Multi-channel Infrastructure

To support excellence in an organisation's multi-channel customer offering, a robust, scalable and integrated e-commerce infrastructure is crucial. The organisation's web presence must reinforce the brand and service values to allow it to reach out and communicate with its customers while supporting key corporate objectives.

The Internet is a 24x7 operation and it is essential the organisation's infrastructure is sufficiently robust to ensure its customers get great service no matter what time they visit the site online. Since traffic can extremely vary at different times of the year, the organisation's e-commerce platform must be able to cope with these peak demands. This is especially critical given the unprecedented year-on-year growth of online customers choosing the Internet as a key channel to the organisation's business. The organisations today need an infrastructure that will scale to meet their needs and cope with the rapid growth expected over the coming years.

From the organisation's perspective, the most valuable customers are those that use multiple channels to interface with it. The need to present a consistent experience to these customers is clear and to do so requires reliable and close integration between channels and excellent information management to ensure consistent communication.

Customers can exhibit radical buying behaviours. They may wish to check the stock available in their local store and reserve it for later collection, commence a loan application online but complete it over the telephone or purchase goods online but return them to the physical stores. In these, and many other cases, integration across channels is paramount.
IVIS Group's expertise in the Infrastructure dimension of the Multi-channel Landscape covers areas including:

• IVIS Commerce Engine - Delivering best practice processes and designs to deliver online excellence


• Shopping Services - Providing customer registration, browse, search & navigation, basket management, checkout and help information to online customers


• Order Management Services - Providing links for fulfilment, customer self-service, call-centre customer service and management reporting


• Channel Integration - Delivering excellent integration to deliver a consistent, cohesive experience to multi-channel customers


• Information Management - Ensuring consistent customer communication by efficiently managing information about products and services


• Integration - Providing tight integration with existing systems to deliver efficient business processes across channels.