Multichannel Musings

New business, new site, new blog

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Barker) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:35:00 +0000

For any of you still subscribed to this feed, I've now moved over to the ThinkBulb.co.uk blog, we're you'll find all my musings in future. It's been a while, but I'll be writing again soon over on that blog.

Thanks and hope to see you soon!

eCommerce Archeology: The 3 Ages of eComm

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Barker) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:36:00 +0000

Everybody seems to be talking about eCommerce re-platforming. It's got me thinking about how retailers have evolved their use of eComm over time. I kind of see it as 3 ages, of which we are now entering the 3rd age.

The 1st Age - The toe in the water (mid 90s - early 2000's)
The goldrush starts and retailers begin carving out their marketshare. The key was speed to market, very few eCommerce platform vendors existed and those that did were in their infancy. Many Bricks & Mortar retailers believed they could build it themselves, and set out on that path.

The 2nd Age - Handling the success (mid 2000's - late 2000's)
eCommerce gathers pace, as consumers opt for the convenience. The success of the likes of Amazon and eBay show the way and the growth of shopping on the web is exponential.
Those that built it themselves see cost of ownership spiralling to support increased traffic, but the ability to make changes slows. All contrary to what is required by the business stakeholders who see competitors adding capabilities.
The stakeholders lose faith in the existing platform. Many traditional Retailers at this point decide to outsource to the experts, to remove the application/infrastructure headache and concentrate on what they know buying and merchandising - this was also aligned with the trend toward outsourcing the commodity IT functions of their primary business.
Those that implemented an early platform, may have taken the same outsourcing route or decided on the upgrade path.
It was toward the end of this period that new innovations began to gather pace, many termed it Web2.0, in general it revolved around the concepts of User Generated Content. Whereby the wisdom of the masses was being used by consumers to inform purchases.

The 3rd Age - Masters of destiny (2010+?)
This brings us to now, as retailers look to harness and leverage the new concepts and put them to use. Business Stakeholders have realised eCommerce is no longer that web thing that contributed negligible revenues. The term Multichannel, having risen to prominence halfway through the previous period, and dismissed, begins to gain traction again.
Those that outsourced, realise that the size of their eCommerce business and the cost model, whether it be revenue-share based or traffic based, are no longer sustainable. A combination of this and frustrations with their suppliers has led back to insourcing, the attraction of leveraging the wealth of experience in the skills marketplace and potential agility of an in-house team is just too great an attraction. It also positions them to compete more effectively with the pure-plays.

The fight is on for the next generation of eCommerce and to be ready for the upturn in consumer confidence and a share of their pockets.

I predict this next age will be an exciting one! It'll be interesting in around 5yrs to reflect upon this 3rd period and the trends that occur.

Will mobile Twitter apps mean a decline in SMS?

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Barker) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:14:00 +0000

As I began yet another tweet from my iPhone, the thought struck me - I wonder if there'll be a decline in SMS? Surely SMS is what Twitter was modelled on in the first place given its message limit?

I also remembered the reports suggesting that traditional email traffic was seeing a decline as Facebook users began utilising FB mail. I wonder if the same is true of the IM services?

I wonder if the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) have spotted any trends since Twitter growth spurt?

What are your thoughts?

Getting a shared basket between brands right

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Barker) — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:10:00 +0000

Over the last week or so I've been doing some consulting work for a retail group that has a multitude of brand identities. I've been working with them on their eCommerce strategy and one piece of functionality they're keen to introduce is a shared basket across their various branded sites.

I seemed to remember that Gap had done this for their Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime and Gap branded sites. The Client referenced AH in the Netherlands as an example.

So, I thought I'd take a look at the Gap site and what the general perception of how successful it had been. I found an article by eConsultancy dated January 2009 which referenced Foresee's Online Retail Satisfaction Index report indicating that Gap had seen a fall in satisfaction since the shared basket went live, citing:

"This feature may not have been important to Gap’s online customers to begin with because they may view the other brands differently in terms of price, quality, and style"

Interestingly, taking a look at the AH brands and how they've implemented shared basket, I would expect it to be quite a success. They have clearly differentiated product assortments between the brands sharing the basket; Groceries vs Wines vs Telecoms vs Photos.

The key point here and probably a lesson Gap are learning, is that when you make it easy for your customers to compare between your brands with similar assortments at different prices, in this current climate it will inevitably lead to sales cannabilisation as their customers defect across from the higher cost brands. I'm sure it's probably led to an uneasy political atmosphere as the lower cost brands exceed expectations, whilst the higher cost brands fall short.

Whilst there maybe some overall benefits in sharing IT infrastructure, as I have advised our client, be careful which of your brands end up sharing the basket, particularly given the similarities between their assortments and their online pricing models!

Multichannel Retail Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:05:00 +0000

Having watched my Google Alerts stack up, I thought it was time for another brief round up with a couple of highlights from what I've been reading recently...

Cranfield School of Management's view on what it takes for Multichannel Success
This recent article on the MyCustomer website caught my attention. An interesting article and a surprise to find a Management School article with a focus on technology.

As I pointed out in the comment I left, whilst I agree that integration forms a large part in terms of gaining single view of several important data elements, the real hurdle within long established retailers is securing stakeholder buy-in and funding. This is made much more difficult if the organisation is siloed and the stakeholders you are targetting do not have incentives to encourage cross-channel behaviours.

A nice cross-channel customer service anecdote
RightNow's CEO, Greg Gianforte, posted a nice anecdote on his blog of a recent experience with iRobot's customer service. It's an area I'd not paid a great deal of attention to, but it's just as important as your multiple sales channels - having a joined up aftersales customer service will generate brand loyalty and increase your customer retention.

An elegant definition of Multichannel vs Cross-channel
This interview with Kevin Ertell is an interesting read. A couple of good points in there, namely the difficulty in measuring conversion rates as retail websites evolve beyond just simply selling stuff to us and I had to quote this too:

“Multi-channel” is more than one channel while “cross-channel” is leveraging the strengths of each channel to create an overall customer experience that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Kevin has also picked up on a growing view that mobile will find a use in-store, providing the ability for customers to make purchase decisions based upon reviews, recommendations, etc right from their mobile phone. I believe Bazaarvoice's Customer Reviews offering comes out-of-the-box with the capability to deliver reviews via mobile phone.

A discussion on Web access within the store
RetailWire have published an article on web access in-store (registration required). However, it's not the article that's particularly interesting, it's the subsequent discussion. Several of the panellists hit upon the theme that customers will evolve to use their mobile smartphones if they want web access. I'll admit I don't use my iPhone as much as I should whilst shopping in-store, but that's currently because the Apps aren't necessarily there yet. It makes sense for stores to be spending their scarce budgets on targeted mobile apps (reviews/recommends, store locator, stock checker), rather than trying to deploy kiosks out in their store estate. As stated by a couple of the panellists, those investing in store technology need to be aware that mobile applications are coming and are likley to be adopted by their customers before the accountants have depreciated those in-store investments!

UK Retailers on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:29:00 +0000

It's hard to miss Twitter at the moment, there seems to be dozens of posts and news articles appearing on a daily basis right now... and yes, I know I'm adding to that.

However, going through my recent Google Alerts, I chanced upon an article by eConsultancy. They're constructing a list of UK retailers on Twitter. Interesting to see a lack of presence from the big name high street retailers, though I'm sure that will change with all the current Twitter hype.

One question in the comments asking whether tweeting about offers, promotions, etc was well answered. Whilst it's valuable in terms of visibility (possibly even early visibility for those loyal twitter followers), it still needs to be combined with an engaging stream of tweets to keep people interested and engaged.

By the way, I've been tweeting myself over the last couple of months. You can follow me @mc_musings.

The Current State of Cross-Channel Retailing: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:52:00 +0000

Continuing my review of RSRs “Cross-channel Retailing for the Anytime, Anywhere Consumer” benchmark study on the current state of multichannel retailing, I'll take a look at the inhibitors and technology enablers sections of the study.

Obviously a major concern for retailers currently is the impact of the economic climate, though the study does highlight how the retail winners differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack during these difficult times, “Winners know that other retailers focus inwardly in stressful times, looking for ways to cut costs and laying low until external conditions improve. Winners however are unwavering in their focus on the consumer.” Investing now whilst their competitors haul down the shutters will put them in good stead for the upturn in the economy.

The top 2 identified inhibitors to becoming an efficient cross-channel retailer indicate the survey respondents recognition that becoming customer-centric is key, as opposed to product and location:

Inability to effectively use customer information for cross-channel marketing
Do not have one view of the customer across all channels

The studies section entitled, “Organizational Resistance is Tenacious and Lingers On” highlights the continued issues with getting the organisation onboard with multichannel efforts. I've recently read the book “Fast Strategy” which discusses approaches on how organisations can become more agile, giving examples of recent tech company successes to allow them to adapt quickly to market forces. I wonder how some of these approaches could be applied to Retail.

Retailers are attempting to address their inhibitors, though a later graph in the study suggests there's an opportunity to greatly improve, with 67% of respondents suggesting they still have work to do synchronising customer and inventory information across channels.

On to technology...

Another clear differentiator between retail winners and their competitors becomes apparent when asked about their approach to managing cross-channel data. 52% of winners enter product and customer data into a single system of record and move electronically in to other channels, whilst 71% of their competitors are still entering that information seperately into each channel - clearly the winners have optimised their data processes.

The study highlights how retailers view the importance of real-time customer and inventory data and the need for cross-channel content and product information management, but interestingly the third most important is a modern eCommerce platform. It would be interesting to find out what retailers believe to be a “modern eCommerce platform”, what feature set do they believe such a platform should comprise? Do they think these modern platforms require more Web2.0 features? Or is this a refelction that they feel their eCommerce platform capabilities require further investment?

As discussed in my previous posting, few retailers see adding channels as important in the current climate with a distinct view that mobile is most definitely low on that list. Only 4% of Retail Winners considering it very important, even though mobile operators are predicting significant growth in this area. Could this be the retailers are holding their cards close to their chests, or are the mobile operators just trying to encourage a market in its infancy?

To summarise some of the key recommendations from the study; Winners will continue to invest during this downturn and emerge even stronger, with the help of technology vendors and some creative financing options. Though there are still some key challenges, the most significant, the lingering issue of organisational change to support cross-channel initiatives. To address this will require new metrics and processes to aid alternative compensation structures and promote cross-channel behaviours and attributes.

What are these metrics? The need to track a customers journey across channels and their spends, what product did they browse on the website? Did they go on to buy that product via an alternate channel? – this should be easy for an integrated web to store/phone journey where those channels share that customer information and have the ability to identify the customer at point-of-sale. Though I suspect from reading the study there aren't many retailers out there with that kind of sophisticated integration, or have even considered it a metric to measure – I look forward to being proved wrong.

Again, for full access to the study see the Retail Systems Research website.

The Current State of Cross-Channel Retailing: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:06:00 +0000

Over the next couple of postings I'm going to review this years annual Retail Systems Research survey on the current state of multichannel retailing and some of the interesting stats the report uncovers.

This years survey results reinforce the analysts and many industry pundits views that multichannel customers are more profitable than single channel customers – 56% of the surveys respondents felt this was the case. However it appears that many retailers can't actually quantify this as 29% still don't know whether their multichannel customers are profitable or not!

The survey continues the growing trend in using the term 'cross-channel', including it in the title, “Cross-channel Retailing for the Anytime, Anywhere Consumer”. What's nice about this report is the use of the term in context, identifying cross-channel with the behaviours of the customer and multichannel with the underlying systems. It also highlights the focus on the brand, particularly with this great phrase – "the brand is the value, and the channel is how the value is delivered".

It would appear that the survey respondents are switching on to the importance of brand and that customers shop the brand not necessarily the channel these days – 76% of the respondents see creating a single brand identity across all channels as the most important opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

However, only 20% believed it very important to explore new channels, e.g. mobile. This is probably an indicator of the current economic climate and the focus on strengthening foundation channels, or perceived barriers to entry for new channels. This is still quite a surprise, given that International should be considered an additional channel and with potential brand saturation in local markets, international expansion should be more appealing in their efforts to counter balance shrinking local revenues.

An interesting observation is that 40% of what the survey refers to as Retail Winners are fulfilling online orders from the stores. To me, this is not a scalable model – as volumes increase there's a serious risk of cannabilisation of store inventory, leading to dissatisfied local customers. Where's the incentives for that Store Manager to promote cross-channel behaviours and attributes?

The report uncovers some clear benefits to enabling cross-channel processes and behaviours. Here are some highlights below, I suggest downloading the report from RSRs website for the full picture.

- 40% report a 2-5% increase in eCommerce profitability
- 20% report a 5-10% decrease in warehouse space requirements
- 31% report a 5-10% improvement in gross margin percent
- 22% report a 10-25% sales lift on cross-channel promotions

Multichannel Retailing Reference Architecture: Update

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:57:00 +0000

The Multichannel Retailing Reference Architecture

This is a minor update to the architecture after the comments on the original posting. I've now added the 'Decision Support' component.

This component should contain the enterprise-wide reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) tooling not encompassed in any of the other components, such as the CRM. Ideally all reporting and BI should be performed using this component, though the reality is that many application packages will provide their own specialist reporting tools that may be better suited to the job at hand. These tools may be best placed for operational reporting, whereas the tools within Decision Support will be for non-operational reporting, such as data mining historic information and trend analysis.

The challenge here will be deciding what should be considered as operational and non-operational data. One possible approach could be as follows.

Partition the 'Master Data' in to two areas; Operational and Historic. The Operational Data Store (ODS) may enforce a policy of containing only 13-months of data, whilst the Historic Data Store (HDS) may contain all older data. Of course, each entity in the ODS may have data of varying age due to legislation and compliance issues, much as data in the HDS will also be governed by such factors. From a cost perspective the HDS may go further and implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) techniques to store the data, e.g. 1-3yrs online, 3-7yrs automated/retrievable offline, 7+yrs offline/offsite.

The tools providing reporting on the HDS are always likely to be generic, it's more cost-effective than having secondary instances of each of the business applications for specialist reporting on the historic data. However, this is where there will always be the challenge of the business user requiring the same level of reporting they have on their operational data. Though this frustration can usually be circumvented by demonstrating the data mining and flexibility of the BI tools. The only time it may be necessary to provide secondary instance of a business application against the HDS is for legislative compliance. A recent example I have experienced was to ensure a despatch system could reproduce all labelling for any customer orders shipped internationally for a period upto 7 years. To achieve this, we had a secondary instance of the application configured against the HDS that would only be started upon business request (e.g. during an audit) and agreed with the application vendor that this would not constitute the need for an additional software licence. A cost-effective solution, satisfying both the business stakeholders and our IT budget!

Multichannel Retail Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:56:00 +0000

This is the first in what I hope to make a regular spot on the blog where I'll be rounding up and summarising articles, blog posts and generally any content that's caught my attention relating to Multichannel Retail. Hopefully you'll find some of it interesting and of relevance.

UK Retailers continue to invest in multichannel programmes
First up is this recent article documenting the multichannel round table debate hosted by BT Expedite. Looks like it was a very open debate, with some great soundbites captured and addressing some common issues across retailers. I particularly like Andrew Clarkes comment relating to TopShop not becoming a social networking site, which RetailWeek decided to highlight in a callout. Reading between the lines it sounds like there could be some disagreement on strategy there between the parent and operating company. Another notable mention in the article was Comet's click to chat, whilst they were reluctant to give out figures the article seemed to suggest they've seen a measured impact on conversions. As a slight side on this, an ATG partner recently implemented a callback feature for a Health Insurance client. An email was automatically sent to the call centre when a customer abandoned their application, the call agent contacted the customer to see if they could be of assistance - this resulted in a 17% reduction in abandonment, imagine something similar for an online retail site as part of checkout abandonment.

How a Company’s Culture Can Affect Efforts to Integrate Channels
This article published by Retail Systems Research provides an interesting insight in to the multichannel strategy of US retailer, Bare Escentuals. Clearly hampered by their US growth strategy, whilst complex was primarily product-centric and store based (typical of most traditional brick'n'mortar retailers world-wide), are using their EU and Asia expansion to implement their multichannel vision. The final objective to migrate their US operations to the multichannel model once it has proved itself. This is a relatively risk free approach, as it removes any potential impact on their currently successful, if slightly hamstrung, US business.

Blog: Mobile Retail - Coming to any store near you
Finally in this roundup, a fellow blogger's post on mobile retail and the recent Forrester Report. Some nice references to recent mobile retail applications and how consumers are now using mobile devices more and more to inform their buying decisions whilst on the move.

Crowdsourcing and Online Retail

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:38:00 +0000

Before leaving the house this morning I caught a TV news article about http://www.galaxyzoo.org, a new website asking the public to help classify star systems and spot oddities in the vast number of photographs scientists have of the universe. What a great use of crowdsourcing I thought, how could online retailers benefit from such concepts?

An obvious example might be a competition to design a new product, similar to Walkers recent efforts to get the public to define new flavours of crisps.

Possibly slightly less obvious would be to address a couple of issues most website managers would profess to having, search result relevancy and product hierarchy. So, how about having something similar to Googles new additions allowing your users to rank site search results
or comment? Or allowing users to re-categorise products? It would be an interesting experiment to see the affects on conversion rates. The theory being these would improve as the customers with common interests improve each others routes to find products.

Using Social Media to drive footfall and customer retention

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:18:00 +0000

I've just been reading Joe McKendrick's SOA blog over at ZDNet where he's been blogging from the Microsoft Fastforward conference in Las Vegas. He's described what he calls the LIFT phenomenon; Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

I was thinking, with a good Social Media marketing strategy in place a retailer could really benefit from these platforms, gaining insight, introducing rich interaction with their followings.

Many retailers have RSS enabled their websites, but what if it were just as easy on their eCommerce platform or Enterprise Marketing Mgmt (EMM) tool to click a box when creating that latest and greatest promotion and it to appear directly on those Social Media sites?

With the advent of FaceBook Connect and the Twitter APIs that shouldn't be so difficult should it?

If these customers have already pledged allegiance by following on Twitter or becoming a Fan on Facebook, imagine how special they'll feel if they're always the first to know about special offers and discounts.

Multichannel Poster Child: Argos

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Here in the UK one of the retailers regularly held aloft for being a successful multichannel retailer is Argos. Pioneering kiosks, click & collect amongst others.

However, compared to most store based retailers, Argos have a couple of distinct advantages:

Each store is effectively a mini warehouse with tight stock control
The customer journey is almost identical across all channels

Let's take the latter point and observe the typical in-store customer journey...

Customer enters the store and is presented a catalogue to browse through
Products of interest are placed on a list and can be checked for availability
Customer takes the list to the checkout and pays
They now wait for the product to be picked from the local warehouse and delivered to the collection desk in the store

Does that all sound familiar to those of us working on eCommerce websites? How easy must that have been to transfer this business model to the web and phone ordering? "Hey Joe, this Internet thing, how do we get ourselves on it? - Heck! It's just a virtual version of our store with a large warehouse attached, we just need to get the home delivery logistics in place"

Having only display stock on the shelves means they must have much more accurate stock visibility, none of this late check in of received stock only for it to already be out on the floor and half of it already gone! (of course this wouldn't be issue if there was real-time reconciliation between ePOS and stock management systems, as well as automated check-in).

Such stock accuracy means cross-channel functionality such as 'Click & Collect' can be implemented with confidence.

The Multichannel Retailing Reference Architecture

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:19:00 +0000

NOTE: I've updated this to include the Decision Support function, see the MCR-RA Updated post

For a while now, I've been pondering over what the ideal Multichannel IT architecture might look like or for want of a better term, the Multichannel Retailing Reference Architecture.

At the very highest level it might look something similar to my diagram below.

Whilst very high-level, I have attempted to address the business functions for a retail organisation rather than cross-cutting IT concerns, such as security, systems management and monitoring, etc.

The key element to this diagram is the horizontal 'Business Interaction Services' layer that separates the vertical business systems from the 'Sales & Fulfilment Channels'. By decoupling the multiple channels from the underlying business applications through a single consistent set of interactions, customers, employees, suppliers or business partners can interact with the business across any channel consistently. What I'll now attempt to do is give an overview of each element.

Sales & Fulfilment Channels - these are the selling channels to the customer, such as Web, Phone, In-store POS, Mobile, etc. However, I have also placed fulfilment channels here too, the idea being that 3rd parties providing dropship fulfilment services, build-to-order services or logistics will interact with the retail organisation preferably through a subset of the Business Interaction Services. It also gives the opportunity for a flexible fulfilment network.

Business Interaction Services - this horizontal layer provides a common data/services model for the whole enterprise and in a manner that can be easily expressed to non-IT people during the design phase of applications. A catalogue of services should be maintained and governance in place to ensure re-use of services and removal of duplication. In providing this layer it ensures consistent interaction with the core vertical business systems between the sales and fulfilment channels. Whilst a service may be interacting with multiple business systems to fulfil a channels request, it will appear seamless to the end user. As an end user moves between interaction channel, the selected channel will present the same services and information in an appropriate form, e.g. on an ePOS display, mobile PDA, Kiosk or Website. It should be made clear that this may not have to be a technology layer, but could simply be a catalogue of the interaction services provided by the underlying business systems, though typically due to legacy business applications it will almost always need to be a technology layer!

The reality these days is the 'Buy vs Build' tenet manifesting itself in sets of packaged or best-of-breed platforms, delivering business systems for specific functions of the retail organisation. Those vertical components in the diagram above represent these. In most cases, the business units being supported by these systems will access them directly rather than via a channel or the business interaction services (E.g. Call Centre staff accessing the CRM platform, Distribution Centre staff accessing the Warehouse Mgmt system).

Warehouse Management - this function would be in place if the retailer manages its own warehouses, this may also be extended to logistics fleet management. Here we would see processes and services for picking, packing, dispatching and individual warehouse inventory management.

Customer Relationship Management - a broad function, covering all customer contact - inbound calls, website visits, outbound marketing, etc. It is this function that understands and develops the interactions with the customer. It will also manage the single view of the customer, providing services to the channels for creating and manipulating customer information.

Product Information Management - the central management of the product life cycle, here is where the product master data is managed ensuring the product data is available for consumption by all channels. This capability will also manage rich content associated to product; images, video, baseline descriptions (the channels may enrich this with localised content appropriate to the channel). One approach may be to hold this as a central catalogue and for channels to take a subset of products and localise their content.

Order Management - providing the capability to capture and manage a customers order centrally. Ideally, the order management platform would also provide fulfilment planning to determine which home delivery enabled warehouse is best placed to process a customers order. For Global organisations (and dependent upon their organisational design) this would provide services to 3rd party fulfilment partners or their separate operating companies fulfilment operations via the business interactions service layer.

Finance & HR Management - these core capabilities, typically implemented through the use of an ERP system, are unlikely to be exposed through any of the channels (though could be to streamline processes between the organisation and 3rd parties).

Content Management - whilst product related content should ideally be managed within the product information management business systems, non-product content would be managed here. Examples might be marketing materials, property digital assets, non-channel specific content. A catalogue of core content could be created here, allowing channels to select content appropriate to their channel or locality and re-purpose as required.

Retail Operations Management - this vertical contains all the systems for managing store processes, examples might be range planning, store planning, workforce task management. Again, whilst not necessarily obvious to expose processes through the business interaction services, it may be beneficial for optimising interactions with third parties.

Master Data - the other most important part of this architecture is securing the single version of the truth. Ensuring only single data stores for each key logical data entity for the organisation. To retain integrity of that data, one of the business systems should be made responsible for maintaining that master data entity and access/modification of that data entity only possible through the services exposed by that business system.

Technical Interaction Services - These services are provided as an alternative to the business interaction services layer, supporting legacy business systems, suppliers and partners that cannot interact through the preferred business interaction services layer. Use of these services should be kept to a minimum, though whilst transitioning to this architecture this is may be impossible to avoid.

A couple of technical points to labour; ensure loose coupling between channels and core business systems, and that a business system masters the data and access to that data is only achievable via that business system. The former will allow flexibility and choice of channels and the latter will enforce data integrity.

Of course, it doesn't take much imagine to compare the above to what we in IT commonly refer to as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, given recent reports of the imminent death of SOA, at least as a term, I thought I'd avoid using it in my diagram and descriptions ;o)

Deloitte's Xmas Retail Survey 2008

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Just spotted Deloitte's related paper to their annual Christmas survey; 'Multichannel retailing - every cloud has a silver lining'.

It's a succinct read and I'm sure only touches the surface of the survey results. In reading it, I felt a level of vindication for my earlier posting about the need for CRM. The survey results would indicate that retailers do see the need for a CRM as an enabler to consumer x-channel behaviour - great news!

Interestingly, joint top of the key challenges faced to becoming a true multichannel retailer is 'Inflexible organisation structures and processes that are based on channel and not brand' at 41%, but 'Implementing the required cultural shift and changes to measures and incentives' was last at 9%. Surely these should be of joint importance, the latter going some way to address the former? I may not be an organisational change expert, but laying out some incentives to encourage behavioural change is a good step in the right direction for getting organisational change accepted.

Does Multichannel retailing need a re-brand to Cross-channel?

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:29:00 +0000

Over the past few months I've noticed the increasing use of the phrase "Cross-channel" replacing "multichannel" in presentations, whitepapers and blogs by various industry commentators and consultancies.

However this doesn't come as any surprise to me, as back in February when I posted a question on LinkedIn Q&A asking about the challenges of becoming truly multichannel, I received an interesting response.

Satindra Chakravorty believed, even back then, that we needed to decommission the phrase multichannel as it did not convey what the customer does or what's required by the retailer to enable the customer journey across channels. In fact, his view that any organisation that considered its processes as multichannel also would have the notion of boundaries between those channels. My view is that if this is the case, those espousing they are multichannel haven't really understood what it's about.

Maybe the marketing teams at these consultancies have decided that a rebranding exercise is required, though I can't help but think that maybe if they'd got the message and scope of impact right first time around we wouldn't be needing Multichannel 2.0 aka Cross-channel now.

Either way, whatever you call it the key challenge is moving from purely a product and sales centric to customer-centric retailer and overcoming the obstacles of people, process and technology that accompany all such transformations.

eCommerce Expo - Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:12:00 +0000

Given that I'm making this blog entry well before the end of the expo may give an indicator that I've some free time not attending the seminars. Not that the seminars have finished, more that I've given up attending them... A single word sums it up - disappointed.

Whilst many of today's sessions had multichannel in their title all but one actually had actual multichannel content. Even that session only skimmed the surface. In any case, here's a rundown of the sessions I attended.

First up, "Customer-generated content goes multichannel" with Bazaarvoice and Screwfix. This was moderately interesting, but given that I'd spoken to Bazaarvoice recently nothing particularly new surfaced. It was interesting to hear about the Screwfix experience. They are beginning to use online review content in their offline channels, though didn't indicate whether this was having a positive affect on their trade desk or catalogue sales. More interestingly, their email campaign to incentivize reviews threw up a surprise. Where the subject did not include their win £100 promo they saw 2% more reviews! In terms of uplift, Screwfix have seen a 34% uplift in sales of products with a 2 star or above rating and an overall lift of 32% in sales for products with ratings versus those with no rating. This backs up a statement in a later session featuring Bazaarvoice, "with the proliferation of advertising, reviews are a key differentiator in driving sales".

The next session, "Multichannel: the road to true retail success", didn't start off too confidently. The presenter, Chris Barling of Actinic, telling us he was the John McCain of eCommerce and that many in the room probably knew more about multichannel than he did! It was tempting to walk at that moment, but didn't want to dent his confidence further. Chris' opening slides presented a few top-level facts from recent IBM and MORI surveys on multichannel behaviours and it would have been nice to dig a bit deeper here, but as I know there's only so much you can get from a web trawl before you have to pay good money or let the consultants in to get hold of the detail! Sorry Chris, but it was obvious. The rest of the session was a Chris taking us through a selection of Actinic's SME retailers and how their only using 1 or 2 channels to do business... not a great advert I'm afraid.

The final seminar I attended was the BT Expedite/Mosaic/Wickes presentation on Multichannel integration strategies. As always, John Bovill of Mosaic spoke confidently and heaped praise on the BT Fresca platform. A few good points were how Mosaic recognised that the customer interacts with the brand, not recognising channel. The key was to ensure consistency at every touchpoint. Mosaic's biggest challenge was the cultural move to become customer centric.
The rest of the session was a quick talk from Bazaarvoice (again!) and the customer experience manager from Wickes telling us how they're doing more or less the same as Screwfix. Hat off to Justin Crandall of Bazaarvoice for getting so much airtime for his company!
Again though this was hardly multichannel or the issues we face implementing multi or cross channel retailing.

Before leaving I did get a chance to chat with the guys from Mercado, who indicated they're currently being acquired by Omniture. This could be interesting to see how they compliment each other to improve upon their closed loop analytics and merchandising. I also wonder what will happen with the relationships between Mercado and the other Web Analytics vendors such as Coremetrics?

All in all a disappointing day, I was hoping to see wider coverage of multichannel topics and advice, to name a few

multichannel fulfilment and inventory mgmt
how single view of customer enables multichannel
organizational barriers to cross channel retailing

Whilst I appreciated it was an eCommerce Expo, why tempt the audience with titles if the content isn't there!

eCommerce Expo - Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:42:00 +0000

The day looked like it was going to turn into something of a damp squib as the first seminar I attended was a real let down. Entitled, 'Online shopping cross-border' it was billed as insight from the IMRG on international commerce. Unfortunately James Roper, Chief Exec of IMRG, first slipped up by using the phrase 'it's just another postcode' - destroying any credibility almost immediately. Obviously he's unaware of EU intrastat sales reporting, the varying sales thresholds for tax reporting across the EU countries, the x-border invoicing legislation or that not all Eire addresses have a postcode... Oh dear James. Though none of this mattered as it inevitably turned in to a pitch about the broader IMRG work. The couple of pieces of wheat that could be taken from this were the 'pathfinder' project the IMRG are spearheading. This hopes to provide a x-border working model with the EU commission (more on this would have been great) and the other, imrworld.org - a website containing lots of stats and info on x-border ecommerce.

The next session I chose was a case study, much, much better! Long Tall Sally took us through their approach to selecting Hybris and PortalTech as their ecommerce platform and SI. They kindly presented their lessons learnt;

using traffic lights to communicate their evaluation results worked well,
don't get hung up on details in the early stages of selection - use the quotation for this,
ensure plenty of time for UAT - don't let downstream slips squeeze it,
don't underestimate content migration,
engage 3rd parties (e.g. Payment services) as early as possible checking and double checking they can meet your timescales.

Afterwards I caught up with Andy Piscina, UK Manager for Hybris, who was very upbeat about how brisk business in the UK is going with a couple of significant recent signings.

After a bite of lunch and a catch up with colleagues it was time to see what Tesco had up their sleeve. An excellent presentation from Charlotte Tookey, Tesco.com, and Finlay Clark of Bigmouthmedia. It outlined how their online operation interprets the core principles and
distills them to: Easy to shop and Delivery on time.

To Tesco, SEO is key to their non-food offer as it's not what customers typically know Tesco for. They teamed with bigmouthmedia who helped get them ranking highly through the use of sitemaps, understanding Googles indexing behaviour, hierarchy naming and so on. All of which they bundled up into best practise documentation to utilise across Tesco's numerous microsites. Finlay then gave a heads up on what's next, utilising social networks and growing their community microsites. A great presentation and plenty of food for thought.

The following session was disappointing, probably for the technology vendor as much as the audience. I was hoping to find out how GSI Commerce were being utilised as an enabler to Casual Male's European expansion, instead we were subjected to a pitch from CMs COO and the
GSI guy barely got 10 minutes... A shame.

The final session I attended for the day was Simon Evetts, CTO of Javelin, session on buying or renting your ecommerce platform. A good session, whilst perhaps a little too brief, showed a good level of knowledge of the current marketplace and that with the numerous delivery models it really isn't a clear cut decision. There were also some good tips in there for what to consider when going out to tender. A key point well made was to plan a 3-5yr lifecycle for the platform.

Overall a day of hit and misses, but nothing new there for those that have attended these affairs before.

Tomorrow has more multichannel on the agenda, so it should be interesting.

eCommerce Expo

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:17:00 +0000

I'm off to the eCommerce Expo at London Olympia over the next couple of days, where I'm sure there'll be plenty of sales pitches. Though there does appear to be a few multichannel sessions, so I'm hoping to get a feel for what other retailers and tech vendors have achieved and experienced.

Let's hope they focus on the broader issues more so than the recent multichannel summit I attended. Where it felt that the presenters were too focused on just the Internet channel.

I can only hope! Watch this space...

Will the economic downturn postpone your multichannel efforts?

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:33:00 +0000

With the downturn appearing to be in full swing there's a danger that
some retail execs will postpone their multichannel aspirations.

Today I attended a presentation about strategies to retain core customers. This was followed by a statement that a CRM programme was not needed and that experience had shown that no x-sell or up-sell initiatives have ever been successful. This really grated with me and seemed counter-intuitive.

The customer is king to the multichannel retailer - how do you target your core customer when you don't know who they are and cannot connect with what they're buying? You resort to sampling and lesser accurate techniques whilst your competitors use their CRM and loyalty schemes to mine customer trends and buying patterns!

Surely in the current climate knowing your customer and what they are buying is key to retaining them. I would suggest the lack of success relating to x-sells, etc is more related to the lack of the ability to measure success.

I suspect the statement was more related to the state of budgets for such a CRM programme.

My view is that now more than ever is the time to find out who your customer is, how they are interacting with you and how you can serve them better.

The impact of iphone on multichannel

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:40:00 +0000

It's been a while since my last posting, but I suspect I'll be posting a whole lot more now I've discovered mail-to-blog and how easy it is on the move with my new iPhone.

On the subject of the iPhone. One has to wonder what impact it will have on the use on the Internet and ecommerce. Some might say it'll open up the opportunity for a full mobile internet experience. I've got to wonder given the number of iPhone optimized websites out there already, some have already decided they need to modify their "full" Internet experience into something more digestible on the iPhone form factor.

Whatever the future of the iPhone, I suspect the feasibility of usable mCommerce capability just got a whole lot closer.

I'd be interested in others thoughts on the subject.

The Consultancy take on Multichannel Retailing

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:41:00 +0000

After reading the article on the BT Global Services report, the subject of my last post, I decided to take a quick look at what the other consultancies were saying (or have said) about multichannel retailing.

Wipro http://www.wipro.com/ai/images/downloads/wp/IntegratedMulti_Channel_Retailing.pdf
Whilst I've worked with Wipro in the past and on both occasions came away slightly disillusioned, I have to say that this whitepaper is excellent. Though that's not just because their introduction has an almost identical definition for Multichannel Retailing as I used in my first blog post, but because they clearly define the benefits and challenges to implementing a multichannel operation. They highlight the added complexities of legacy systems in an established retailer, the governance issues in ensuring consistency across channels, the need for organisational alignment and the difficulties of getting store staff onboard with promoting cross channel shoppers. Of course the paper finishes by promoting the Wipro appraoch, but still a good high-level paper.

Javelin
Unfortunately, Javelin Group don't have a great deal to say about Multichannel out on the web apart from their brochureware. That's a shame, as I've worked with these guys and seen them influence and advise on both purely eCommerce strategy and cross channel.

Charteris
Back in late 2006 Charteris, a UK based IT consultancy, commissioned Martec to review the current state of multichannel retail in the UK. In early 2007 I was lucky enough to attend their breakfast briefing on the subject in which several well known UK retailers discussed the challenges of multi-channel retail. The report produced by Martec highlighted a couple of areas to me, the main being the lack of decent CRM processes across channels, followed by KPIs used to measure channel effectiveness. My view on the first point is that many retailers have yet to understand the wealth of customer data that is available to them from their web channel and therefore the need for an effective CRM platform to capitalise upon it. Not only that, but how they can merge that data with their other channels and external sources. The second point always amazes me, whilst many businesses produce business cases to justify a particular project, it very rarely contains any clear success criteria on which to base KPIs, e.g. level of customer retention/acquisition. Typically it's only ever about the first 5 year projections on the incremental revenues. 9 times out of ten, these KPIs are picked up in the reporting requirements that also seem to be the last thing the project team think about. Of course, Retailers aren't the only culprits here.

Conchango
Rizwan from Conchango, a business consultancy and systems integrator, has an excellent couple of blog postings. I think he sums up Multichannel and its challenges in his posting 'What is Multi-Channel?'. Working for one of those older traditional retailers, I totally agree with his observation regarding greater gains, but higher barrier to entry due to technology and organisational obstacles. In an organisation that has grown it's business units organically and traditionally autonomously with IT aligned to business unit, there are silos of organisation and technology which first need bridging and then replacing with joint technology and process - thankfully it's something that's been started here. Rizwan also mentions Service Orientation and this is something I want to go in to more detail about in a later posting. Service Orientation is a key concept to enable multichannel retailing, allowing individual services to be called upon from multiple channels to provide that single, consistent customer experience.

All in all, the consultancies appear to concur with the definition and points I raised in my first posting. In fact, many of them use a similar definition or at least some of the same terms!

The importance of getting it right

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Just spotted this posting on TheRetailBulletin - "Multichannel Strategy Drives Customers Away".

It describes a recent survey conducted by BT Global Services and highlights the fact that if you get it wrong and the customer experience isn't consistent across channels then your missing out on sales. Almost all repondent (97%) expect the interactions to be consistent across channels.

If you get it right there's the likelihood that those using 2 or more channels will spend 114% more than those only using a single channel!

An interesting final statement, “The difficulty with multichannel strategies is often a chicken and egg one. Organisations will only invest significantly in a new channel when they can prove its worth. They should remember, however, that customers will only use a new channel if it offers them a truly effective experience.” - surely this is actually a result of the barrier to adopting a new channel being too high. So, what are these barriers? It's probably a fair split between lack of IT agility and resistance to organisational change or new process adoption.

I've a few thoughts on the IT agility one that I think the NRF/ARTS are starting to address and I'll elaborate more as my blog continues.

What is Multichannel Retailing?

noreply@blogger.com (stuart_b) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:20:00 +0000

In the first of what I hope to be many blog posts I'm going to attempt to create a succinct definition of what is multichannel retailing.

A quick Google for the term 'multi channel retail definition' didn't really come up with much.

In my view Multichannel Retailing can be summed up with the following phrase; "Multichannel Retailing provides a consistent customer experience regardless of the channel that a customer wishes to use to interact with the organisation"

There are a few key sub-phrases in that sentence I wish to highlight. Let's take them in reverse order...

Interact
I could have easily used the word 'shop' in place of this, but I didn't. The reason is that in this day and age the customer relationship with a retail organisation should be more than simply a shopping experience. With the advent of the Web (forums, customer reviews, etc), IVR and other channel technologies there is no reason why the relationship between customer and retailer should not be more interactive.

Channel
What exactly is a 'Channel'? What makes a retailer 'Multichannel'? Nowadays we can shop with our favourite brands in a multitude of ways; the bricks & mortar shop, web, phone, catalogue/mail order, mobile phone, in-store kiosk, IDTV. Each and every one a different 'channel'. The majority of retailers have at least 2 of these channels operating. So, surely aren't all these 2+ channel retailers classed as 'Multichannel'. One might argue, 'Yes' as they're operating in multiple channels, but how many of them meet the definition I've made above? That bring me on nicely to my final point...

Consistent Customer Experience
The most important of all. I love the phrase 'Customer is King'. If that's the case, why do so many retailers fail to understand that to succeed they must provide customer-centric services. Whichever channel I interact on must know who I am, what I've bought and what my previous interactions have been. Not only will this impress the customer (or spook the more wary), but it will also provide extensive and valuable marketing intelligence and the opportunity to target customer segments and personalise the customer experience.

Not only that, but as the Banking & Finance industry all too well know, the future share value of an organisation will be proportional to the quality of customer data it maintains. (I know somebody else said that, but not sure who - anybody?)