HFS Highlight: Genpact acquires critical e-commerce capability to expand Rightpoint

Genpact has been slowly but steadily building thought leadership and capability around “experience innovation” over the last few years. Genpact’s 2017 acquisition of experience consulting firm TandemSeven was its first big demonstration of an appetite to develop a OneOffice capability, aiming to move beyond its back-office roots and help its clients develop more holistic experiences.  In 2019, Genpact acquired digital consultancy Rightpoint, with a focus on digital transformation and capabilities in customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), commerce, and digital products. Now it’s adding e-commerce agency Something Digital into a market that the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating towards digital business.

The increasing importance of digital commerce means Something Digital’s experience comes in at just the right time

A highlight of the 2019 acquisition was Rightpoint’s expertise in designing and implementing commerce experiences; its work with Raymour & Flannigan, for example, demonstrated Rightpoint’s capability to deliver customer-centric commerce experiences. This was such an important element that many companies needed help with, as they struggled to connect experiences across their organizations and align to the customer; now, being able to align to both enterprise customers and consumers that see digital commerce as the only option during COVID-19, but also as the preferred future, could not be more essential for service providers.

Through the acquisition of Something Digital, Rightpoint will join several of the largest companies in the world in leveraging the broad feature set of Magento Commerce, which powers Adobe Commerce Cloud:

“As an Adobe Solution Partner, Something Digital has a strong track record in helping businesses design holistic commerce solutions that fit the needs of their customers,”

Tony Sanders, senior director, Americas Partner Sales at Adobe

E-commerce experiences are make-or-break capabilities for enterprises

At HFS’ recent automation roundtable, a retail and CPG giant’s procurement leader commented on their firm’s switch to e-commerce in China, as retail stores everywhere closed down. Teams were redeployed to digital channels, which were obviously about to explode. A failure to pivot towards slick e-commerce channels would have meant customers—both consumers and wholesalers—dropping fast. The company’s partnerships became all about those who were native to digital, and those who were embracing it, or “winning with the winners” and driving change with those partners. They were forced to have slick, efficient, automated processes as were their supply chain partners. “Wholesalers’ scoring of suppliers is ruthless: firms who can’t keep up are being thrown aside.” This example started with e-commerce but necessarily involves supply chain. It’s the evolving OneOffice model, with automation enabling the linkage of front to back office for digital gain.

The Bottom Line: Genpact has expanded its expertise in the digital commerce space just as it becomes essential for any ecosystem player to survive.

The competition is heating up in this space, which we assessed earlier this year in our 2019 Design, Sales, and Marketing Services Top10 report.  Genpact landed at #14 in the rankings, largely as it just began developing thought leadership for front-office focused offerings and mindshare was relatively low on our Voice of the Customer rankings. The Something Digital acquisition, and its combination with Rightpoint, is a step in the right direction to move up the value chain—particularly as Genpact can bring in its strong capabilities around data and analytics to fuel digital transformation roadmaps for its clients. Something Digital is another play to increase Rightpoint’s experience capabilities with its e-commerce know-how to support clients trying to nail the virtual market that so many of us are now depending on.