OSF Global
Facilitating Exceptional Customer Experience

With rapidly changing retail environments, the key driving force for businesses to thrive is a solid strategy toward customer-centric experience. According to Gerard Szatvanyi, President & CEO of OSF Global, whether it’s a need for an advanced unified ecommerce solution or a seamless, personalized, digital shopping experience, the better the customer experience, the better the company’s overall efficiency and productivity.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Gerry shared his insights on OSF’s value proposition and its offerings that enable companies to enhance their customer experience.

Tell us about the inception of the company.

Founded in 2003, OSF Global has its headquarters in Quebec, Canada. Since its expansion to the United States in 2008, the company’s global impact has significantly increased with the opening of several offices in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Latin America, and the APAC region.OSF Global, with its brand OSF Commerce, is a leading global commerce solutions company with expertise in enterprise CRM, CMS, OMS, unified commerce, online shop management, and cloud application development. It provides technology, consulting, and implementation assistance to emerging and premier brands and merchants. Taking an agile approach allows OSF to scale global growth more quickly to deliver innovative solutions across channels, devices, and locales to enterprises and emerging businesses across B2B and B2C sectors.

What are the trends and challenges that exist in the digital experience landscape, and how has OSF Global aligned itself accordingly?

Due to the rapidly evolving needs and the technologies developed to satisfy consumer demands, there has been a significant shift in the customer journey. Companies must now insert themselves throughout the numerous multi-channel paths customers use to engage with their brand including browsing and researching products, purchasing items, obtaining service, resolving issues, instigating a return, sharing their experience, and interacting with marketing messages. More companies are striving to become customer-centric, since it all starts and ends with ensuring shoppers’ expectations are not just met, but exceeded.

OSF Global works with enterprises and emerging businesses across B2B and B2C sectors and has experiencewith a variety of different industries, including retail, consumer and manufactured goods, financial services and communications and media. OSF is a respected partner that helps its customers to take a unified commerce approach to their business, placing emphasis on the consumer and empowering merchants to deliver a meaningful, unfailing experience throughout the customer journey, at every touchpoint they have with the brand. With its trusted products and solutions, and wide-range of services, OSF possesses extensive expertise in assisting companies to exceed their revenue-generating potential, expand into new global markets, and most importantly, delight and enchant their valued customers.

What is the unique value proposition of OSF Global’s e-commerce, online shop management services, and OSF UnifyCOMMERCE?

OSF is the first company trained by Salesforce Commerce Cloud in Advanced Business Manager Webmastering.

The company’s focuses on commerce, not just e-commerce. OSF is an award-winning Salesforce partner that has 300+ trained e-commerce specialists, 80+ Commerce Cloud certified developers, 45+ eBusiness certified consultants and a large number of certified professionals who are all experts in the delivery of high-quality projects for global multi-brand retailers.

OSF has 80+ global commerce clients, has launched 200+ online shops, and has helped its customers process $1 billion USD in online orders. The company provides support for 25 languages and offers 24/7 support and evolutive maintenance. OSF Global assists brands in expanding their web presence, taking care of re-platforming needs, designing a customized online store aligned with their business goals. The company offers digital commerce consulting, ecommerce implementation, maintenance, and evolutions as well as training in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

OSF’s online shop management services are focused on providing merchants with digital strategies that work. OSF helps to implement and customize digital solutions to enhance the entire ecommerce ecosystem. With 15 years of experience in digital marketing and more than five years of expertise in Business Manager, OSF has been working in this capacity for a long time. The company boasts 18 e-commerce specialists in Business Manager and more than 22 specialists who are experts in digital marketing. OSF offers consulting and digital marketing services, a healthy check-up website audit, and training in the ecommerce ecosystem. OSF is a company known for being highly skilled in email and affiliate marketing, search campaigns, SEO, user experience, and social media management.

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE (Patent Pending) is a product built natively on Salesforce that provides a 360-degree view of the customer, and enables unified customer journeys across channels. The product works online and in-store, as well as through multiple clouds (such as Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud) to connect the channels and unify the customer experience.

OSF’s main differentiator is taking a connected commerce approach, using the best platforms available on the market and providing unified commerce solutions for its clients. Above all, OSF ensures that it keeps the customer journey in mind at every touch point. OSF helps brands achieve connected commerce by individualizing the shopping journey from the online website to the physical store. To achieve this, OSF focuses on integrating and implementing POS, OMS, CMS, loyalty systems, AI, and clienteling solutions for in-store agents, to deliver a unified view of consumer data across all channels and touchpoints.

What is OSF Global’s go-to-market strategy and client on-boarding process?

OSF’s mission is to ensure merchants are well-positioned to provide their valued customers with a seamless experience, both on and offline. The company achieves this by obtaining a unified view of customer data, an approach that is infused in all of OSF’s strategies when working with its customers. OSF’s primary focus is on multi-cloud, unified, and headless commerce projects, but adjacently the company delivers work in the areas of comprehensive content management systems (CMS), digital transformation, and e-commerce Sitecore solutions.

During the client on-boarding strategy, OSF uses the agile method to help development teams and customers to maintain control over all stages. The standard rollout of a project begins with the discovery phase that includes a kickoff session and project definition. This phase is followed by building the solution and all associated integration work leading to the QA phase. Once all Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Tests are complete, the project is launched, and support and maintenance work is performed as required.

What does the future look like for OSF Global?

OSF will continue to expand on a global scale and enter new regions by opening new offices. Also, the company plans to grow the OSF Global Commerce Alliance, an assembly of partners with overlapping interests, complementary capabilities, and a willingness to apply those resources for mutual success. In addition, OSF Global will continue to invest in AI-driven tools that will enable the creation of better and more productive services, as well as a faster time to market and quicker ramp-up of teams and services.

OSF has developed several industry-focused solutions, such as OSF DigitalMart, a solution designed with grocery retailers in mind. The company is also developing other industry and market-focused solutions that will help merchants launch commerce sites that meet the precise needs of customers in these sectors.