Presentations

Experience over transaction

Bucketfeet

Nespresso

Digital divide

Deloitte

Retail is about being connected with the customer.

"The experience can take place anywhere at any time, in person, on devices big and small and in wearable technology," said Pat Bakey, head of retail at SAP.

Although retailers are starting to implement customer-centric strategies to good effect, research from Deloitte suggests there is a long way to go before the current retail offer matches customer expectations, especially around the experience of digital in the shopping journey. Deloitte found that more than $11 million (or 36 cents on every dollar) of retail sales are influenced by digital – including online and mobile. "Integrating digital into customer experience is a business imperative," said Alison Kenney Paul, Deloitte’s vice chairman and leader of US retail and distribution. "For those who ignore it, you will be trapped in the digital divide."

Another good reason to embrace customer experience as a core strategy comes from the threat of commoditization. To counteract this, Nespresso is creating a customer experience around its direct order business, which is powered by data and integrated into its CRM, marketing, mobile and clienteling systems, with the aim that these areas have a contextual view of the customer across all channels in real time.

Offering memorable content and experiences needs to be integrated into the store experience. BucketFeet, a Chicago - based footwear brand that partners with artists, operates by the philosophy that content drives commerce. The brand calls its stores 'studios' and previews a different artist each month. According to Raaja Nemani, BucketFeet’s co-founder and CEO, putting storytelling first has lead to increased average order value, and repeat visits and purchases.

The changing world of luxury retail

The changing world of luxury

Luxury is about knowing the customer

Now more than ever, nothing about luxury is "one-size-fits-all." Today's luxury consumers are a varied bunch, ranging widely in ethnicity, in attitudes about ownership versus use and even in how they want to interact with retailers and brands. But they provide enormous opportunity: The global luxury market continues to grow by 10 million people annually.

"Luxury has morphed from two or three archetypal customers to its current state", featured Ken Nisch, chairman of JGA ; David Selinger, CEO and co-founder of RichRelevance ; and Matthew Woolsey, executive vice president of Barneys New York.

From Woolsey’s view, Millennials are “very naturally” luxury customers. Again, that’s not so much an indication of having money to invest, but rather an identification with the idea of themes like story, authenticity and heritage. As such, he said, personalization efforts “have to be about more than how you deliver a discount coupon. It has to be about story — it has to be about engagement."

One of the biggest mistakes retailers could make at this point, Selinger said, is to think that the same technology being used for the past five years will automatically apply to this generation. More than making the Internet simply a “big catalog,” Millennials are more interested in the where, why and how, and that must be conveyed. They’re also interested in doing things their own way: 82% of Millennials are more likely to make a purchase decision using their mobile phone than by speaking with a sales  associate. Therefore, Selinger said, the way retailers engage at the point of interaction has to change.

The luxury world has been slower than other retail sectors to embrace technology, but David Selinger, believes most brands have now got through the first stages of learning about e-commerce.

2015 is therefore likely to be “the first year luxury companies can apply technology in a strategic way to advance who they are,” he said.

New York retailer Barneys will be one of the first off the mark when it relaunches its suite of digital sites this quarter using a fully responsive design and higher levels of tailored content.

In-store: Connecting the physical and digital

JCPenney - The new digital divide

• Macy's: Highlights from Optimizing Omnichannel

John Lewis

The next killer app

We need to connect the dots

In-store, the emphasis remains on marrying the offline and online experiences within a physical environment. Rather than simply replicating digital in-store, however, there is a move towards digitalization of the in-store journey, which includes both enhanced experiences and unique-to-the-store encounters.

According to Deloitte research, customers using digital during their shopping journeys convert at a 40% higher rate than those who do not and it is important to tailor their experience to their needs especially where they are in the shopping process. “The more the digital information matches the shopper’s need, the more likely they will buy”.

Mobile formed a central part of retailer JCPenney’s Black Friday strategy with an iPhone app developed and launched within 87 days, in time for the shopping event. The app features include targeted products, a new look and a focus on making product the hero. It also includes a barcode scanner for use in stores and retains coupon information across channels.

Since launching, Mike Rodgers, chief customer officer at JC Penney, said conversion via the app is up 40% and the in-store barcode scanner is being used more than 1,000 times every day.

Citing company statistics, he said: “Retailers like JC Penney must have a robust digital experience driven by mobile to compete today. 69% of our customers use a digital experience before they go into the store, 36% during the store visit, and 14% after it”.

Seamless and frictionless are words often used to describe the customer journey, and Big Show 2015 is no exception. Paul Coby, IT director at UK department store John Lewis, summed up what these mean from a practical level: “To succeed you need a really good front end, but unless you have re-engineered the back end and are ready to cope with peaks in traffic, you’ll have real issues. There’s no point doing one without the other.”

Without the investment in the back end, retailers are not able to deliver on customer promises, whether that’s availability of goods or convenient fulfilment.

A single view of inventory is a key piece of getting this right. US department store Macy’s has worked on implementing inventory visibility, and its chief omnichannel officer RB Harrison predicts it will fulfil $1 billion worth of online orders from across its store base this year as a result.

From personalization to relevance & beacons

Julep: Crowdsourcing for dollars

Julep: Crowdsourcing for dollars

Cisco

From personalization to relevance

Personalization has been a dominant topic at retail conferences in recent years, whether its personalization of product, service or marketing.

Retailers give consumers more say in product design and consumers increasingly have more input as companies create new products, from social media and other crowdsourced feedback Julep shaped new beauty products with 3D printers and have let customers create the finished product at home,"The drive toward collaboration is something that starts deep within our company, that we then extend out to our customers as well," Julep CEO Jane Park said.

At Big Show, however, there was a repeated emphasis on relevance instead, driven by technologies coming to the fore in 2015. "Personalization is when the retailer knows your name," said Joseph Bradley, VP at Cisco Consulting Services, “relevance is when a retailer understands the context of your shopping experience, which includes location, speed and environment.”

“Incremental growth comes when you can move the decision-making closer to the customer,” said Bradley.

Beacons

Retailers were reminded of the need to experiment and test new technologies of they are to effect a change in the shopping experience. Beacons were among the technologies tested by US retailers in 2014. Big-box retailer Kohl’s rolled out beacons to 22 test stores last year. Digital head Ratnakar Lavu believes in their potential: “There are no real case studies yet as we’re still working it out, but I’m bullish on beacons – they will take off in our environment if we have the right customer journey.”

California-based exhibitor Aruba Networks believes the potential for beacons may come more from their use in mapping, particularly as a navigation tool in larger department and big-box stores, and in clienteling. “Beacons have been used to push offers but labor management is perhaps more relevant, such as employee notifications when a VIP customer walks in or someone comes in to collect an order,” said Jeff Hardison, director of product marketing.

Other presentations

The future of retail 2015, a manifesto to reinvent the store - PSKF

10 retail innovations - Ebeltoft

Technology insights - WGSN

Global forces and their implications on retail - Mc Kinsey & Company

Global retail innovation: the lastest concepts and ideas drinving change - Ebeltoft Group, Bilder & De Clerq, Birchbox

Omnichannel commerce