world wide technology (wwt) tec37 webinar: customer experience transcript
TRANSCRIPT
World Wide Technology, Inc.
#TEC37 Webinar – TRANSCRIPTION “Disrupt or be Disrupted? Evolving Your Customers’ Experience”
July 7, 2016
INTRO: Our TEC37 webinar is a monthly series focused on a different solution and designed to pack a lot of information into a quick 37-‐minute format so you can continue on about your busy day.
TOPICS COVERED:
Today's topic, “Disrupt or be disrupted, evolving your customers' experience.”
1. How retailers transform their IT operations to stay in front of the competition. 2. Find and communicate business use cases for technology investments 3. Bridge the gap between IT and lines of business 4. Embracing technology disruption
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): My name is Matt Sebek. I'm the retail engagement director at WWT Asynchrony Labs, a custom software design and development shop here in St. Louis. We are the newest members of the World Wide Technology family. I believe it's been transformative not just for us as a business, but for our customers as well. And what I mean by that is, it's not just the application layer anymore when we talk about customer experience in retail. So on a day-‐to-‐day basis, I get to work with Neil Anderson on the mobility and infrastructure side, Tim Brooks on the consulting and big data side and we believe that all three of these components: data, infrastructure, the apps that run on it, are really the transformative experiences that the consumers interact with.
I think the really interesting thing is that the customer experience is a wide term. All of us are customers, and on any given day we can walk into a coffee shop, or retail store, doctor's office, our place of business, and we interact with technology in a very intimate way and each one of those ways can be different but similar. So all of these expectations in our heads have created a world of disruption. The technology world is different today than it was five years ago, so we're going to drill into some of the reasons why, what we can do to support that, and what Famous Footwear is doing to support that. We last met about retail six months ago with TEC37 and our guest at that time was Jon Stine from Intel and we talked a lot about the customer experience and what customers were saying. This came right after the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference and we were asked to drill a little bit deeper. So we thought, who better to drill deeper than someone on the brand side, someone like Willis, who's familiar with the technology and what customers
are asking. So we’re excited and thank you for your time today, Willis. Let's get into it with a general question:
Question #1 -‐ With consumers being more mobile connected now, what is Famous Footwear doing to address these concerns?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): Like you mentioned, the way consumers shop has really changed from where it was about five years ago. What was a predictable, linear purchase has turned to very unpredictable and very dynamic today. The control, the consumer seizes the control and the expectations for our brand, or any other brand are really elevated today, so we have to adjust and evolve our technology and our consumer experience to meet that rise of expectation.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Absolutely. Tim, Neil, what are you seeing on the industry side,
Question #2 -‐ How has digital technology, mobility, data infrastructure…how has this really changed how consumers shop and purchase?
NEIL ANDERSON (WWT Mobility & Access Lead): First of all, as Willis said, it's really a mobile world. People are using mobile technology, whether they're shopping at home, whether they're shopping in the store. Their smart phone devices have really become a central point of being able to access different consumer information and look at different brands, like Famous. So I think that's an important one there. Second, I think the technology we're seeing is just moving very, very swiftly. It’s very difficult for customers
like Famous, and, Willis, we were talking about this, just to be able to swallow the technology as fast as it's changing out there, is really a big challenge for our customers.
TIM BROOKS (WWT Big Data Principal Consultant): I'd say that in addition, we're seeing that the data that can be harvested from additional points such as access points, mobility data, click stream data, OUR customer’s buy investigations, data about how they flow through the store, what they buy, what they attach to those purchases, where those trends are, inform an over-‐the-‐horizon view of both inventory, where to place stores, how to merchandise within the stores, how to address the customer. So my question back for Willis is:
Question #3 -‐ Seeing all this happen over the last several years, what sort of practices did Famous Footwear adopt in order to gain greater insight or take friction out of customer experience?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): Well, we thought about an omni-‐channel or this digital experience on the consumer end…how do we draw them into our brand, the power of our associates, how do we enable that engagement for our associates throughout, with that consumer? How do we align or adjust to the rising need for personalization, so in a consumer engagement we’ve done a number of things but we started with a mobile app, one of the biggest investments we’ve made for our customers to put their account management back into the palm of their hands.
We’ve done a lot in the mobile space around frictionless journey; we’ve done a lot with insights to understand the power of encounters on mobile device and websites, about how we make that within context of the mobile space in the journey. We also did some table stakes, infrastructure things like guest Wi-‐Fi, for that mobile experience and did some learning with the data analytics of that. Around the associate, the empowered associate, we’ve done a lot to bring the back office to the sale floor, so we feel like our associates can be engaged with the consumer at every opportunity and we had some places where they were tethered to the back office, so we drove the mobile application for our associates to give them those back office functionalities on a an iPad. In a lot of ways it was an infrastructure thing for us too, to learn how to support the devices, handheld devices, so we have a lot of learnings from that. We also are compiling data from the mobile point of sale so we retain sort of a natural interaction with the consumer and complete the sale without having to stop …at the cash route. On the consumer performance side, we’ve done a lot to make store inventory available and visible, but also just to free up and enable that inventory …we have about 1000 stores fulfilling web orders today and…order management system.
Neil Anderson (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): You mentioned the sales associates,
Question #4 -‐ How important do you think enabling your sales associate with mobile technology is in your stores?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): Well, you know, we're talking about digital and the growth of digital, but we think our associates are still the best ambassadors of our brands. So, with the consumer coming into the door today, much more informed, much more focused on what it is they are going to buy, we have to make sure that the sales associate is informed and aware of the opportunities and capabilities that we offer as an organization, so I think its very important that an associated be mobile-‐ly empowered.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Willis talked a little bit about giving control back to the consumer, back to the customer, which is interesting because we look at, where technology was four, five years ago, when mobility really took off, it was very much a push mentality and social media obviously proliferated this where it’s the same message going out at a macro level to all consumers, and ultimately the experience consumers get in the store, when it's right, it's right. You think about the common brands, where they have a very frictionless experience, Famous Footwear, Panera, Disney, these are good brands that have a frictionless consumer experience. They didn't really think about all the touch points you guys just mentioned here. Cause when it's right, it's right. So Neil, from your perspective,
Question #5 -‐ What exists behind the scenes on the infrastructure side, data that customers don't think about that is really powering the engine of the consumer experience?
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT) I think it starts with a really good Wi-‐Fi experience, when you're on your property, and there's a lot of discussion about what's being called advance guest Wi-‐Fi, which is really rethinking your guest Wi-‐Fi, it's not just about access, but a platform you can engage the customers on. It's a marketing platform; it’s a brand platform. And I think that's one thing that you really need to think about, if you don't have a really good coverage in your store properties, you really should be thinking about that.
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT) -‐ I would say on the back end infrastructure and with the data that's ingested aggregated from all those infrastructures, would be a breaking down of the conventional sort of silos that existed between point of sale, digital, campaign, click stream management, Google analytics, things like that. As well as the flagship store, the discount experience, converging all of that data gives you a
better view of the customer. People call it “omni-‐channel”. Which is the thinking that we have channels through which we market to different types of customers. From the customers' perspective, with most leading brands, there's no channel. It's just that brand and me, and how can I access it, whether it be, oh, there's a store, let me stop and go into the store, or oh, I need something or the kids need something, let me order it. So converging an infrastructure that makes that easy, and provides you with analytics so that you can make better decisions about inventory, about a lot of other things, is a best practice.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT) -‐ And it's not easy, right? Because people typically, you had stores, and people needed to develop web applications, now they need to develop a mobile application, and a lot of times that's a separate experience for people.
Question #6 -‐ Willis, what have you guys done, in thinking about that, and your approach to, how do you give people a good experience across those different needs (on-‐line and mobile)?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): There are a lot of things. And you talk about the data, there are things that might seem small, but if you think of it as …? You lose when you think about your inventory and if your going to enable that inventory on line, you have to be able to fulfill those requests, right, and put that data together, and take the IBO? From the channel outputs which are very important, so people haven’t done those things… and haven’t been very effective, which the last thing we wanted was disappointment…The other part, too, is we aren’t thinking of it as channels, right, it’s how people view our brand, so thinking about the insights and attribution and understanding how offline influence or online purchases or the online view of the offline purchases…thinking through that, can certainly guide us in a holistic approach to how we manage this.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): You guys mentioned a couple times, “omni-‐channel”, channels, and it's interesting to me because I think this is really where marketing and technology collide. It's brand objectives, pushed out in a number of different, interesting ways, to the customer. And typically what we see in the industry is marketing and technology typically doesn’t get along. These are creative types mixed with the analytic types. They are typically too siloed. And I think the brands that have really dominated the customer experience have figured out how to bring these groups together. Maybe Tim first,
Question #7 -‐ What are you seeing out there, what are good patterns and practices for these groups (marketing and IT) to come together?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT) -‐ I would agree with you wholeheartedly, Matt. The best performers tend to have broken down P&L responsibility, so it's no longer any channel or niche distribution platform, but there's one P&L. And marketing uses the data that is coming from the technologies that IT has put into place. Together with some sort of analytics that incorporates it into their regular work stream so that the use of the data is no longer episodic, but it’s now burned into the culture.
And that helps with things like A/B testing, new product rollouts, new marketing offers. So we don’t have to do it all the way across, we can do it in a little subset, you can do it as a sample, see how it goes, test it, learn from it. Now, go out bigger. That makes companies more agile. So what you're doing, really, are companies that are focused on keeping up with their customers, more than their competitors. Because as long as they have that close, frictionless relationship with the customer, they're going to do okay.
Tools that they use would be a mixture of Hadoop and Data Lakes and/or data virtualization. These come about as means of accessing data that might have been siloed and either aggregating it and then mining it for insights. That's all noble, doable. The difficult part is taking those insights into your work stream. And that’s a combination of both strategy and how the P&L is laid out. How the company thinks, starts from the C-‐level and then goes downward, and how do we make decisions. Do we make decisions as a well-‐informed debating society, or do we all consult the data, and that helps become our single vision of truth, if we trust it.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I also think it's really important for IT to also break down the barriers with their counterparts in the brand and marketing team…those conversations have to happen to be successful. I.T. needs to sort of rethink themselves, instead of just delivering a technology, or cool configurations of network equipment, they really need to be thinking about what value are they providing to the business and what can they bring to the business to deliver on the business objectives. I'm curious, Willis, what have you seen in Famous, in that regard?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): I would say this. We don’t really think of it as a marketing strategy, or merchandise strategy separate from an IT strategy, we really focus on it as a business strategy and the technology that we need to enable the experience that we want. To mix with what we’re trying more and more to make data driven decisions and take some of the conversation out of it and even as we’ve
approached and pursued various technologies in our strategies, we’ve taken a pilot, assess, optimize and scale approach, which we try to get something out quick, fail fast, learn from it, if it has the value we see or perceive or if the customer gives us the credit for it, then we’ll double down and optimize it and scale, if not, then let it go.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Yeah, and I think one of the things, I asked the question about marketing and I.T. coming together, that I think Famous Footwear does it better than most brands that we work with, like you, someone from I.T., being able to speak very fluently about marketing and business objectives, customer personas. I’m just interested in,
Question #8 -‐ What have Famous Footwear and Caleres at large done to bring these groups (marketing and IT) together?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): Yeah. So I think we start with the consumer, and I said it a few times and I’ll say it again, we start with the consumer, we’ve organizationally structured in a way that we align with the brands, we are a portfolio company, that has many brands. But we have Famous Footwear focused Famous Footwear, all initiatives, all channels. We understood the change that digital is influencing on our business and on our people, so I think we have done a lot of work to understand our digital maturity to bring and recruit more talent with that digital maturity and that consumer lens in mind. Then we’ve organized around competencies, so even in the I.T. space, historically we had embedded in the marketing groups some web development teams that were the front end development that were typically focused on look and feel type content, but over time, its evolved and its become more of development and they're driving more platform functionality. So when we structured and aligned the brands, we brought that group into IT, cause that’s developing competencies in IT, but it's really unleashed some power for us in a holistic platform way, where we adopted a more agile process, with the front end and back end and the consumer experience in mind with the product owners right in the same room.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): And even that's changed in the last year or two. So,
Questions #9 -‐ How have the mobile applications at Famous Footwear evolved, just over the last 18 months?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): When we started our mobile app journey, we started with some collective analysis that said, adoption in the retail space is around loyalty. So we built an application because we have a strong loyalty contingent, and that's where we began. But, we had some broad assumptions. We thought they would look to it for a trend and content, some engagement, but as we evolved the application,
as we learned from the analytics, from the reviews and from the insights that we’ve gathered from our consumer, we realized that they really just valued the program, so we’ve changed the application to put the rewards program front and center, to give the benefit the consumer is looking for, that's the use that of program.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR):
Question #10 -‐ On the back side the foundational infrastructure data side, what trends are you guys seeing in the last 18 months that's really on the forefront that other brands and retailers should be thinking about?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT) -‐ One of the trends is something that Willis touched on, and that is empowering the sales associate. There's no need to be, you know, anchored down to a point of sale terminal. If I can empower my people to float on the floor to where the customers are, own that customer, take them through their buying journey within my store, the number of stores you're doing this, so the proliferation of scanners, tablets, mobile devices, in order to consume sale, define inventory is one thing we're definitely seeing. On the back end that generates a whole lot of data as well but it's very helpful about how you move around the store, how customers move around the store, helps your merchandise, particularly in a big box environment or even to make it even bigger, in a mall full of customers shopping in different types of stores. How do we engage them, how do we promote different sections of a mall? So we're seeing a number of initiatives like that, that call for both the mobility solution that is an app, that a customer can use when they're not in the store, as well as mobility solution to empower sales associates to interact better with customers once they're in a store.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): From my perspective, I think when you see a lot of customers that are experimenting with different wireless technologies, whether it's the Wi-‐Fi network, experimenting with Blue Tooth, ibeacons and Bluetooth beacons, experimenting with different forms of RFID to change the way people experience a store, I think that’s definitely one trend. Another trend we see a lot with customers is to rethink the store experience, a lot of traditional customers took a look at their in store and said we need to make our web presence look like our store. And there's a trend to reverse that thinking and think about how we make our store actually resemble more of the digital world, give people a different kind of experience, the kind of experience they're used to on a mobile app or smart phone, how do you carry that kind of experience into a store with things like digital signage and other things that can kind of enrich the experience in the store?
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Yeah, and I think there are certainly common technologies that move between industries, but at the top, we talk about myself as a consumer who can float between a retail store, coffee shop, doctor's office, and I think there’s a lot of technological patterns and practices that exist between those, what parallels are you guys seeing and what is Famous Footwear seeing?
Question #11 -‐ Are there any other industries you look at that have related patterns and practices with how consumers engage with brands?
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I think definitely, we're talking about retail today a lot. But if you think about it, hospitals, universities, cruise ships, the sports entertainment industry, they're all retailers in a sense. They all have some form of reaching their customer base and giving them a different experience. I think it's much more, even financial sector, bank branches, are trying to experiment with how they touch their customers in a different way at their locations. I think everybody has got this kind of customer experience problem. I think retailers is a bit of a poster child for it, but it really does flow across segments, I feel.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Tim, anything with any use cases of the data that apply, not just for retail, but cross sector and in other verticals?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): Oh, sure, there's tremendous number of use cases in hospitality and leisure, some in retail as well, that speak to cross selling and cross selling, not just items, but experiences by knowing what is the next thing, be it a service or a product that a customer may want based upon their previous buying behavior. And before it used to be cohorts built on now it's cohorts built on behavior. And from that, we can market more effectively to them. There's also dynamic pricing schemes that we do, where we can change the price, you're all familiar with this from airlines, from rental cars, but retailers, some retailers are beginning to experiment with dynamic pricing based upon day parts or day of the week because of the fluctuation of supply and demands, specific to that. Data informs all that. So these are all, I call them mostly ground breaking areas for those industries but there's definitely testing and adoption going on.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Willis, any other industries, or verticals that you guys look at?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): I don't know that we look at…, if you take like a Starbucks, or some of the industries that you referred to, that's a frequency that's different than ours, so you're going to shop Starbucks everyday, and your going to shop us, if you’re a good customer, two or three times a year. So I think it's less about us
looking at those parallel industries and finding patterns because I think the patterns are somewhat common. But it's understanding the bar that they are setting, so I think the user experience and expectation there is a big one. We have digital signs, we’re trying to think in context of weather and trends and newness, and all those things for that content that we render and also trying to think about getting you closer to the purchase with our search and some of our personalization that we’ve worked on.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): So obviously there's an arc to this, there’s a journey, and we talked about the last five years being such a ramp up. We have seen the evolution in the last five years. How do organizations get started? We're talking about now, that you've got the data; you’re able to make more informed decisions. We have good, stable mobile applications. We’re using this data, but this is not a starting point.
Question #12 -‐ Where does, where does that starting point begin (with data analytics)?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): For us, you know, I think it starts with the talent. We talked about big data earlier. And historically, when we were, when we had the questions that we want to ask from a business perspective that required big data, we’ve outsourced it, right, we have done a lot of real estate analysis, consumer analysis, we shipped some data out. I think, though the influence of the volume of the data now on our consumer and the consumer journey, and the need for us to bring that closer to home is what's caused us to pursue that as the next leg of our journey. And were looking at that big data infrastructure that supports the volume and the speed and performance as well as as the speed to delivery of disparate data sources. I think our marketing folks, one quote I like, that they would say, is that “we’re data rich and insights poor”. Which the thought is just that we have a lot of data in a lot of places and we really need to bring them into a place where we have the ability to harness it. But again, starts with the talent for me, understanding how we're going to use it and then the technology that enables it.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I think we see a lot of customers that really struggle with the technology solutions out there are really innovative, and we see a lot of customers that will go and launch into a technology platform and not have a real good understanding of what they're really trying to do with that platform. So we spend a lot of our time actually almost coaching customers a little bit to sit back and think about, okay, so you're thinking about this technology, but what are the use cases that are really important to your business? We want to be sure for our customers, that the technology platform they select is going to support the use cases that are really important to them.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Absolutely. Tim?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): You had asked for starting points. Starting points would be start small, show some successes, don't invest in technology as much as Neil has mentioned, and as Willis has reinforced. Look at the business first and the experience that you want to provide to your customer, and what questions do you have that can't currently be answered, that if you had the answers to those questions, the customer experience would be great. Focus on those first. Let’s say you're more mature, you're already doing that. The next phase is, how do I integrate, insights generated from all this into the work streams of the people that face my customers? Be they in a contact call center, right, if you're one of those stores, or the sales associate, and then the final, I would say the more mature stage would be, let's say we're doing all that, things are going pretty well, but the next phase we need to do, and we're seeing this widespread, is self-‐service analytics. There are tools now that make the insights generated from big data much more approachable for many more people, you don't need to be a data scientist any more as long as the data is in one place and you have the right tools, you can expand the insights across your organization. Now you're being a data driven organization and making smarter decisions in a lot more places.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR):
Question #13 -‐ Any use cases that you guys have seen recently of interesting ways businesses are using not only their mobile application experiences, but the data that's produced out of them? Are they driven out of a business outcome that's hopefully defined very early in the process before a big purchase is made, any common use cases that you've seen?
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I think there's a lot of common use cases people are trying to understand, how many shoppers or how many customers come into our location? How long are they staying, what's their behavior, maybe where did they go next, where did they come from? We also see use cases where people are using the data as a way to set for example, tenant rents in a mall and be able to prove a certain amount of foot traffic came by this location. That should quantify this sort of, command this sort of rent for a mall tenant.
(Case Study: https://www2.wwt.com/case-‐study/international-‐airport-‐looks-‐to-‐improve-‐customer-‐experience-‐using-‐location-‐and-‐analytics/)
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): We’re seeing it also in sports venues. In sports venues, not only the placement of where we put merchandise, but how we price, given who it is we're playing, what day of the week is it, how well is the team doing so far this year. There is an entire…, this is why intermediaries exist, right? And
they’ve been arbitraging that band of pricing and more and more sports venues are saying we should be doing that. We do own the franchise, after all. Let's price adequately so we can capture more of that revenue which has been deferred previously to the intermediaries. So we're seeing work in that area.
The other part would be in leisure and hospitality, it’s knowing how, in a big cruise ship or large resort area or in a ski resort, how are people moving and migrating so that we can staff for food and beverage, so that we can staff for things like bathrooms. In airports, we're working with airport authorities in order to help them determine wait lines for TSA and where certain other retailers might be optimally placed to drive those revenues because, let's face it, airports are also shopping malls these days. So we're using mobility technology combined with analytics to help them make those decisions.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Absolutely. Even at the application layer, the retailers we have seen that can respond very quickly to change are using data to make decisions a lot faster so they know what parts of the application user is spending the time in, so for evaluating if we should spend time on feature A, or feature B, you can use metrics to make those decisions a lot quicker. Willis,
Questions #14 -‐ Are there any metrics, insights or analytics you guys (Famous Footwear) use either in the apps or in the stores?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): All the above. I would say a an easy and pretty generic example is around the mobile web, we spent a lot of time trying to understand are they seeing the shoes that they want, are they expressing intent to purchase and if they do are they closing the sale. These are pretty high level metrics, but as we evolve that journey and try to take the friction out of that mobile web experience, we were able to really get the data that told us when we were hitting the sweet spot for making it easy to find what you needed, for also making it frictionless to complete the check out, so that we don't lose those sales when they’ve already expressed intent to purchase.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): We talked a couple times, it's been mentioned, the frictionless experience. Neil,
Question #15 -‐ On the infrastructure and mobility side, what are areas, kind of to flip it, around what areas have caused friction that you’ve seen with customers, particularly in the retail space?
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I think the retail industry in general has invested a lot over the last couple years to try to solve, seemingly simple problems for the
rest of us, but they're really complex to solve, things like getting real-‐time inventory to appear on your mobile app or web app. That takes a great deal of integration with those back end systems. It's kind of a barrier for folks, I think.
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): I've seen the failure to converge inventory across either multiple stores or across a digital platform hinder many sales about to be made. So a shopper will find something in his or her size or wants it in another color or find something they like that's not available at that retail location. The sales associate is trying to find it by going, leaving the customer, going back to a busy point of sale terminal, using a browser, and trying to find it somewhere else. That's just basic. You got to win that one, you got to converge your inventory across the platform so the sales associate can be there with the customer and say yes, we have it in another store, five hundred miles away, I can ship it to you within two days, or you can come back in this store two days from now and pick it up. And guess what, they're going to pick it up and buy something else when they return. That is basic. You got to have it.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Obviously, this panel is about the digital experience, but there is still that “warmth” and “personalization” that consumers crave, so that personal experience, which Willis talked a lot about with the store associate inside Famous Footwear and the customer satisfaction scores, are still very much built on warmth, so that warmth is not just about the data that's delivered to a consumer facing application, it's the data that’s delivered to your store associate so they can be more personable and give the customer an experience they desire. Final questions, guys, we talked a lot, Willis really started very eloquently, with the notion of giving control back to the customer, which I think is a profound thought.
Question #16 -‐ Any advice for retailers at large, if they want to really differentiate their consumer experience (“warmth”, “personalization”), what it one thing you'd leave them with?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): I would say that just continue to stay up with your customer or maybe test new ideas you have on a limited set of customers, classic A versus B testing, to see if it's something that's going to be adopted. And that repeated process of testing and learning, be it marketing or promotion, a product, how you place your inventory, is going to reap some benefits.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I’d say think mobile first. Mobile technology is really how people are experiencing, especially the younger you are, I mean, let's face it, you know, people are using apps to do everything. So I think kind of transforming yourself to think mobile first, I think is really important.
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): The only thing I'd add to that is to start with customer first. You know, I think it's easy, I think you need to be aware of the environment at large and we talked about the pace of change and kind of wild, Wild West that technology is today. But I think we need to understand how you differentiate based on what your customer expects from you and I think it's easy to fall into the trap of so and so is doing this, and I saw that whitepaper, and I’ll chase that, I think the real impact and the real differentiation comes from what your consumer expects from you.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): That's great. We're going to toss it to Brian for a question on line.
Q&A:
1. What role do you see iBeacons playing in the customer experience?
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): I can start with that one. There are different wireless technologies out there. A Wi-‐Fi network is how you can get connected and really start to engage with the customer. I would say the difference between that and something like Blue Tooth, beacon technology, is think about the Wi-‐Fi network as a macro technology, everybody can connect to it and you can connect analytics, anybody that's within range of that Wi-‐Fi network, right? Blue Tooth beacons, it's a little bit more of a proximity, a localized technology, so if you're trying to give someone an experience, as they walk up to an exhibit or walk up to a certain product display, that's where you really have to transition from that macro network experience down to a much more localized experience.
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): I would add that we see much more of the Wi-‐Fi and analytics derived from Wi-‐Fi than we do from iBeacon, so I have no position on which is better than the other. I'm just saying in terms of adoption, iBeacon is limited in terms of what we see as analytics possibility.
2. What processes or practices have you found helpful in deploying new technologies?
WILLIS HILL (VP Retail IT, Famous Footwear): I think we have taken a much more agile approach. We talked about the guiding principle that we adopted of pilot, assess, optimize and scale, which again, it’s our intent to get something to market quickly with an understanding of the business outcome, evaluate that outcome, and then make the determination of going forward. In that from a peer process perspective, we have gone down more of an agile development approach, with strong business ownership and product ownership in our organization, and that's done a lot for our quality.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): Absolutely. And it's provided a lot more confidence in the wild, wild west we talked about, where we can do something very quick and get a turn on something to test out, and if the test fails, that's good because the cost of change significantly increases as time increases, so the quicker we can access success or failure, the better.
So guys, any closing thoughts? Neil? Tim?
TIM BROOKS (Big Data Principal Consultant, WWT): Just, I think Willis has touched on a lot of areas that are very instructive for our audience in general, and that is to be thinking about the business and the customer first, and then make your technology and human resource decisions and the process changes based upon what you know, you know, you started, you're doing well in that journey, there's going to be a lot of other things thrown at you, and thrown at our audience as well, but always keeping that in mind as your signal, is going to work for you.
NEIL ANDERSON (Mobility & Access Lead, WWT): Yes. I'm reminded of the title of our webinar, which is “disrupt or be disrupted”. Try something; staying status quo is not going to get the job done.
MATT SEBEK (MODERATOR): It's kind of the line, technology can certainly be a disrupter but it can also be an enabler. And those that really understand their customers can bridge the gap between marketing and IT are the ones that are going to win.
Thank you again, Willis Hill for your time. Neil, Tim. Remind us to join us on Facebook Live, World Wide Technology’s Facebook page. We’ll be doing a session wrap-‐up over there. Until next time, thank you very much. ///
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