How UV Plans Digital Experiences on SFCC, with Business Analysts, Industry Experts and Other Professionals

When you build a small site, it’s easy to do so in a vacuum. You just hire a dev team, they do some designs, you build it, you test it, and voila! (If only life were always so smooth!)

Site complexity scales slowly. A bit bigger, and you need a UI/UX specialist. Bigger still, you need QA as well.

Indeed, on the scale from making simple to complex web sites, there are various pieces that, as your needs become sufficiently more complex, become substantially more important. Take, for example:

• QA (quality assurance). This is the fancy way of saying: in any complex system, tiny, “simple” changes become more likely to cause major breakages or disruptions; thus, even tiny changes need to be constantly tested. Not to mention browser compatibility and the many other areas often forgotten that need to be tested.
• UI/UX (user-interface/user-experience). With just an out-of-the-box site, you can add in a logo, product shots, some imagery of happy, smiling, cute people (whoever puts images of angry people onto their sites?), of course. But as there become lots of use cases to think through, and experiences you want to optimize for, a good user experience requires focus and attention to plan out as well.
• Integrated marketing & conversion optimization team. You want to build or platform your site with the goal of maximizing your sales in mind from the very beginning, right?
• Production management. This is to ensure that not only is the site planned smartly, and then built according to plan, but that what the site integrates with all the other logistical aspects of the back-end works smoothly.
• Content creation. Content is a whole other can of worms because you need not only the core site content, but messaging everywhere on the site that is consistent with the site’s positioning — even details like the error messages.

And so forth, and so forth. So now we’re building a more complex operation to make your bigger site.

But what about the even bigger levels? The truly advanced sites?

Those, of course, need the same elements as above — just more of them. But in addition to that, with such scale, we take on another level of needs: to work with industry analysts and expert, specialist planners to ensure that the digital experience we build is the right one that’s needed. This takes the planning to another level — but is essential for large-scale, goal-oriented sites that are deeply committed to ensuring the site achieves the right objectives.

Said differently: there is work to be done earlier in the cycle, before jumping into building it, if you really step back and focus on the high-level objectives, from a creative point of view.

Let’s think, as an example, that you want to grow your ecommerce site by, say, 10 times. Just moving to a new platform won’t do that. Yes, perhaps all the optimizations that Salesforce Commerce Cloud has built-in to it, and investing your time testing and optimizing it, could result in, perhaps, a 10% improvement here, another 15% improvement there, a 2% improvement all the way over there — together, yielding perhaps a doubling in sales.

For most companies, doubling your sales is great. Who wouldn’t want to?

But let’s take the world in which you’re focused on your goal of 10x-ing your sales. Optimizing Salesforce Commerce Cloud along will never achieve that.

Instead — well, in addition to that — you need to plan your Salesforce Commerce Cloud strategy as one, integrated part of a bigger picture.

Maybe the bigger picture is to create a movement. Maybe the bigger picture is to create a controversy. Maybe the bigger picture is a repositioning. Maybe the bigger picture is about an industry trend that you will jump on very early on. This is the specialty of industry analysts.

But then, once you have the bigger, integrated strategy planned out, you need to not just figure out how Salesforce Commerce Cloud fits in, but make sure all the little details fit in perfectly. And that there are no leaks. You need a complete digital experience, built from the ground-up, around the concept.

Most teams can’t do that; they’ll be either too small, too inexperienced, or (for the ones that do have the level of expertise and experience) just a massive bureaucracy that charges a few gazillion dollars per minute (including the minutes they spend coordinating their time planning a meeting time with you — yes, true story, that once happened to me, long ago! I never hired that firm again).

But you know who has the right balance between these two extremes, plus knows Salesforce Commerce Cloud with their eyes closed? You guessed it: United Virtualities. So why not give us a call?

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud experts. Contact us to see how we can work together.