social Web both for visibility and customer sat. Your customers live there. That’s where they expect to find the right answers and solutions.

Integration with assisted-service is a back-to-the-future trend. It was also a hot one five or six years ago. KM suppliers are, again, integrating their offerings with contact center/case management systems. For example, InQuira iConnect for Siebel Contact Center puts InQuira’s KM capabilities on the Siebel (now Oracle) agent desktop, or Salesforce Knowledge puts new KM capabilities on the Salesforce.com agent desktop. Why is this integration hot again? After all, customer service has always been cross-channel. Well, we think that organizations have been over-focusing on customer self-service. Self-service is a great strategy in tough economic times. But customers still need help, help on the telephone and, now more than last time, help via Web chat.

One more thing. There were a ton of new products announced late in 3Q and early in 4Q. We’ll be quite busy evaluating them in the next few months. Our evaluation of Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2 is just about ready.

IBM’s Enterprise Content Management Strategy; Bigger than SAP?

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

You'd expect anything with "enterprise" in its name to be pretty big. IBM's Enterprise Content Management platform is breath-taking for its breadth. First of all, it redefines the meaning of "content." IBM expands the definition of content to include all types of records and archives (paper!), tweets, audio, and video. IBM's platform also provides a broad set of services covering all the ways organizations interact with unstructured information. IBM's ECM platform embraces services to store, analyze and annotate content so that some structure (metadata) can be imposed on it and value extracted from it, mine it to extract insights and correlation, classify it, report on the sentiments expressed therein, search it, organize it for discovery and compliance, provide business process management services, manage digital assets, and deliver information to portals and other agile interfaces.

IBM's picture of its ECM Platform is so broad and deep it calls to mind SAP's enterprise resource planning. If you're still thinking of content management as a few tools to help you with revising and publishing articles or Web pages, you are so last century.

As you'd expect from an IBM vision, ECM is a layered architecture. The ECM Platform is comprised of multiple repository technologies, the ECM framework, and user interfaces.

Your New Framework for Evaluating B2C Ecommerce Platforms

By Patricia B. Seybold
Founder, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold 

Our Customers.com Technologies' guru, Mitch Kramer, has just released a new framework that you can use (and he is using) to evaluate Ecommerce platforms. If you are among the many companies that hope to upgrade your ecommerce capabilities in 2010, we'll make your job easier. First, you can use our new streamlined framework to be sure you are covering all the bases. Second, you can use our RFP template based on this framework to get apples-to-apples comparisons of the platforms you're considering. Third, you can use the blank evaluation matrix to do your own evaluations of the platforms you're considering. Fourth, you can rely on our detailed and objective evaluations that will be delivered in the coming months on the following platforms:

• ATG Commerce Suite

• Demandware

• E4X FiftyOne

• Elastic Path Commerce

• hybris Commerce

• IBM WebSphere Commerce

• Venda

If there are other platforms you'd like to see us evaluate, please drop Mitch a line (mkramer@customers.com). If you'd like to share your evaluations with us, we would love to see them.

Can Your Customers EASILY Find and Buy the Right Stuff Online?

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

In the past 12 months, we've watched our clients who were unhappy with how difficult it was to get the right items in front of their customers take very different paths to achieve their customer acquisition and sales conversion goals.

We saw one client opt for SEO services to bring all visitors to exactly the right page – no site search and navigation required.

Another client chose a recommendation platform to bypass their site search inadequacies. They didn't want to replace several search engines providing keyword and part number search on the site, and they recognized that metadata was never going to keep pace with customer terminology.

A third client took the traditional approach of replacing a simplistic keyword-match site search with an ecommerce-focused search solution, selecting an offering that comes with what the vendor describes as a marketing suite: recommendations, targeted ads and emails, and SEO.

A fourth client continues to struggle with ineffective search, because as she says, "We have an ecommerce platform, and we all pretend to believe it will do everything for ecommerce. So there is no chance of augmenting the parts that perform poorly for us, such as search."

The first three are pleased with their results, noting that customers are getting a much better experience and that the Web site is contributing more to business results.Does this mean that search, navigation and discovery are no longer the leading mechanisms for marketing and for streamlining the customer experience?

This is the question we address in our Pocket Guide to Tools for Acquisition and Conversion.

Integrated Customer Service Knowledge Management Needs to Span Self-Service, Assisted Service, Case Management, and Contact Center Solutions

The Web and the contact center are the two critical channels for cross-channel customer service—the Web for self-service and the contact center for assisted-service. Customer portals are the mechanism for delivering self-service on the Web. Agent desktops are the mechanism for delivering assisted-service through the contact center.

Knowledge management-based customer service offerings can be the key to delivering customer service across both these channels. For Web self-service, they typically offer portal-like UIs. For contact center-based assisted-service, their integration with the case/incident capabilities of the agent desktops in contact center offerings can be the key to helping agents/CSRs deliver more effective, more efficient, and more consistent customer service. InQuira iConnect provides that integration between its InQuira 8 knowledge management offering and leading contact center products.

Customer Interaction Cloud from Cisco and Salesforce

On October 5, Cisco and Salesforce.com jointly announced Customer Interaction Cloud, a combined Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) "solution" that enables customer service organizations to implement their contact centers entirely "in the cloud." An organization can deploy its entire contact center in the cloud on Force.com, Salesforce.com's cloud computing platform. This includes case management and knowledge management customer service applications, call routing, call queuing, agent management, and CTI telephony applications, and the integrations between them are deployed entirely.

This is a very big, maybe market-changing announcement.

Think about it. Cisco and salesforce.com are providing an approach to contact center implementation that requires no computer system hardware or software and no telephony hardware or software—no hw/sw purchase, implementation, or management and support. A little provisioning and configuration, perhaps a little customization and, whammo, you've got a fully functional contact center. Train your CSRs, give them the URL to access the apps' home page through the Web browsers on their desktops and their IP phones, and turn them loose. (Yes, Customer Interaction Cloud assumes you're using VoIP.)

We cover several customer service suppliers with offerings that have SaaS deployments—Astute Solutions, Attensity Group, IntelliResponse, nGenera, and RightNow in addition to Salesforce.com. In addition, we know of several telephony suppliers that have CaaS (Communications as a Service) deployments of their applications—Mobivox, OnState, SipGate, and Voxeo, for example. But, we believe that Cisco is the first telephony supplier to offer SaaS deployment and, together, Cisco and Salesforce.com are the first to offer a complete and integrated SaaS contact center offering that combines customer service and telephony applications.