Customer Experience Wins Game, Set and Match!

Last week I attended one of Europe’s longest running events for all things retail technology and design, RetailExpo. Hosted in the imposing setting of The Olympia in London over the course of two days the great and the good came together to air their views on some of the biggest challenges facing UK retail today. You could be forgiven that set against the retailpocalypse narrative the media loves to vaunt only a masochist would want to put themselves through two days of this. Far from it. It was a packed, vibrant affair that put the record straight with equal measures of realism and optimism.

With such a strong line-up spanning seven stages (Headline, Marketing & Branding, Operations, Payments, Special Events, Store Design & Experience), I employed the planning rigour and discipline I normally reserve to attending to a music festival. My advice, study the programme and agenda ahead of the event but try not to be too rigid as it will not always go to plan as you bump into old friends and make new connections. Allow for a little serendipity and you'll be surprised at the little nuggets you might uncover.

Spoiler alert – there is no retailapocalypse

Justin King CBE, Former CEO, Sainsbury's kicked off proceedings and set the tone for the first day. There is no retailapocalypse, but, things are different now. The High Street can do with a spot of help, and we can’t ignore the thorny issues of business rates and online sales taxation, but if all the stakeholders can come together we have a good chance, was his message to a packed crowd.

The owner of La Gavroche gave us food for thought, and I can imagine eating one of his creations to be on a par with hearing the man speak himself. The lovely Michel Roux shared anecdotes of his culinary heritage alongside his secrets of longevity on the high street. Whether you’re managing a Michelin starred restaurant or a retail empire the message was clear and simple – we all need to strive for excellence and differentiate the customer experience.

We have to give the customer a reason to be there

The advent of the silent disco format of delivering acoustically isolated talks is great until you arrive a little late and the headphones are all gone. Are you any good at lip reading? was the well-intentioned advice from one of the stewards when I vented frustration at not being able to hear The Retail Futurist. He was challenging retailers to deliver retail theatre, experiences and innovation to drive footfall. At least I think that’s what he was talking about.

Disrupt Or Be Disrupted

Disrupt Or Be Disrupted was doing the rounds again – an oldie but a classic. Ronan Tighe, Moonpig's Chief Product Officer, told us to be brave and to resist the temptation to hold back things without letting the fear of making mistakes stymie innovation. By reorganising his teams to focus on customer goals they made the kind of progress that many retailers would be envious of.

Martin Wild, Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) of MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group, literally shone a light on the tech themes with his amazing laser clicker pen. When it comes to all things AI, AR and drones we need to understand what our brands stand for before we invest in tech. It is vital that brands get their story straight to ensure the platforms and technology aligns with their brand values. I actually couldn’t agree more with Martin on this point. Getting distracted with the latest innovations isn’t going to solve anything unless you’ve got the fundamentals right first and can, at the least, enunciate the problems you’re trying to solve. And that’s not so easy to say.

We need to understand what our brands stand for

A panel debated whether AI, automation and robotics would be essential to retail in the years ahead. While automation and AI have already taken some jobs (and more to come), Karen Harris, MD intuDigital, sees new jobs being created all the time.

Automation enables scale and as AI becomes better, it affects retail in a positive way.

When customers visit a store the emotive human interaction they receive on the front line is particularly important – and we’re headed towards a future of retail that will be humans augmented by technology. However, there’s still a long way to go when it comes getting automation right, as Karen recognised that that willpower alone won’t drive change if there isn’t the necessary investment from the business.

Turning Customer Experience into a Compelling Quest

For those that know me, the topic of customer experience is close to my heart, and for that, I’d like to share the insight and wisdom imparted from the last speaker in my review in a little more depth. Yes, this is a topic so mighty that it beats all others game, set and match. If I said this speaker began by sharing that there were just a few disappointed faces in the audience when they realised who he wasn’t, you’ll probably guess I can only be referring to Andy Murray.

Holding court on the Headline Stage, Andy took us on his journey that has led him to passionately believe that Customer Experience is the key ingredient for retail success. With a title you’ll more commonly find in a software company than a grocer, Andy has been Chief Customer Officer at Asda since 2016. He began by explaining how his mindset was hewn from a previous agency-side life helping retailers understand the path to purchasing and the total customer journey that goes with it.

So what’s the secret? Sam Walton become the richest man in America by simply focussing on what his customers' wanted and then delivering it. That’s the starting point but, as Andy moved into the meat of his talk, this is no easy thing to deliver these days. So let's consider the six key factors that combine to make this so hard to achieve.

1. Expectations are always changing

The thing about customer experience is that it’s continuously evolving. It’s not like order-tracking or stock availability that has a definite binary answer. It’s always moving and it’s really important to recognise that customer satisfaction and customer experience is directly correlated to customer expectations. When it comes to customer expectations, it’s often said that when the competitor takes two steps forwards, customer expectations are fundamentally changed. The customer is aware that something new is out there and they want to understand why they can’t have that experience with you. You, therefore, find yourself continually chasing this ever-changing idea of what the customer is expecting, and what are they actually experiencing and then asking yourself how you go about connecting those dots together?

Big companies, or older legacy companies who have been in the retail space for some time, face a number of challenges:

2. Understanding the ownership of the customer

Hands up if this question hasn’t surfaced in your organisation - ‘who owns the store?’ Is it operations, is it merchandising, or maybe marketing? And who’s responsible for that? There’s no single answer, and as it touches a lot of places the ownership of customer experience is not in one department, and it subsequently crosses the whole organisation. 

3. How do you leverage Big Data?

Getting the voice of the customer into all the places it needs to go at scale is another challenge. We live in an age where there is an abundance of insights but a scarcity of insight - and those are two different things. We need to really understand how to get insight into the people that need it most. Most retailers, unfortunately, are not well resourced with Data Scientists, and the analytics that is in place is typically focused on informing insights to merchandising for better space planning.  

4. Rethinking the business case for investing in Customer Experience

It’s an undeniable fact that if you want to invest in CX initiatives you’ll be competing for budget against other tech teams and technology groups, and it's worth being aware of what their priorities are. Typically, they’ll be shooting for productivity improvements that align to a labour saving initiative, because labour cost is huge and anything you can do to improve productivity will give you much higher ROI.

To really understand the customer experience we need to think about it in terms of lifetime value.

But measuring ROI on a customer experience initiative is extremely difficult and because of that, project investments will follow the money. Given the way enterprises rank the relative importance of priorities, actually getting a customer experience improvement on the roadmap is a feat. We also let ourselves down when it comes to aligning on the metrics around which we measure customer experience. To really understand the customer experience, and move it forward, we need to think about it in terms of lifetime value.

It’s imperative we think about multi-touch attribution and understand that it’s a much longer journey than most of the financial metrics or ROI that’s based on a six-weeks or some sort of short-term payout. However, when you’re not comparing apples with apples there will always be a challenging debate that takes place. E-commerce is essentially acquisition lifetime value, which is not a metric that we’re that familiar with. Ultimately, it requires buy-in down from the board-level to establishing how we look at lifetime value, what's a good benchmark and how we approach customer experience through that lens. 

5. Disparate and disconnected data sources

A typical multinational retailer may have many things to offer to their customers from optical to pharmacy, money, credit cards, mobile services and online shopping. All these things typically have their own organic data structures, so to get a view on the total customer journey means you’re dealing with a lot of legacy data systems that don’t connect. Just getting that data to move seamlessly with a single source sign-on is not something that's easily done with most retailers, and as a consequence, they don’t have all their worlds well connected.

6. Keep focussed on maintaining a customer-centric culture

Andy stressed the importance of having a customer-centric culture, which takes a huge amount of work. It’s really easy for big organisations to lose focus on this and keep remembering the customer is their number one priority. Citing an email he opened that very morning (yes - Andy is the kind of CCO who actually reads customer emails) from a someone seeking compensation because he felt Asda’s wonky veg campaign mocked his own wonky eyes, Andy admitted that it’s easy to become desensitised, exhausted and cynical with the unending torrent of such customer feedback. His coping mechanism was to have different buckets to file these into. Some you have to accept you will have a hard time solving – like the wonky eyes – but those that relate to business as usual activities can be resolved through operational fixes or sent to your innovation lab.

Final thoughts on being successful

Concluding his talk, Andy reminded us that improving customer experience needs to be a total company effort. It’s not something that can be done by one person or one department, and if you’re going to be successful you need to be a strong influencer as opposed to a controlling force. Try turning the journey into a compelling quest, something that invites people in to work with it; invite colleagues and customers to improve it with you. And if you don't like change, well Andy left little to the imagination when he used the immortal words of General Eric Shinseki:

If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less

I hope you found my reflections on this year’s RetailExpo valuable – and a few folks who couldn’t make it asked me to be their eyes and ears.

Clearly, we are in the midst of seismic changes in the way consumers expect to interact with their chosen retailer. Customers are integrated and they now expect, no insist, that a brand or retailer is similarly integrated and is able to see them as having one identity. There are many pain points in retail that need to be overcome in order to reach true integration. How we manage customer data, deliver a multichannel experience, reduce payment friction, offer increased personalisation, cyber-security, deal with legacy systems and take our sustainability and ethical sourcing responsibilities more seriously are but a few of the things we must attend to. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, and a recurring theme across the sessions was that the UK is on the brink of becoming the ‘retail playground of the future’ where we lead with innovation and best practice.

If you were also there and would care to share some of your views on the event, I’d love to hear them.

If you’d like to find out how your customer engagement and support capabilities compare to other global organisations, and what can you do to improve? We’ve recently partnered with Forrester to develop a simple 2-minute short self-assessment to help you find out.

And if you’re thinking about what practical steps you can take to implement AI into your Customer Experience, stay tuned to our AI: In Real Life podcast which will have a Retail Special coming up soon.