The events this year have permanently accelerated the move to digital. As always, the shift has not been universal, with the outcome based on their existing digital maturity or their industry segment read blog for more details.

18 months ago, IBM WebSphere became HCL Commerce, part of the HCL Software unit. I, like many of my colleagues, wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But one of the key messages the leadership team ingrained in us is that HCL Software and HCL Commerce by extension, would be an organization focused on helping our customers excel.

First let’s will look at why it is important to understand your customers intentions when they search and interact with your Ecommerce site. Many studies show that shoppers using on-site search are, on average, two* times more likely to convert than shoppers that do not search. So, when someone searches on  your site it is important to understand what they want and get them to it quickly. Secondly, mainstream consumer technology and voice assistants such as Alexa and search engines like Google are creating new "Human Computer Interaction" paradigms and expectations from consumers. This will become table stakes to compete in the world of ecommerce creating a knock-on effect for traditional ecommerce search interactions too. Defining the best digital Journey Helping you navigate around this and any new expectations can be simplified by breaking it down into bite size chunks. The first chunk to look at is how you can understand your customers intentions on your site, once you do that it can help you curate an amazing and relevant digital experience. This does raise the question, "how do we know what sort of experience they need"? This can be easier than you think. Human behavior in the retail context can be very predictable and mapped out in journeys. So of you may have been in one of these fun workshops: Once you have mapped out your customers journey the next step is a nice approach that I stole from a retail guru and mentor which has turned out to be very useful. 1) Take the context of the consumer be it: online, instore, mobile, with pushchair & screaming baby, and so on. 2) Take the product or service category: is it essential, discretionary, influencer led & lifestyle signaling, and so on. Armed with these two key points on context and...

Hard to believe we’re closing in on the end of 2020. It has been a crazy year! Yet despite all of the challenges our team and our customers and partners have faced, we have stayed positive and worked together to bring you our 2nd major release in 2020. Truly a collaborative effort with our customers and partners who have extended themselves beyond the transaction to ensure we are always bringing relevant, impactful improvements to the platform. Our Fall 2020 release is going live on December 11th and features some phenomenal additions to help you sell more stuff. To give you a little preview of what’s coming, including live demos across our three wows, we are hosting a Sneak Peek webinar on November 20th to demonstrate: World Class Experience - More control, more power for better customer experiences. Building on the 9.1 release, we are embedding a Content Management Solution and a Digital Asset Management Solution that makes it even easier for your business users, merchandisers, marketers to create engaging experiences and manage compelling content like shoppable videos. Optimized Merchandising - Capture and analyze behavioral data to sell more stuff With the integration of behavioral analytics from HCL Discover, you can proactively target your customers based on a deeper understanding of their behavior on your site, taking actions to improve their experience and engage them with timely and relevant content. Additionally, this release enhances our customer data platform with the integration of Google Big Query and Google Analytics360 enabling you to have all your customer data in one place for a holistic view of their behavior Cloud Native - Build and run scalable applications in modern dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds Underpinning everything we do is our Cloud Native strategy. Need to scale to 30-40K transactions a...

Plans to shake up the industry and grow rapidly  In a matter of a few short weeks after selecting HCL Commerce and Perficient as their digital transformation partner, 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty (“2-10HBW”) went live on V9 with the first phase of their new digital initiative that will create a holistic customer view and enhance the user experience www.2-10.com.  2-10HBW, a home warranty company that provides products and services for homeowners, real estate professionals, and builders, provides its customers online access to products and services, including purchasing coverage, filing a claim, and viewing the status of their claims and coverage, among other capabilities.  “We’re excited to announce this project and to collaborate with such capable partners,” said Steve Martinez, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty. “As we continue to grow our business, we have been highly selective of the technology we use to ensure it can support us as we evolve, and we believe HCL Commerce has the capability to scale to meet our needs. A project like this requires a trusted partnership, and Perficient has proven themselves to be a collaborative and reliable partner with the experience to match.”  “2-10 Home Buyers Warranty is one of the premier home warranty companies, and we’re thrilled to partner with them to digitally transform their business,” said John Ambrose, managing director of Perficient’s commerce practice. “Today’s customer platforms provide users with seamless experiences at their fingertips while giving businesses the visibility they need to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. We look forward to collaborating with HCL and deploying our expertise to deliver a quality customer experience to 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty.”  Another great example of how HCL Commerce goes beyond the transaction to help our clients deliver an innovative end-to-end customer experience. With a cloud native...

We recently kicked off a series of virtual discussion and Q&A sessions between our customers and our engineering team. It’s an opportunity for customers to get to know the engineering team, ask them questions about capabilities, design thinking and why they made certain decisions about the platform around a specific theme. We aim for a smaller group to ensure all participants have an opportunity to ask questions, offer opinions and feel like they are part of the session and community. Our first two were excellent, with great attendance and participation from our customer community. Below is a quick recap of both of those sessions, as well as a look ahead to our November Meet the Engineers session, which will be covering the Storefront. Session 1 – Cloud & Deployment - September 14 For this session, we brought in our team of experts who focus on the platform’s native ability to deploy quickly in any cloud environment. The attendees were very engaged, with questions falling into two primary categories: 1) Best practices for deploying in a cloud environment (Google, AWS and Azure all came up) 2) How HCL business services and API-first architecture work with integrations to supporting technologies (ERP, CMS, etc). A great opening session that went the full 90 minutes, and still had a few questions open and scheduled to be pursued in follow-up meetings. Session 2 – Performance Tuning – October 14 Our second session was intended to be very timely for the upcoming holiday shopping seasons which grip much of the world, helping our customers think through how they tune their site performance in preparation for (likely) recording breaking online shopping. Here, our discussion centered heavily on caching tips and best practices, including the use of REDIS and DynaCache to ensure high performance and great customer experiences...