Changing priorities
Digital commerce priorities are shifting. Our study reveals that financial prudence will overtake customer- focused outcomes this year as companies aim to reduce the costs of customer acquisition, delivery, fulfillment, returns, and other digital commerce operations.
This shift toward financial outcomes makes sense when you consider that companies face record inflation, the Russia-Ukraine conflict disrupting supply chains, and weak economic growth.8
There is a slight shift in priority for the next two years. Improve cart to order conversions moves from third to the top desired outcome, while reduce customer complaints falls to rank six. Customer delight is still imperative, though financial outcomes take the spotlight.
Reduce costs gets a significant jump up in priority, rising from rank five in the past two years to rank three for the next two years — essentially exchanging places with customer retention rate.
Again, improve supply chain and inventory management metrics remains the least prioritized outcome, while strengthen payments capabilities and infrastructure moves up from the second-least to the third-least priority. Similarly, expand product portfolio, improve transparency and information flow within the organization, and improve uptime for website or app remain in the bottom five.
Figure 1: Desired outcomes by share of respondents ranking them in the top three — Past two years and next two years
Source: Infosys Knowledge Institute
Over the past two years, digital commerce initiatives focused on reducing complaints and improving customer retention rates. Of the surveyed companies, 30% ranked these outcomes in the top three of their five most desired outcomes (Figure 1).
Customer delight was the top priority, followed by financial, operational, and strategic outcomes. The next three most desired outcome, in order of importance, were improve marketing return on investment (ROI), reduce costs, and increase basket size or revenue per user were the next three most desired outcomes.
The two lowest prioritized outcomes in the past two years were improve supply chain and inventory management metrics and strengthen payment capabilities and infrastructure.
Many companies already cover inventory management well, so they now focus on other pressing outcomes. Payment management is currently ranked at the bottom of the list, as many companies may not be proficient in it yet.
Figure 1 reveals the top seven priorities for respondents to our survey, and how they changed overtime.
