Customer Focus vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

Today, with a globalized competition and without truce, a company must evaluate and take into account its size, and use this to analyze which of the tools available in the market is more suited to their needs. If it is a small company, you can improve your customer service by incorporating a chat. But a company of national level must evaluate other aspects like: marketing, tastes, preferences, tendencies, etc. To achieve the effective management of relationships with our customers, this technology provides us with effective tools and easy access.

Incentivized

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.

Incentivized

• Facilitates the interaction between the company and customers, through various communication channels, thanks to the storage of information of interest, such as the needs and preferences for products or services.
• Access data of interest (about the clients, their histories, products, prices, etc.,) from any place with access to the internet
• An extensive knowledge about the clients allows the company to present commercial offers adapted to their needs, so the income is also higher, through a lower sales cycle. The CRM allows to enhance sales and marketing functions.

Incentivized

• Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
• Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
• Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Incentivized

• Cost is always an element to consider when purchasing a computer solution, both for the purchase of the software and for its maintenance, many forget about the ongoing support costs that come with software.
• Many systems are backed up automatically through the cloud or through some other solution, but not all. So there is a good chance that the data will be lost. it is therefore necessary to take the safe backup forecasts in the event of any unforeseen occurrence and cause us an unpleasant surprise.
• There is a difference between being served by a real person when making a phone call, to an automated attention system. Sometimes it is good to make the tasks more automatic, but it is also good to have a little personalized help to avoid losing the human value of relationships.

Incentivized

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

Sales management is based on the management of customer relationships and must be centralized so that its analysis is effective. The data that is collected must be available for the generation of statistics for decision making by the directory. This tool allows us to generate the necessary data to generate results, save time and production cost. The other products did not fit our objectives.

Incentivized

Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.

Incentivized

• With the information available, about the clients, the company can know and segment the markets and develop effective and successful marketing campaigns.
• With the information the employee can develop more personalized relationships with the client.
• This customer service tool facilitated the administrative processes of sales to achieve higher performance and better results in the company.

Incentivized

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized