How Digital Innovation Is Transforming the Customer Experience for Manufacturers
Here’s how digital commerce is reshaping customer experience in manufacturing.
While retailers have been the subject of most of the “digital transformation” press, manufacturers’ role in it can’t be overstated. With similar issues to retailers in terms of increased demand, coupled with supply chain crises and a burgeoning direct-to-consumer framework, manufacturers are similarly transforming their businesses with digital innovations that are reshaping consumer experience and expectations in digital commerce, discusses Derick Jaros, head of industry, eCommerce at Yext.
The past two years have been a major wake-up call for retailers: the onset of the pandemic forced an increased need for digital solutions to accommodate an increase in ecommerce, and many businesses were caught unprepared.
Manufacturers have long had to serve multiple masters. Having to keep both retailers and marketplaces happy, the rise in direct-to-consumer business has added new channels and logistical structures to consider. This diversification has been great for business, but it’s also required a reevaluation of the tools utilized to connect all of these disparate data management systems intuitively for internal teams, partners, and consumers alike.
See More: 5 Change Areas Manufacturers Should Consider When Pursuing Tech Solutions
How Digital Innovation Is Changing the Manufacturer-retailer Relationship
With increased stress placed on retailers at the onset of the pandemic, it’s no surprise that there were some growing pains as that volume found its way to manufacturers. The rapidly changing data patterns of a boom and bust economy, coupled with drastic swings in consumer behavior, put outsize stress on insufficient digital systems.
Order management structures were ill-equipped to handle such an increase in orders on the back end, for example, and customer-facing service architectures left many customers without the ability to get simple answers on order statuses.
Manufacturers learned quickly that to adapt, they would need to connect disparate systems in inventory management, logistics, and sales to provide customers with the answers they needed without having to involve customer support agents.
By leveraging emerging AI-powered tools, retailers have been able to create customer-facing service infrastructures that enable more intuitive order tracking. By instituting next-gen search tools based on natural language, retailers were able to provide customers with the answers they need, pulling data from manufacturers in order to deliver up-to-the-minute information, in context, on order statuses. And this is all without the need to involve CS agents—who are then free to focus on higher-level tasks.
What’s more, by instituting better systems of search in ecommerce settings, retailers have been able to glean data and insights on customer preferences and interests.
By better understanding what customers are looking for and making that data actionable, retailers have also been better able to communicate with their manufacturing partners to anticipate potential spikes in demand for certain products and adjust supply projections accordingly. For example, search is a leading indicator of what will eventually be bought. Understanding this data can help supply chains get a 2-6 week headstart in production and shipping.
What Digital Innovation in CX Means for the Evolution of Manufacturing
While retail continued to expand its online footprint in the past two years, manufacturers took on a larger role in the direct-to-consumer marketplace. Additionally, retailers took on a larger role in manufacturing in the form of private-label brands. In short, where there was once a clear delineation between retailer and manufacturer, those lines are blurrier than ever. The disruptions of Covid-19 forced a need for agility on the manufacturing front that worked to disintermediate retail channels faster than it otherwise would have.
Retailers have been moving into online commerce slowly but surely over the past 20 years, but this hasn’t been the case for manufacturers. For manufacturers that have shifted their focus to D2C offerings, many of them are late to the party—which is understandable, given that their focus has always been as suppliers, helping retailers serve customers. The recent wave of disruption has caused a reevaluation of the go-to-market strategy.
This late-to-the-party reality may seem like a disadvantage: retailers have established online footprints and infrastructure to support an ecommerce business. With that 20 years of lead time, however, they’ve also had to evolve their offerings as new platforms have transformed the online commerce space. Retrofitting outdated systems and adapting new ones for the current moment has left many established retailers with a patchwork system that is complicated on the back end and confusing to navigate on the consumer-facing front.
Manufacturers who have only had to focus on the back end with respect to logistics and order management are beginning with a clean slate as they move into the D2C world. They’re also arriving at a time when the CX tools available to them are the best they’ve ever been. Think about a retailer who began their ecommerce offerings ten years ago needing to run a primitive version of WordPress versus one that arrived in the Shopify era, for example.
The customer experience manufacturers are able to bring to their D2C offerings is largely devoid of the same baggage established retailers have had to overcome. Manufacturers are able to leverage a better suite of services including ecommerce engines, search tools that leverage AI, and order management systems that enable the best customer experience possible.
Setting the Gold Standard for CX through Innovation
On top of a better customer experience, manufacturers also have customer trust built into their D2C business. Rather than a customer encountering a manufacturer’s brand intermediated by a retailer’s platform, they’re able to provide validated, trusted information on products straight from the source. And, with better search tools, support engines, and information organization, that knowledge base can further build trust with customers.
Manufacturers have the chance to use the data and information from their own site to improve the customer experience across all of their digital channels. By deploying AI-powered tools and utilizing knowledge graphs—search tools that use natural language queries to connect disparate databases of information—manufacturers are able to provide improved customer experiences and better control their brand.
While manufacturers may be new to the D2C game, it’s entirely possible that they will set the gold standard for customer experience going forward, surpassing even the most savvy retailers.
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