Are you ready to serve Global Citizens?

In 2018 there were 80 million international flight arrivals into the US*, some of those trips made for pleasure and many made for business so knowing how time poor we are in this decade we should understand and anticipate that this is a huge market which is yet to be addressed and it's not just a US opportunity, this is global. It really is the next channel that businesses have been waiting for, but have so far not addressed. In addition to these 35 billion passengers I should also add that four out of ten families have a family member living abroad that they provide gifts for. These are our global citizens. So how are retailers gearing up for the Global Customer?

It's a whole new channel.`

The big news is that the global citizen, just like every other consumer is expecting to be a global customer of your brand, they know your products and they expect to be able to buy around the globe as easily as they can at home in their local stores. So far retailers in the main are falling very short, as usual Amazon has set a decent standard for having many products available for global shipping and also enabling separate accounts with geographical domains but after 10 years of doing this we don't see enough brands following their lead so why are business failing to gear up for this today?

Retailers are particularly poor at enabling the global citizen, many major US brand websites can’t even be accessed from abroad and if you strike gold and you can see the website, you are still highly likely to encounter one or two major obstacles. The biggest obstacle is that the friendly mobile responsive website will detect where you are accessing the website from and politely tell you that they do not take orders from your country or they will tell you that there is a very limited choice of items which can be delivered to your local country. This week I was traveling from the US to the UK and I wanted to order some clothing from my favorite UK fashion retailer, I had a good experience in that I could access the site and even put items in the shopping basket but when I clicked on the click and collect in store option things went awry. The location choices came up but when I clicked on one it redirected back to my US home town. It should be fairly simple I thought as I will check the store locations but as soon as I did that I was redirected back to the US site and could only see locations in California, I tried clearing cookies and switching off location detection to trick the website to no avail so sadly we both missed out, I could not complete my purchase and when I gave feedback they did reply but couldn’t understand my issue which is is exasperating but you can’t replicate this problem from London and they didn’t speak to their US operation, they were run in silo.

Work it out

Many US retailers are still not geared up to ship globally and many more that have subsidiary or licensed operations in other country cannot connect the channels to serve. The technology is there, the logistical 3rd parties needed for fulfillment are ready and honestly you can’t continue to blame Brexit or GDPR, this is a channel that has been ignored, it’s a substantial opportunity for some brands and a foot in the door for others. I still remember the day that I had lunch with a CEO of a very large retailer and they said to me that online shopping was a passing fad and that I shouldn’t invest my time into it. That retailer went from being the absolute darling of the fashion retail world to now hovering on the point of filing for bankruptcy and I take absolutely no joy in that but I continue to be a voice for opportunity and have an eye on futurology. So if you are a retailer who wants to tap into a new market look into this with some urgency and if you think this looks like a distraction you better hope your competitors do to. Look at those disrupters, hire people that are not conditioned to think about what “ is” but what “can be” and take the risk. 

It is time to enable the customer to engage and transact wherever they are, we talk about the omni channel being the holy grail for meeting customers where they are but what about the global channel and the entire customer journey? Once again the customer is ahead of the brand, it’s time to THINK GLOBAL CUSTOMER!

#tgc #cx #retail #business

*source ustravel.org