Why empathy is key to building an eCommerce business case

Nic McDonald, Director of Transformation at Greene King, emphasised the importance of understanding your customers, and how that understanding can provide a shared vision for teams to coalesce around.

“It doesn’t matter where you sit on the eCommerce side, whether it’s tech, or UX, or whatever. Knowing your customer — what they want, what their needs are — is a way to unite the language across all functions and disciplines within the organisation,” said McDonald.

“If you can get to know your customer segmentation, or what the new trend is, or what people are seeing or wanting, you’ll be ahead of the game,” she added.

Rachel Smith, Managing Director of SQLI UK & ME, emphasised the need for continuous customer understanding: "In our experience, when brands claim to know their customers, the reality often differs. Rapid changes over recent years requires an ongoing review of customer needs, behaviours and wants.

“The key is to avoid complacency: listen to your customers and consistently benchmark against the best experiences your competitors offer. It's crucial to have a clear vision of where you want to be in one, two, or five years – your North Star – ensuring it aligns with what matters to your customers."

Digital transformation doesn’t just affect customers. Your own colleagues become users of the technology you procure or build, and winning their buy-in is essential in creating a successful business case, as noted by Rachel Tonner, VP of Marketing at Klevu.

“The key to selling a plan to the board, but also about selling a plan internally, is about taking your team along with you,” said Tonner. “Getting more people on-board with your plan is only going to make it stronger.”

This doesn’t have to be a big, scary thing. It could be as simple as showing your colleagues and team members the technology they might be using and obtaining their initial feedback, or by giving them the opportunity to do their own research, which in turn can foster excitement and internal advocacy.

“It’s important to think about your internal end users before you build the technology,” said Sezin Cagil, Principal Delivery Lead for Selfridges. “There’s no point in building something that nobody can use.”

This enablement shouldn’t just extend to your technical team, argued Lynsey Reid, Customer Experience Director at Heineken, but also other stakeholders who can provide valuable input and evangelisation for your project.

“Bring your legal team or your privacy champions closer to what you do — and vice versa. Equally, it’s important that your legal team, wherever they sit, have a better understanding of the customer and their needs, and the organisation’s commercial ambitions,” Reid said.

“I’m not suggesting for a second that this will alter their approach, but still, it’s important. Otherwise, it can feel a bit like a conflict between the two parties, which isn’t useful.”

One of the fundamental rules of good storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” This applies when making a business case to the board, too. As McDonald explained, a good strategy for building an effective business case is describing how the various components work and how they interact, and crucially, how they collectively provide business value.

“You can’t assume everyone understands the digital world at the same level as an eCommerce professional,” she said. “If you use a lot of acronyms — CDP, DXP — you’ll lose them.”

“You can’t go with individual business cases for each item, because alone they don’t demonstrate a return on investment in their own right. So, how do you connect each part together and see how they add value to the other? That can be quite complex from a measurement perspective,” she added.

One approach, as McDonald explained, is to relate these components to the direction of the company and for the customer. Showing how, for example, a new eCommerce platform will reduce customer churn and cart abandonment is far more compelling than merely saying that it’s better than the system preceding it.

Digital transformation projects are expensive, and they often take years to show results, especially in the most complex organisations. While a board may initially provide enthusiastic approval, that enthusiasm may wane over the lengthy development and integration process. Setting expectations, therefore, is key.

“A transformation for a big organisation can take anywhere between three and five years,” said McDonald. “At the beginning, people get it — especially if it’s been a while since the last big change — and they understand the need. As you move forward, that enthusiasm lessens because they’re waiting for the moment where they see the ROI.”

To avoid this — or, at the very least, minimise it — McDonald argues that stakeholders need to be educated about the complexity of the project, the challenges and components involved, and the realistic timeframes involved. And that explanation needs to be clear, unambiguous, and universally understandable.

Smith agreed, adding: “It’s so important to bring through quick wins, which you can deliver alongside more strategic change.

“You need to set realistic timelines that allow for flexibility and agility. There will always be things that crop up — and often it’s in those difficult moments when the magic happens. It’s where you learn something, or realise that an assumption wasn’t correct and you need to change it, in the process making your digital transformation project so much better.”

Cagil emphasised the importance of early communication with board stakeholders. By starting the conversation at the earliest point, you have the ability to understand the board’s fears and concerns, reduce the amount of new concepts introduced at one time, and ultimately build a stronger case for whatever you propose.

“If you go to the board with an amazing project that they knew nothing about prior to the meeting, and you expect them to fully grasp things like privacy changes, how you’ll use AI, and new software they’re unfamiliar with, or you’re introducing new terminology they’ve never heard of, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.”

And when discussing these new concepts, or new challenges, it’s crucial to remain patient and to understand that not everyone shares your expertise. You don’t need to give the board a technical seminar, but you do need to show why your proposed solution represents a major step change in capabilities and results.

“I think there isn’t only a technical gap between the board [and eCommerce professionals], but also a confidence gap,” Cagil said.

“We’re moving away from a monolithic model to one that’s bringing better results, using composable architecture, agile development methodologies, and other new ways of working. We need to educate without overwhelming, and we can do that by trying to explain that technology is improving, not for the sake of technology, but to deliver tangible business value.”

Empathy is, at its heart, understanding the concerns and worries of those around you. Not only is it core to convincing others of your ideas, especially when they involve a large upfront investment, but it’s also a crucial component in turning stakeholders into vocal, enthusiastic advocates.

How do you show those concerns? The best way is to take these stakeholders with you. Make your proposals clear and transparent. Seek their thoughts. Establish expectations and share your vision.