Supercharge your composable business ecosystem with a customer support starter kit

Composable commerce has emerged as a transformative approach to e-commerce that offers unprecedented flexibility and scalability to businesses.

Where traditional monolithic suites burden organizations with unused features and an inflexible software ecosystem, composable commerce unlocks a ‘best-for-me’ approach to building your digital commerce ecosystem with hand-picked packaged business capabilities (PBCs), combined and reconfigured to meet your specific business needs. With the ability to mix and match various capabilities and functionalities, composable commerce rapidly adapts to changing market dynamics, and enables organizations to optimize operations, and create highly personalized and differentiated customer experiences.

The industry has witnessed a significant rise in composable commerce adoption, with several mature PBC vendors leading the way. Solutions like commercetools, Fluent Commerce, Algolia, and Amplience have established themselves as pioneers in building composable enterprises. Many vendors offer solutions that adhere to MACH principles—Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless—that enable businesses to easily integrate various commerce functionalities, such as catalog management, checkout, and payment processing, to create highly customizable and scalable commerce experiences. Their solutions have been recognized by the MACH Alliance, a collaborative organization formed by leading technology companies that share a common vision of promoting the adoption of modern, composable, and headless architecture in the digital commerce industry.

Completing the MACH puzzle: Filling the ecosystem gaps

While composable commerce has gained significant traction in the industry, there are still certain gaps that remain unaddressed. Our experts at Grid Dynamics recognize these gaps due to our extensive track record of developing diverse composable commerce solutions. One such critical gap is the absence of a customer support solution tailored to seamlessly integrate with composable commerce PBCs and equipped with commerce-centric capabilities to assist agents in providing effective customer care.

While existing customer support solutions are available, they are built as either monolithic systems, making it challenging to adapt them to the modular composable business solutions, or as general-purpose support products that require building commerce capabilities and implementing complex integrations with existing PBCs.

To address this gap, there is a need for a customer support solution that embraces the principles of composable architecture. This native composable customer support tool would offer seamless flexibility to integrate with various modular components, including order management systems, inventory management systems, customer data platforms, and e-commerce platforms. It would enable businesses to create a unified view of customer interactions, streamline support processes, and deliver personalized and efficient customer experiences. Filling this gap would contribute significantly to the maturation and evolution of the composable commerce ecosystem, empowering businesses to further harness the advantages of flexible architecture.

Notably, the lack of customer support capabilities is evident not only for businesses that use a composable commerce ecosystem but also for those that are undergoing a digital transformation from monolithic suites to composable solutions. For example, many companies migrating from legacy Oracle Commerce or SAP Commerce solutions seek alternative customer support systems as they have to give up the ones that these suites provide (Oracle Customer Service Cloud or SAP Assisted Service Module). These support systems include comprehensive features like case management, omnichannel support, customer impersonation, and more, which are complex to recreate if you decide to build a custom solution from scratch.

While some companies still choose to implement custom support applications, others develop a solution on top of a MACH-compliant product like FreshDesk to fulfill the customer support gap in the target composable ecosystem. Either way, it is a big initiative that requires designing the agent experience and UI with commerce capabilities in mind, along with implementing both standard and business-specific features. Surely this process could be accelerated and streamlined using an extensible foundation that covers most of the expected capabilities?

In response to this question, our experts embarked on crafting an ingenious customer support starter kit called the Composable Commerce Help Desk (CCHD). Within the composable commerce ecosystem, our starter kit seamlessly fuses commercetools and FreshDesk, enabling the delivery of tailored e-commerce customer support experiences.

Beyond filling a pivotal gap in composable commerce, our starter kit holds the potential to bridge additional voids through similar solution accelerators in the future.

Empower your e-commerce customer support with Grid Dynamics's Composable Commerce Help Desk

As part of our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions, Grid Dynamics, in partnership with FreshDesk, is proud to unveil the Composable Commerce Help Desk—an innovative starter kit designed to bridge the gap between commerce and customer support within the composable commerce realm.

CCHD offers an extensible integration back-end for customer support capabilities, layered atop an API-first back-end. The default implementation is built on the commercetools platform, complemented by a set of FreshDesk applications. These applications equip support agents with practical tools to efficiently address commerce-specific support cases.

Key features and benefits of Composable Commerce Help Desk

Tailored acceleration: CCHD functions as a customizable starter kit tailored to your specific business requirements. It's not a pre-packaged solution; instead, it can be integrated with new functionalities. This adaptability ensures a seamless fit with your unique needs and preferences.

Intuitive UI and flexibility: With a sleek and user-friendly interface, our starter kit is easy-to-use and adaptable. It seamlessly integrates within your existing ecosystem, ensuring a seamless and visually pleasing experience.

API-first foundation: At its core, CCHD is built upon an API-first back-end, forming a robust base for seamlessly integrating customer support functionalities into your composable commerce environment.

commercetools integration: Leveraging the commercetools platform, our starter kit establishes compatibility with various systems and components. This ensures effortless connectivity with search engines, order management systems, or other PBCs.

Empowering agent tools: CCHD equips support agents with specialized FreshDesk applications or widgets. These tools are meticulously designed to address commerce-specific support scenarios, enabling agents to efficiently manage tasks such as order processing, inventory inquiries, product details, pricing, and more.

Frictionless resolutions: Our widgets empower support agents with capabilities such as Order Cancellation and Order Refunds, facilitating seamless and efficient customer issue resolution.

Adaptable use cases: While offering standard implementations, the starter kit's extensibility allows for the incorporation of business-specific processes. For support features beyond the scope of commercetools, the starter kit incorporates 'stubs' to seamlessly integrate client-specific backends.

Embark on an enhanced e-commerce support experience

By harnessing CCHD's power alongside FreshDesk and commerctools, you're poised to deliver exceptional customer support, elevating agent satisfaction and customer loyalty in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

If you’d like to discover the true potential of building custom support capabilities within a composable commerce environment, reach out to our team for an immersive workshop. Our experts will guide you through the process, demonstrating how our CCHD starter kit can seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure.

Contact Grid Dynamics today to embark on the journey toward building a premier support capability within your composable commerce environment.