Streamlining digital commerce: Integrating IBM API Connect with ONDC

In the dynamic landscape of digital commerce, seamless integration and efficient communication drive the success of buyers, sellers and logistics providers. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform stands as a revolutionary initiative to streamline the digital commerce ecosystem in India. When coupled with the robust capabilities of IBM API Connect, this integration presents a game-changing opportunity for buyers, sellers and logistics partners to thrive in the digital marketplace. Let’s delve into its benefits and potential impact on business.

Introduction to ONDC and IBM API Connect 

The ONDC platform, envisioned by the Government of India, aims to create an inclusive and interoperable digital commerce ecosystem. It facilitates seamless integration among various stakeholders—including buyers, sellers, logistics providers and financial institutions —fostering transparency, efficiency and accessibility in digital commerce. 

IBM API Connect is a comprehensive API management solution that enables organizations to create, secure, manage and analyze APIs throughout their lifecycle. It provides capabilities for designing, deploying and consuming APIs, thereby putting up secure and efficient communication between different applications and systems. 

Benefits for buyers and sellers apps 

1. Enhanced integration: Integration with IBM API Connect allows buyers and sellers apps to seamlessly connect with the ONDC platform, enabling real-time data exchange and transaction processing. This makes for smoother operations and improved user experience for buyers and sellers alike. 

2. Expanded services: Buyers and sellers apps can leverage the ONDC platform’s wide range of services, including inventory management, order processing and payment solutions. Integration with IBM API Connect enables easy access to these services, empowering apps to offer comprehensive solutions to their users. 

3. Improved efficiency: By automating processes and streamlining communication, the integration enhances the overall efficiency of buyers and sellers apps. Tasks such as inventory updates, order tracking and payment reconciliation can be performed seamlessly, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors. 

4. Better data insights: IBM API Connect provides advanced analytics capabilities that enable buyers and sellers apps to gain valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends and inventory management. By leveraging these insights, apps can optimize their operations, personalize user experiences and drive business growth.

Impact on business and logistics 

1. Operational efficiency: The integration of IBM API Connect with the ONDC platform streamlines operations for buyers, sellers and logistics partners, reducing costs and improving productivity. Automated processes and real-time data exchange enable faster order fulfilment and smoother logistics operations. 

2. Customer experience boost: Seamless communication between buyers and sellers apps and the ONDC platform translates into a better customer experience. From faster order processing to accurate inventory information, customers benefit from a more efficient and transparent shopping experience. 

3. Business growth: By leveraging the integrated capabilities of IBM API Connect and the ONDC platform, buyers and sellers apps can expand their reach, attract more customers and increase sales. The ability to offer a seamless and comprehensive shopping experience gives apps a competitive edge in the market. 

4. Logistics optimization: Logistics providers can also benefit from this integration by gaining access to real-time shipment data, optimizing delivery routes and improving inventory management. This leads to faster delivery times, reduced transportation costs and enhanced customer satisfaction. 

Enhanced integration with IBM API Connect

The integration of IBM API Connect with the ONDC network platform represents a significant advancement in the digital commerce ecosystem. Buyers, sellers and logistics partners stand to benefit from enhanced integration, expanded services, improved efficiency and valuable data insights.

As businesses embrace this integration, they can expect to see tangible impacts on operational efficiency, customer experience and overall business growth. By leveraging the combined capabilities of IBM API Connect and the ONDC platform, stakeholders can navigate the complexities of digital commerce with confidence and unlock new opportunities for success. 

Source: ibm.com

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How to achieve high-impact personalization at scale with managed marketing services

To help companies better deliver on their marketing vision and scale their marketing business processes, managed marketing services (MMS) offshore has become a fast growing trend. According to an Everest Group study, offshore MMS centers increased over 50% from 2019 to 2022. What’s more, the number of offshore full-time equivalent employees (FTE) jumped 115%.

What are managed marketing services (MMS)?

Managed marketing services are the outsourcing of marketing business processes, such as campaign planning and execution, content management and enhancement, marketing analytics and other marketing support (SEO, social listening and loyalty).

Traditionally, business processes tied to marketing are manual tasks completed in-house and onshore. These processes are becoming more complex as AI and automation eliminate the tasks that can be executed through technology, leaving only the most challenging work behind.

This complexity translates into higher costs and makes it difficult for marketing teams to keep up. In a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 55% of respondents reported challenges coordinating effectively with different teams within marketing.

For big brands across all industries, today’s marketing campaigns are customized for specific audiences. These campaigns often need to be tailored to meet requirements in specific regions, which means navigating various regulations and standards.

While core creative and strategy campaigns are kept primarily in-house, marketing leaders are turning to MMS and tapping into their business and technology expertise to accelerate digital marketing operations, bridge talent shortages and fill technology skill gaps.

IBM Consulting offers managed marketing services that help clients improve their customer journeys by bringing together strategy, experience, technology and operations. IBM’s cross-functional team of experts helps companies transform their marketing organizations by taking on marketing functions.

Benefits include improved market performance and reduced costs, revenue growth through deep customer understanding and actionable insights, and exceptional experiences for customers and marketers.

Leveraging MMS for personalization at scale

Personalization builds brand loyalty by creating customer experiences (CXs) specifically designed for each audience. This leads to stronger customer relationships, which leads to higher customer value. Today, a service or retail organization might have 20 to 30 campaigns delivered to different audiences across numerous modalities (spanning paid social, email, push notification, texts and more).

The act of delivering such personalized messaging is a complex challenge. Marketing teams struggle to deliver relevant content and communications at scale.

The main areas of opportunity for businesses who leverage MMS for personalization at scale include campaign support, content management, customer experience, and marketing and media support. These components come together to create end-to-end operations efficiency, experience optimization and data optimization.

1. Campaign Support

Managed marketing services for campaign support transform marketing organizations by removing complexity across people, processes and platforms to create intelligent workflows and drive more value. MMS for campaign support includes:

◉ Design and planning

◉ Execution

◉ Optimization

◉ Performance evaluation

2. Content management

Content management with MMS involves collecting and managing content so it can be personalized and deployed at scale. When effectively managed across an organization, content can be used to engage customers, automate business processes and enhance collaboration. MMS for content management includes:

◉ Content localization and optimization

◉ Content migration

◉ Content personalization

◉ Digital asset management

3. Customer experience

Great customer experiences are built on data-driven insights. Managed marketing services provide the hyper-personalization needed to build customer loyalty and reduce churn. MMS for customer experience includes:

◉ User experience strategy

◉ Journey mapping

◉ Segmentation

◉ Predictive modeling

◉ Social listening

◉ Customer data management

4. Marketing and media support

Leveraging state-of-the-art AI solutions ensures optimization of targets, channels, messages and actions.MMS support around data and analytics answers questions such as: Who clicked on an online ad? Did that action turn into a lead? Did the customer make a purchase? What time did this occur? All this data can be fed back into the campaign’s execution to continually improve its effectiveness. MMS for marketing and media support includes:

◉ Commerce cataloging and curation

◉ Social/mobile command center

◉ Channel optimization

Transforming the customer experience in financial services

Recently, a national financial services company was challenged with scaling its marketing operations to address sudden growth in campaign volume and complexity while maintaining superior member experience with no increase in budget. To carry out this transformation, the organization worked with IBM to redesign its operating model.

The IBM team provided consulting services to support operational and organizational alignment around journey-based marketing that dramatically changed engagement with customers, prospects and suspects. The overall transformation simplified processes and infused automation in creative and campaign execution.

Accelerating marketing performance

By executing MMS to achieve personalization at scale, businesses have seen great success. One retailer saw a 176% increase in online revenue from target segments, a 25% increase in online conversion rates and a 10% average increase in order size after personalizing their digital presence across touchpoints with IBM iX.

IBM’s managed marketing services provide a flexible framework that allows our clients to accelerate a shift to digital marketing and achieve personalization at scale. We do this by supplementing marketing operations to transform, automate or change workflows so businesses can innovate, keep up with evolving customer needs and stay ahead of the competition.

Source: ibm.com

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Transforming data into artist insights and enhancing the fan experience at the GRAMMYs®

We want to help music fans discover something new and interesting about their favorite artists…” — Corey Shelton

When the world’s top recording stars cross the red carpet at the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards®, IBM will be there.

IBM Consulting builds long-term relationships with clients and 2022 marks the 5th year the Recording Academy® and IBM have collaborated to enrich the digital experience of Music’s Biggest Night®. This year, the Recording Academy asked IBM to help create a solution that could provide unique insights about the lives and accomplishments of GRAMMY® artists.

Together, we built GRAMMY Insights with IBM Watson, an artificial-intelligence (AI)-powered intelligent search and text-analytics solution, which uses the AI and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of IBM Watson Discovery to dig deep and reveal distinctive information that fuels passionate fan engagement. Putting AI to work in a real-world application like the GRAMMYs® is a powerful demonstration of how AI is changing the way we learn, work and consume content.

When IBM Consulting partners with the GRAMMYs and other premier events—including Wimbledon, the Masters Tournament and the US Open Tennis Championships—our clients rely on us to orchestrate and implement automation, AI, analytics and skills to fundamentally change how work gets done. In collaboration with digital, marketing and technical teams from the Recording Academy, IBM Consulting helps them jumpstart initiatives using IBM Garage Methodology, bringing together an open, seamless set of practices with a human-centric, outcome-first approach, used to create, execute and operate workflows alongside the client. The process delivers an end-to-end model for accelerating digital transformation, which facilitates innovation and develops the practices, technologies and expertise to rapidly turn ideas into business value.

IBM Watson Discovery scans more than 20 million articles from the past two months using natural language processing to recommend interesting facts—including some hidden gems—about each recording artist. Using these gems, insights are provided to music lovers.

Ultimately, this harnesses intelligent workflows allowing those like the GRAMMY digital team to shift their focus to more critical, run of show processes while AI works in an automated fashion to handle the voluminous tasks otherwise beyond reach, advances scalability thereby improving the fan experience.

2018 marked the first time the Recording Academy and IBM used AI to generate award-show content. Then in 2021—in an innovative effort to help fans feel more connected in the COVID-adjusted telecast—GRAMMY Debates with Watson summarized fan opinions through structured and fun debates during the live show. Thousands of fans weighed in on a variety of statements that fueled strong opinions such as the most groundbreaking artist of all time, the top style icon and how virtual concerts compare to live shows. Natural language processing was used to analyze a half-million keywords and summarize music fans’ points of view around lively conversations.

This year, the Recording Academy worked with IBM Consulting to use AI technology delivered by IBM Watson Discovery. IBM Watson Discovery scans more than 20 million articles from the past two months using natural language processing to recommend interesting facts—including some hidden gems—about each recording artist. Using these gems, insights are provided to music lovers during the GRAMMY Live Pre-show and on the artist pages on GRAMMY.com. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding, which works behind a firewall or on any cloud, uses deep learning to extract meaning and metadata from unstructured text data. The analytics from the text data reveals categories, classification, entities, keywords, sentiment, emotion, relations and syntax. This uncovers real-time actionable insights that can be used to pull meta-data and patterns from massive troves of data.

The AI insights unearthed by IBM Watson Discovery contribute to the show’s digital workflow and help streamline the operations and production behind GRAMMY.com. The power of AI and NLP greatly speed data mining and queries that would otherwise take weeks or months to parse can now be accomplished dynamically. Once insights have been harvested the production and curation teams decide which content cascades across TV, social media and digital platforms. As stars arrive, meet with the press and showcase their designer fashions, data will be embedded in red carpet live streams and posted to the artists’ pages on the GRAMMY website.

IBM Consulting teams go far beyond creating a solution and handing it off to the client for implementation. Throughout the planning process for the GRAMMYs, IBM Consulting collaborated with multiple stakeholders across the Recording Academy and frequently met with information technology, marketing and digital teams. And on the big night, IBM will be on-site during the event as an extension of the editorial and production teams.

The powerful combination of IBM Consulting, IBM Garage, IBM Watson Discovery and the Recording Academy digital team delivers an engrossing digital experience to more than seven million music fans worldwide. Learn how IBM Consulting can help you use market-leading natural language processing to uncover meaningful business insights from documents, webpages and big data.

Source: ibm.com

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Why intelligent commerce is the future of business

Close to 60% of CEOs are planning for assumed economic growth, says Gartner. How are you thinking about growth? Are you considering the possibility of extending your business models? In today’s digital world, there are tremendous opportunities to expand your business and take advantage of new growth opportunities, whether it’s through creating a seamless experience between physical and digital experiences, moving to a subscription model or expanding your business to different marketplaces, B2B or B2C.

As you consider these possibilities, it’s imperative to keep in mind that all business is now digital, even when it’s in person. Think about a customer returning an online purchase to a physical retail store or an in-store retail associate ordering an out-of-stock item for a customer. In a world where all business is now digital, the fundamental driver for business growth is the customer experience.

Optimizing commerce through a great customer experience isn’t about turning on new technology or doing business through every possible channel. Instead, it’s about helping customers through their 100’s of micro-decisions across their buyer journey and engaging, delighting and motivating customers to convert. This requires the thoughtful, orchestrated execution of technology across your entire business. We call this intelligent commerce—a human-centric, experience-led, insight-driven approach to designing digital commerce solutions on any cloud to activate new revenue streams, reduce inefficiencies and accelerate time-to-value for your commerce investments.

Then what is dumb commerce? Unless you are really driving experiences across the channels that are most strategic to your business and unless you have the data, insight and the flexibility to expand your ecosystems to accelerate time to value, your commerce experience likely needs to be more intelligent.

Close to 60% of CEOs are focused on expectations of growth as their top objective and priority in 2022 and beyond. – Gartner, 2021

Turning commerce into your growth engine

In the years leading up to the pandemic, many companies moved digital commerce to a back seat of their strategic priorities. Digital commerce was a digital work horse, which was maintained and fixed when broken. It was often marginalized and discussed in basic terms of transactions, platforms and implementations.

While IBM has always approached digital commerce with a strategic lens, recent market disruption has caused our clients to rethink its importance. It’s a pivot to understand that the real promise of digital commerce is growth. Our strategic approach moves digital commerce to a level of intelligence to change the bottom line of the enterprise.

How to orchestrate experiences that drive growth across complex multi-cloud ecosystems

Based on thousands of consulting engagements with clients, IBM industry-leading research and even our own path to transformation, IBM identified three primary growth levers shaping commerce growth:

1. Experience orchestration to tame channel chaos

Orchestrating personalized and consistent experiences is increasingly complex as the number of commerce channels continues to explode. Think of experience orchestration as the fundamental components needed to realize the promise of intelligent commerce. The world is incredibly complicated and continuously changing. This means you need to have all the critical technology in place to ensure your business has the agility and capabilities to continuously deliver great customer experience

For example, to maintain and optimize workforce operations in times of disruption, Frito Lay expanded its e-commerce strategy and created a new solution to streamline frontline employees’ workflows. Frito-Lay is now positioned to fully function in a virtual environment, helping teams keep the same routines, stand-up times and release schedules.

Such best-in-class commerce experiences are enabled by human-centered business design and transformative technologies designed to be strategic for today, tomorrow and the future. Based on experiences with our own clients, enterprises designing and deploying omni-channel experiences can increase sales of up to 30% and realize up to a 300% increase in mobile conversions.

2. Data and insights-driven interactions to personalize engagement

Engaging and activating customers in a personalized commerce experience is a moving target due to several stressors—the economy, privacy rules, healthcare regulations, social changes, environmental concerns, and more. Businesses need a focused, dynamic and responsive set of tools to deliver a consistent exemplary commerce experience​.

With the fundamentals in place to enable experience orchestration, you can now access the critical data and insights needed to personalize customer experiences. You can understand who your customers are, what they like, their history with your brand and their buying patterns. Your strategy should focus on the type of relationship you want to have with your customers and their expectations of your brand.

IBM solutions activate buyers with the personalization and permissions enabled by AI, data and insight-driven interactions. IBM Consultants partner with clients and use insights to make the buying experience transparent through order and inventory intelligence. Our clients that drive personalization and engagement realize a 20-50% increase in customer satisfaction, net promoter score (NPS) and loyalty while doubling order size.

For example, with 90% of Audi UK’s car purchases starting online, IBM Consulting redesigned Audi’s website to reimagine its customers’ digital journey from initial inquiry to ownership. By unifying its mobile and desktop shopping experiences, Audi UK  increased  online sales inquiries by 59% despite an almost 30% industry decline in new UK car sales during the pandemic.

3. Ecosystem evolution to keep pace with technology innovation

Delivering desired commerce experiences is harder than ever as customers continuously adopt new technologies. Flexible, modern architecture enables experience evolution and curation so your business can keep pace with and benefit from new technologies. Growth isn’t just about supercharging what you already have. It’s about breaking new ground, expanding your business model and activating new revenue streams. Accelerators activate growth sooner and at scale.

For example, Swiss luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer built a new guided purchasing experience in a matter of weeks that helped bridge the physical gap due to COVID-19 restrictions and resulted in triple-digit growth.

From strategy and advisory through managed service, delivery and everything in between, IBM Consulting can help you operationalize these three growth levers to deliver the measurable outcomes that are most important to your business.

Does your business need intelligent commerce?

The first step to understanding where you fall on the intelligent commerce spectrum is to identify where there may be gaps in your commerce strategy. If you answer ‘no’ to any of the following questions, your commerce experience needs to be more intelligent.

◉ Are you adopting technology and providing the orchestration necessary to take advantage of the explosion of commerce channels?

Delivering desired commerce experiences is harder than ever as the rate of technology innovation accelerates exponentially. Customer experience expectations continue to increase as they adopt new technologies and new channels, which makes orchestrating personalized, consistent experiences increasingly complex.

◉ Are you taking advantage of data, insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver targeted, personalized and contextual experiences to customers and new generations of buyers?

All customers want you to understand them, know them, anticipate them and help them at every touch point. And newer generations have incredibly high expectations for digital buying experiences. The ability to focus on the right data supporting the right experience is critical, and balancing personalization with respect is also critical.

◉ Are you empathetic to your customers’ changing needs and preferences, including sustainability?

Engaging your customers can feel like a moving target, and the need to dynamically communicate is constantly changing due to myriad external forces and influences—economic, privacy, health, social and environmental—impacting their decisions. Adapting to the disruption over the past few years has forever changed buyer behaviors. Customers expect a dynamic, holistic buyer experience across every in-person and online interaction.

The IBM approach to intelligent commerce

IBM partners with global industry leaders to transform commerce by orchestrating experiences and ecosystems to drive client growth. By using AI, smart data and analytics, customer insights are harvested to design personalized commerce interactions. Modern architecture enables deployment of omnichannel experiences, which activate new business models with new revenue sources, increase enterprise efficiency and enrich customer experiences.

Source: ibm.com

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