If you’re a business that makes a significant portion of your revenue via online channels, congratulations! You are officially an e-commerce company!
We don’t have to tell you how critical consistent, reliable IT is to the success of an e-comm business. Any issues in your IT systems mean you’re losing sales – which is ultimately all we care about when it comes to ecomm brands.
Considering the importance of a robust, 24/7 online marketplace for your customers to shop, it’s no wonder most ecomm companies have adopted ITSM frameworks to create a stable, consistent IT system that can handle the myriad challenges of e-comm IT management.
In this article, we’ll cover how e-comm companies can lean on ITSM as a way to continuously improve their IT (and therefore, their online presence (and therefore, more revenue!)). Let’s see what it’s all about!
Defining IT Service Management and E-Comm
As we’ve discussed before, IT Service Management (ITSM) is simply a framework for IT management, with the end goal of making an organization’s IT services as efficient as possible. You’ve probably heard of ITSM frameworks like ITIL or DevOps. It’s a formalized set of processes and procedures that have been proven to improve organizational efficiency across IT users.
E-Commerce (a.k.a ecomm, e-comm, eComm, and so many other different ways of spelling it), is the selling and buying of goods or services over the internet. As per Investopedia, e-comm is accounted for 14.1% of all retail sales worldwide pre-pandemic – a number which has risen to 15% in 2022.
When these two worlds collide, magic happens. ITSM provides the robust infrastructure that e-comm needs to thrive, in its most efficient and effective ways. This comes in the form of ensuring seamless transactions, secure data handling, and a smooth customer journey for customers, just to name a few ways.
ITSM’s Role In E-Comm
ITSM plays a pivotal role in the successful operation of e-comm companies large and small. I mean, do you really think a company as large as Lululemon or Fenty isn’t maximizing every dollar it spends?
Considering how dependent so many brands are on e-comm sales to keep their revenue up, it’s no wonder that ITSM has become such an important part of e-comm. Here’s some specific ways ITSM is used in organizations of all sizes and industries to succeed online.
Streamlined Processes
ITSM brings order to the chaos by giving users and other stakeholders the tools to not only understand the eye-wateringly complex world of IT, but to use IT to its full potential. For internal teams, it allows for more seamless day-to-day use – the stuff you do 1,000 times on your website per day, like updating banners or improving your CRO.
Without the powerful organizational framework of ITSM to underlie the various systems at work that make ecomm happen, ITSM is the reason why you can click ‘buy now’ and have your face serum on your doorstep the next day. In a single sentence, ITSM is what keeps things running smoothly at the world’s biggest ecomm brands.
Enhanced Security
It seems like almost every company these days has been involved in a hack or a data breach or some other compromise of customer data. The stark reality is that human error is responsible for the majority of security incidents at ecomm brands. With just some standardized and frequently updated security plans and protocols in place, many data breaches simply would not happen.
This is where ITSM really shines – in creating standardized, secured systems that work. As per a report by Forbes, ITSM can help reduce security incidents by a whopping 32%. Considering how important it is to secure and maintain your customers’ trust (and never ever lose it!), this is a massive boon to ITSM’s place in ecomm.
Improved Customer Experience
At the end of the day, a successful business boils down to customer experience. If the customer leaves happy, there’s a good chance they come back. If they leave frustrated, well, that’s pretty much your one shot.
ITSM is all about delivering top-notch service by once again providing specific guidance to your organization’s IT. It focuses on enhancing the customer experience by increasing efficiency, speed, and ease of use, while decreasing friction or frustration for the customer, ensuring that every interaction with the business is a positive one.
A study by BMC Blogs revealed that businesses that implement ITSM see a 20% increase in customer satisfaction. Considering how incredibly competitive the internet is these days, that’s a huge advantage to any business, big or small.
High Volume Transactions
e-comm is synonymous with high-volume transactions, and that means you need robust, organized, and efficient IT infrastructure to make it all work in a way that doesn’t crush your budget into smithereens.
High-volume, high-pressure IT situations are where ITSM showcases its unique ability to handle large volumes of data and transactions seamlessly, for long periods of time, without any issues. Considering the incredible load that a big e-comm brand faces on the daily, ITSM is an absolute necessity to make sure all of the disparate parts of an organization are pulling in the same direction.
Rapid Pace of Change
The world is moving fast, and IT is moving even faster. Without a framework of adaptability, change, and organization to guide your IT, you’re in serious trouble. Once again, this is where ITSM shines – ITSM is built to be adaptable to changing environments and works no matter where, when, who, why or how.
As per a report by McKinsey, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards e-commerce by five years, which means we’re facing technological demands that we are technologically unprepared for. This rapid pace of change requires an agile ITSM framework that can adapt to changing business needs – adding and subtracting IT pieces as needed to make sure the whole thing continues to run smoothly.
Global Reach
E-comm operates on a global scale, both in terms of people reached and in terms of the size of each business. That’s the beauty of e-comm – you’ve got Nestlé out there competing with someone who makes chocolate from their garage in Coté d’Ivoire!
This is also where ITSM shows its stuff, as it has scalability built into its very roots. The whole idea of ITSM is it is supposed to fit businesses of all sizes and operations, so adopting an ITSM framework – whether you’re a small fry or a big fish – means you’ve got a solution that is ready-made to fit your needs.
If you’re an e-comm business in 2023 and you don’t have an ITSM framework for your company, you could probably use one. As your business grows, you will only continue to face more challenges to your IT framework – which just further underlines the need for a comprehensive framework that you can lean on to help you scale.
If your servers go down or if you get hacked or, heck, you need to buy a new copier, it’s helpful to have an expert’s guide to make sure you’re spending your resources effectively. Any business owner knows that every dollar should go to the right place – that’s how you succeed – and there’s no world where that’s truer than the brutally competitive landscape of e-comm.
It’s like they always say, “get busy fixing your IT, or get busy dying.”