Understanding your clients' problems, especially those small business clients, is crucial if you want to do right by them and continue to be a successful advisor.
If any of your clients are small businesses that have any sort of an ecommerce setup, you need to understand what kinds of information they consider, and what they try to do in order to convince their customers to use those ecommerce opportunities. That means that they have to understand how to improve those experiences, from the store fronts to the website, and make them all as seamless as possible. Those ecommerce clients want an integrated experience (and your clients, in turn, are going to start to demand the same integrated experiences, if they haven’t already).
Even if you don’t have clients that have a completely integrated ecommerce experience, it’s helpful to know what they’re considering. For example, do they have an app (and what kind of investments are they making in that experience, and how might it affect the financial picture that they bring to you when it comes time to meet?). How are they taking their ecommerce and their retailing from a single channel — say, the old-fashioned store front — into an omni channel and thus creating a more unified commerce experience? What kinds of equipment and personnel investments do they need to make to make that happen, and how will their financial picture change because of it?
If you’re just starting to understand what unified commerce is, it’s going to be helpful for you to immerse yourself in it so that you can speak the language of any clients you have that might be going through the experience. For example, what clients do with their data is going to make a big impact on equipment investments as well as services they need from tech pros. Since they need to connect software in new ways that may be complicated, but that may also help improve both their processes and the experiences of customers. What else should you understand about unified commerce in order to help your clients? This graphic explains it.
Author Bio: Kristy Blackmon has over a decade of experience writing and editing, working in daily journalism, long-form non-fiction, marketing, research, and policy. For the last several years, she has developed a focus on startups, technology, and the socioeconomic changes that come with the digital age. She believes in the power of words as a vehicle for social change, and she's rarely ambivalent about anything. She makes a mean guacamole, is addicted to solo travel, and in the Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate, she comes down squarely on the side of Battlestar Galactica.