eWave: Driving Commerce Businesses into the Era of Customer Experiences

For many commerce businesses around the globe, traditional offline channels still account for a majority of their revenue source. To adapt to the changes brought along by the pandemic, these companies are trying to swiftly embrace digitalization. But due to inadequate capabilities and knowledge, their attempts to digitalize their operations end up failing. In addition to bringing about these changes, the pandemic has also drastically altered consumer behavior as customers are now loyal to the experience rather than the brand. Organizations, therefore, are increasingly shifting their focus and investing in creating best-in-class experiences. “The quality of the experience is what drives customer retention, determines consumer loyalty, and makes consumers return to an organization. The journey is now more important than the destination,” adds Fatima Said, Managing Director and Co-founder, eWave. Over the years, eWave has earned great recognition as APAC’s leading global independent commerce innovator and an award-winning partner of Salesforce Commerce Cloud—eWave. The company combines technology and creativity to empower clients to re-evaluate and modify their digital transformation strategies and stay competitive in today’s market scenario.

Fatima started her first company when she was just sixteen with the vision to help people sell online. And eleven years ago, she, along with Karl Norman, co-founder and CEO at eWave, identified the lack of investments by organizations in building their e-commerce capabilities. The duo hence started supporting companies to build, maintain, and grow their e-commerce strategies. To provide their customers with a robust solution that could enable them to expand their businesses into new regions, Fatima and Karl partnered with Salesforce. Since then, eWave has been offering innovative e-commerce solutions to businesses, helping them streamline their sales, commerce, marketing, and customer service operations. eWave ensures efficient and reliable deployment of these solutions by engaging with its customers in two distinct ways: facilitating a complete digital transformation journey and providing an Inside Agency.

eWave builds a dedicated team inside its clients’ businesses that are aiming to scale and grow rapidly. These teams can be virtual, physical, or both, helping businesses scale their internal capacity. The Inside Agency model ensures stronger and more transparent partnerships and gives businesses the agility they require to adapt to changing industry landscapes.

Elaborating on this, Karl adds, “Inside Agency teams are highly specialized in commerce and Salesforce. With them, our clients get access to our experience of over a decade in delivering commerce solutions which are currently used by millions of users.” Several of eWave’s customers greatly appreciate this model since it empowers them to effortlessly expand their teams and address clients’ issues. In today’s time, as the commerce landscape is becoming more complex by the day, traditional ways of operations are becoming increasingly ineffective, and innovative methodologies like Inside Agencies are emerging as powerful alternatives. eWave partners with its clients during the early phases of digital transformation and helps them set their business objectives for the next three to five years. Defining this analytical approach, Fatima adds, “We help them select the best-suited technology for their use case. We collaborate with the clients to determine the experience they want to deliver to their customers.” eWave then designs clients’ e-commerce ecosystems by integrating various existing business systems, such as order and product management, inventory, warehousing, and payment platforms. “We have completely productized the way we deliver the e-commerce solutions, which makes them faster and high-quality and enables users to de-risk their business,” adds Fatima. The solutions then go live, which marks the beginning of its longterm collaborations with customers. eWave routinely engages with them and modifies their five-year roadmaps into subsets of goals, creating a maturity model where clients have a clear vision of their progressive objectives and growth indicators. Today, organizations have their own digital teams, but they seldom possess the expertise of the e-commerce domain. eWave’s Inside Agency complements such teams to expand their e-commerce capabilities.

The company’s Inside Agency model, coupled with its proactive approach, has earned it the trust of many multi-region and multi-market industry leaders, such as Toys "R" Us, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Coca- Cola, and Nestlé. Apart from B2B and B2C clients in the retail sector, eWave assists brands in the healthcare industry. One such company, Cochlear, was once struggling with inconsistent user experiences, orders, product information, and consumer data across its global offices. The company hence approached eWave for assistance and what followed was impressive. Cochlear, the world's leading manufacturer of hearing implants, deployed the Salesforce Commerce solution with eWave’s support across its offices in 14 different countries. eWave empowered Cochlear to advance from a regional setup to forming a network of centralized digital health centers. In addition to this, eWave also provided the client with a global reference architecture that enabled them to control and manage the regional requirements of each business unit from its global digital hub. eWave deployed the solutions for them in compliance with the different regulatory laws of different countries, ensuring seamless and streamlined cooperation between the various offices.

With such a customer-oriented and problem-solving approach, eWave is all set to revolutionize the global commerce ecosystem while future-proofing businesses for unprecedented events in the near future. “The most important thing is the user experience and how a business treats its customers, as these indicate the direction of its growth. We are able to empower our clients to execute and deliver positive user experience and will continue doing the same for years to come,” concludes Karl.