MarTech Interview with Joe Harouni, Connected Commerce Practice Lead at Avionos

Businesses struggle with fragmented data, disjointed technologies, and siloed systems, leading to lost sales and dissatisfied customers. However, Joe Harouni, Connected Commerce Practice Lead, and his team at Avionos have developed innovative strategies and cutting-edge technologies to bridge this gap. Avionos enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences at scale by connecting channels, leveraging data and insights, and ensuring a cohesive customer journey.

Join us as we explore the world of connected commerce and learn how Avionos is revolutionizing the industry.

Joe, can you describe your role as Connected Commerce Practice Lead at Avionos, and what are some of your main responsibilities?

As Connected Commerce Practice Lead, a large focus of my work is knowing my client’s customers and pinpointing where processes need to be optimized. We start with a vision, and from there, I work with the customer on filling in a strategy and implementing new tools to alleviate their pain points. Integrations are a foundational enabler to building transformational commerce experience so much of my time is spent guiding clients through the ecosystem. Also, I challenge my clients to understand the specific customer experience pain points that can be addressed not just in the commerce experience but throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

How does Avionos approach commerce strategy for clients, and what sets your approach apart from other companies in the industry?

Avionos leverages an Assess-Analyze-Align framework to define our Clients’ commerce strategy. What makes Avionos unique from competitive strategy offerings is that we are platform-agnostic without being platform-ignorant. This means that rather than favoring a specific platform recommendation ahead of time (and then using the strategy definition process as a way to validate that conclusion) we leverage our hands-on experience with the leading platforms to better understand the range of options and define the actual strategy that will maximize business outcomes.

Can you discuss the importance of customer experience in eCommerce, and how Avionos helps clients optimize their online customer journey?

We know through both our experience as consultants and business operators, as well as Avionos’ own first-party research, that B2B buyers will switch suppliers for a better experience. 85% of B2B buyers would turn to a competitor if their supplier’s digital channel can’t keep up with their desires as a buyer. So it follows that if stopping attrition, maximizing revenue, and increasing profitability are important, then customer experience is important.

In terms of helping a merchant optimize the customer and buyer journey, Avionos takes a multi-faceted approach. First, we use usage data and analytics to help narrow the universe of possible optimizations to the highest impact drop-offs and pain points. Then we use design thinking and heuristic analysis to draft hypotheses of how the journey should be improved. Finally, we use surveying, interviewing, and voice of customer research to validate the hypothesis and refine the output into concrete recommendations.

How do you help clients balance the need for innovation in eCommerce with maintaining a stable, reliable platform?

It’s not easy to balance this and every case is unique. Ultimately stability and reliability should be prioritized over innovation and feature expansions until acceptable levels of the former are sustained for obvious reasons: a customer facing an outage or error is not a customer for long no matter how innovative the journey.

That said, the advent and normalization of the cloud have made it much easier to achieve both at the same time. If you are not yet on the cloud, then a migration to the cloud is a powerful choice that enables progress against both objectives.

Can you share a success story of a client who achieved significant business results through their eCommerce implementation with Avionos?

Avionos partnered with Merz Aesthetics, a leading global aesthetics and medical device company, to launch a connected Health Care Provider (HCP) portal that enabled not just ordering, but real value-added digital product innovation for end patients, Marz account reps, and of course the HCP’s themselves.

Because we approached the journey from a multi-persona perspective, Merz was able to realize outsized results including a double-digit jump in product search and a double-digit jump in orders when compared pre-commerce portal.

Please tell us a little bit about the newly launched tool by Avionos. What are the features of the Adobe-Salsify Connector?

Avionos’ Adobe-Salsify Connector provides brands with a simple way to automate publishing product data and increase product information accuracy. 66% of B2B buyers say their suppliers are not effectively showcasing product information and pricing—the Connector alleviates this pain point. By reducing the amount of manual, repetitive tasks and alerting users of product publishing errors, brands create more visibility and an overall more user-friendly, intuitive digital experience.

Product, marketing, and Sales teams can then dedicate more of their time to higher value activity, like lead generation, customer experience, and loyalty. The Connector runs on App Builder for Adobe Commerce and requires no additional licenses or infrastructure making it easy to integrate into existing processes.

Key features include:
Automated publishing
Robust Logging and error reporting
Multi-storefront and multi-instance publishing
Clicks-not-code configuration maintained in Salsify
Ultimate extensibility via near-universally used Node.js framework
Supports adds, updates, deletes, full loads, incremental loads, product images, product variants, taxonomy updates
AEM publishing (coming in Q2!)

How does Avionos approach eCommerce personalization, and what techniques and tools do you use to achieve personalized experiences for customers?

In my experience, companies are not constrained by platform or technology when it comes to personalization but rather by content, data, and decisions. So when a client asks me to implement personalization, I ask them who is creating the content, how clean and accurate is your off-platform data, and who is making decisions about who sees what and when? We can assist in all those areas, and those core dependencies can usually be sorted out as the technology implementation progresses. Overall my advice to clients is to pilot a process that enables personalization, set a small initial target and then iterate and grow, otherwise, you maximize the chance of regretting cost and diminishing returns.

How does Avionos approach eCommerce security and compliance, and what measures do you take to ensure your clients’ data and transactions are secure?

Avionos adheres to its clients’ established security and data privacy policies and protocols.

How do you help clients integrate their eCommerce platform with other technologies and systems they may have in place, such as CRM or ERP?

Generally by pointing out that not every integration point needs to be real-time and automated from day one. Each integration needs to be assessed based on the frequency of underlying data changes, its impact on the customer and employee experience, and volume.

Many companies I work with find that several integrations they thought would require heavy development and real-time automation could be addressed via batch or even periodic manual upload or update while still obtaining the efficiency and growth targets of the initiative.

Can you share any challenges or roadblocks you’ve faced when implementing eCommerce solutions for clients, and how you overcame them?

By far, the biggest challenge I face is inertia; “Well this is the way we’ve always done it.” I overcome this with a relentless focus on driving business outcomes as opposed to focusing exclusively on achieving the technical go-live. The latter is essential but the former takes precedence.

This is why I prefer and always recommend an implementation methodology, such as the one we execute at Avionos, that has a true Discovery phase informed by business process design, data, design thinking, the voice of employees, and the voice of customer. If you do not ground your functional and technical decisions in those, it is far too easy., even with the best intentions, to implement the wrong thing for the wrong reasons based on a bad process.

How does Avionos approach eCommerce strategy for B2B companies, and what unique challenges and opportunities do you see in this market?

Avionos takes a practical approach to inform eCommerce strategy across its B2B customers. B2B Companies in particular should shy away from a one-size-fits-all approach and should avoid chasing trends. Getting the fundamentals right across the entire customer journey is paramount to successful B2B digital transformation. As such we weave the following into our B2B Commerce Strategy work:

Involve the front line Sales and service personnel early and often.
Conduct Voice of Customer research and execute Usability testing
Work off a standard capability framework then weave in the uniqueness and innovation that will differentiate

Each industry poses its own unique challenges and opportunities. For example, in the health and life sciences industry, B2B companies might be struggling with how to enhance customer registration and the overall purchasing process can implement a better B2B eCommerce strategy to reduce customer frustration while increasing brand loyalty. On the other hand, an association that supports multiple businesses in a specific sector or industry might look to apply e-commerce strategies to improve the checkout process and design of the user experience, decrease bounce rates of email campaigns and boost online revenue.

Can you share any examples of how Avionos has helped clients with international eCommerce expansion and localization?

Brenntag North America, a leading chemical distributor, worked closely with Avionos to improve transparency and operational efficiency and quickly launch into four new key markets: Canada, Latin America, US Chemicals, and US Lubricants. Avionos implemented Salesforce B2B Commerce and created a common code base for all four sites, allowing global launches and changes to occur without additional development time. Within six months, Brenntag’s revenue increased by $11 million, enabling customers to access documentation, place orders and buy-backs, and review order history through customer portals. Each international site is customized to provide a seamless customer experience, including localized languages, currency, and tax information. Additionally, Avionos’ B2B Commerce solution is integrated with third-party CMS systems and three enterprise resource planning systems.

What impact do you think emerging technologies such as AI and ML are having on eCommerce?

As businesses across industries adopt emerging technologies, including AI and machine learning, and as generative AI capabilities such as ChapGPT and most recently GPT-4 make their viral entrance, the eCommerce industry will be impacted immensely.

In particular, I look to “productized AI” as a catalyst to cause this disruption because it eliminates, or mitigates the risk of, traditional barriers to entry. Many AI tools are only as good and effective as the data that goes into them so having a large enough data set, high-quality data, and also teams equipped with skills and expertise to design and deliver at scale is crucial and often a blocker.

Productized AI – or purpose-built AI – lowers the associated risk and allows business leaders to draw a clear, straight line toward value. For example, a marketer could leverage Adobe Sensei to generate automated tagging based on a large asset library; Salesforce Einstein can recommend, and even automate, the next-best service agent action on a troubled account in the CRM; or a merchandiser can rely on AI-powered product ranking and relevance in a modern search platform like Algolia or Coveo.

Tune in to MTC Podcast for visionary Martech Trends.