Discovery and planning

The project is as successful as the business case and ambition we can define. It is the key stakeholders who hold this vision and we have a methodology to identify and engage with them to elicit the needs and goals of your business that we can achieve together with technology enablement.

Our North Star in guiding the project, the DNA that will shape the eventual ecosystem and its processes. These are the business results to be achieved by the target system we would build. Our Business Development team will have Business Analysts working to prepare the vision, align with you, and even have an executive team participate to ideate, shape, and define this asset of top priority for further project success.

Looks into how customers usually reach or can potentially get to the site, how they evolve from awareness and intent to purchase, and how they can be reengaged later, then nurtured and converted into promoters and brand advocates. We look into potential touch points onsite and offsite across display networks and channels. Furthermore, we see how marketing automation vision and ambition should be further integrated with the data layer to gather necessary data and BI tools to visualize results.

Once we've defined the structure of the ecosystem to handle customers and commerce as well as established how customers get engaged and continue to be engaged, we look into how to make them happy and how to make their experience different. Our CX team can start from heuristic research insights and then move further into user testing, wireframing, and prototype building to A/B testing and receiving informed feedback. Our methodology allows for the efficient embedding of the CX team throughout the whole project lifecycle to monitor the CX component of the delivery as well as to monitor and improve it after go-live.

If we simplify the interface, then it is data we are exchanging—be it content, product data, prices, stocks, and customer data for registration and payment. UIs have gone a long way from the command-line interface to touchscreens, but at the core is still data that is now richer than ever, with all the new data collection abilities available and heightened focus on 1st-party proprietary data. After the discovery service, we will have a clear list of data objects, their profiles, a map of the systems where the data is originating from and is consumed, and data update triggers.

In taking care of the customer, we also need to look into the experience of those serving them. We look into the roles of content managers, customer support, warehouse operators, marketing teams, creative content creators, and order processing teams to make sure they have the right tools and capabilities to achieve all the business goals that have been set. After all, only part of the elevated customer experience is the sleek and modern UI and a high-performing site. Great customer experience largely depends on your internal team's ability to deliver fast and accurate service.

Once we've understood the project goals, the target system that will support them, your customer lifecycle, the desired overall site experience as well as the needs of backend users, we can map these requirements onto a platform or set of platforms to support them. We are a partner of the platform providers that deliver proven solutions across personalization of content and commerce, PIM, OMS, data and analytics, and marketing automation.

Where the ambition is one of a kind, we build custom middleware or no-code apps to deliver a unique experience or functionality and embed it into the overall ecosystem. Platform and licensing selection happens subject to timing and budget constraints, optimizing the total cost of ownership.

Once a platform or platform(s) are selected each needs to be decomposed into a few smaller parts or components, which each has its isolated and focused nature but together represent the combined value and expectations from the platform. Management of attention from an entire platform to a component that is smaller but still significant in size helps in directing necessary resources to identifying solutions and defining outcomes.

Once components are defined, we iteratively repeat the exercise—further decomposing them into modules alongside low-level design and implementation for each of them on a technological level. This way, we have clarity on how we get from the idea to the platform and its implementation and can accurately calculate the budget and timeline.