The Radical Positivity of Tech in Omnichannel Retail

"The scope of what we’re doing with retail technology is immense because the scope of what we do as a Company is immense."?

Retail as we know it is going through a radical change, a revolution if you will, and here at the Guitar Center Company, we couldn’t be more excited about it.

We’re acutely aware that now is the time to maximize what technology has to offer so we can streamline our operations and give our customers a more personalized experience, which totally aligns with our Core Value of putting customers first.

So today, we find ourselves playing the role of technology visionaries and futurists. We’re at the forefront of innovating and building leading retail platforms for six brands across more than 600 retail stores and multiple eCommerce sites, along with Contact Center Support and Distribution Centers.

As I write this, we’re transforming our existing technology to enable it to operate seamlessly across all functions, including store operations, merchandising, supply chain planning, finance, ERP, and so many more areas. In our world, omnichannel is omnipotent, and our customer is omni-important!

The scope of what we’re doing is immense because the scope of what we do is immense. We offer expertise in the areas of creating, playing, producing, performing, and enjoying music. And because music is a lifelong journey, it has multiple touchpoints across rentals, repairs, accessories, upgrades, and lessons. But these are the challenges that motivate us. After all, when your Corporate Mission is “To fill the world with music,” you learn to dream big and act big.

Transforming Customer Experiences

The focus of our digital transformation encompasses four areas: Customer Service, Customer Experience, Operations Efficiency, and New Business Revenue.?

It was clear from the beginning that to improve and personalize the customer experience, we first needed to empower our store Associates with next-gen technology. We’ve always understood what an important role our Associates play, and I literally mean play. We have the world's largest collection of professional musicians working for us. These dynamic, diverse, creative people are the front lines of building relationships with other music lovers, so we want to give them the best possible tools to do their job – tools that are state of the art, modern and fun.?

Yes, fun! Because one of the most dramatic shifts in today’s working culture is the demand for more engagement at work, and we happily embrace this evolution. After all, when work is more engaging, everything improves. It’s good for our colleagues, store Associates, and our customers because they get next-level customer service and assistance.

The key breakthrough here has been providing our Gear Advisors and Associates with relevant information at the point of customer engagement, which was a big task. In the past, data-driven online personalized customer service has been difficult for physical retailers to match. But our teams have brilliantly managed to create individualized platforms designed to consolidate engagement at all points of contact – whether it’s chat exchanges, wish lists, online shopping, or in-store interactions.

Our customized data platforms and analytics incorporate mobile devices, GPS, AI, in-store analytics, robotics, and more to help gain a deeper understanding of what our customers need and want. The information is converted into insights and passed on, often in real-time, to our store Associates, Gear Advisors, or contact center Associates resulting in a hyper-personalized experience.

Smart triggers are a great illustration of how we’re transforming tech into a more personalized experience – for our customers and our Associates. For example, if a customer is having something delivered, our Associate receives a notification that it has arrived. At that moment, they can contact their customer and share in the excitement of unboxing and provide tips on what was received.

We’re extremely fortunate that our Associates are so passionate about music and the craft of making music. They want to share their enthusiasm and knowledge and build relationships with their customers as the customer experiences their personal musical journey. Together they’re creating lifetime connections around music – which also happens to drive growth for our company.

Growing Wiser

Growth is where the heady potential of digital tech comes in. In our case, we’re putting mobile devices in the hands of our Associates loaded with applications we’ve designed that turn their phones into a kind of Swiss Army knife. A tool rich with, among other things, assisted-selling technology.

Assisted selling harnesses everything we know about an individual customer so that we can craft a relevant, customized experience. It basically brings the power of knowing and choosing to the next best level. It means making recommendations in real-time when customers are in conversation and helping them complete their purchases or upgrade to a product more suitable for them. These recommendations and purchase paths are embedded in the system from eCommerce platforms to CRM (Customer Relation Management) and POS (Point of Sale). But the key is that we’re able to interact in a way that’s non-intrusive, delivers value for our customers, and incidentally increases revenue for us.

Revolutionizing Operations

"Our vision is to be a self-driving enterprise with automated operations that can gather and disseminate valuable information and activate change when it senses the need."

Obviously, none of this would be possible without sweeping changes going on in our back-office and internal operations. Our vision is to be a self-driving enterprise with automated operations that can gather and disseminate valuable information and activate change when it senses the need.?

Our customer service bots and self-service order management are bringing about a tremendous amount of positive change. Among other things, we’ve invested in RPA (robotic process automation) to help remove mundane, repetitive tasks from the workflow, so our employees don’t experience fatigue and burnout. Certainly, if something requires special attention, humans are pulled in. But, we don’t want to underutilize anyone in our organization – we want to free them up to tap into their creativity and insights.

This brings up another important point about the role of digital transformation because it goes beyond selling more product or increasing financial efficiencies. We also want to attract and retain the best employees and give them the best possible tools to do their job. Tools that are state-of-the-art, modern, and exciting to use.

Remember, our brand is all about playing, so we plan to gamify many of our apps. For example, an Associate might have 50 orders to fulfill: some for shipping, curbside pickup, etc. To that end, our software could provide them with the best path while collecting the items and give them points for accomplishing certain parameters. Suddenly work becomes a quest! The point is that gamification, leaderboards, and dashboards will provide a much more fun and engaging experience for our employees while working toward goals and objectives.

New Tech Means New Business

As I mentioned before, new technologies are helping us bring in new revenue through new offerings and the ability to serve our customers in ways that weren’t possible before.

For instance, we now have more digital experiences and mediums within our retail spaces, which enables our Associates to share content over a video call – a one-on-one experience that may never have happened otherwise.

We’re also supplementing in-person lessons with online lessons. And now can offer access to instructors in other locations. So, if there’s a world-famous instructor in another town, or if you live in a small town, we can bring the lessons to you.

We’ve also created patented technology that allows students to pair their music lessons with their phones, and it will provide real-time feedback.

In addition, we’ve written software that allows our musician Associates to review products which, in turn, helps our customers make better-informed decisions.?

The growth of our gear business is a great example of how our new tech is working across multiple touch points. If a customer engages in a web chat about selling their used gear, they can transition that discussion to an in-person video call to finalize the transaction, eliminating the need to make a special trip to the store just to get an estimate.?

All of these examples, and more, are things we didn’t do in the past. This is true transformation that’s driving scale exponentially.?

It Takes Commitment

So how are we making all this happen given the vastness of our omnichannel configuration? It’s only possible because at the Guitar Center Company we’ve given digital transformation front-of-the-line status. This is a company-wide commitment. And I mean wide.

We rely on a large community of cross-functional teams from our stores to our corporate operations, tech, and data teams. Together we’re able to build strategies for adoption, training, and evangelizing new ways of doing things.

We also spend a good amount of effort marketing our technology in-house to help put it into practice and ensure early life support. It’s important to be thoughtful in how we roll out new programs and where we roll them out. So we begin with minimal interruption and measure incremental change. This is a powerful strategy because you don’t want to suddenly replace your legacy technology, you want to introduce new tech in measured amounts. Then, as the new tech continues to add improvements, it will organically begin to take over the old.

In the interim, we have a really good dashboard where we can analyze how everything is working. For every application we create, we build in checkpoints to see how they’re being adopted and where the struggles are. And because we build in real-time support, we get a feeling for how the experience is, and we’re able to leverage the data to make the applications smarter. So we test, validate and refine.

In Harmony with Technology

"We want the digital technology we use to be as entertaining and creative as the very products we sell and support."

The beauty and transformative power of music is part of our corporate DNA. So it should come as no surprise that we want the digital technology we use to be as entertaining and creative as the very products we sell and support.

And while the term digital transformation is a great way to describe what businesses need to do to excel in the digital economy, it also seems to imply that it’s an abrupt, all-encompassing decision executed in one fell swoop. Our approach is more like music, where the process requires an ongoing practice of creating, producing, and disseminating. It’s truly a journey – a digital continuum involving multiple infrastructures as we design, develop, shift operating models and phase out legacy systems.

There’s no question this new tech has enabled us to leapfrog other retailers and helped us become more integrated into the fabric of our customers’ musical journey. I can truly say it has transformed the way we do business, as well as the way we enjoy our business.