Weeknotes #35

Roger on 07/04/2017

What happened this week…

  • Finalised our targets for this year.
  • Began advertising Fascinators.
  • Attended Catalysts of Change and heard how companies like Topman are using personalisation.
  • Attended Internet Retailing Expo and heard what John Lewis have learned about mobile shopping.
  • Organic posts to BHF Events on Facebook.Started our product development plan for clothing.
  • Set up the Silver Pulse Line Pin Badge to take back-orders.
  • Produced the Online Shop Annual Analysis Report for 16/17.
  • Had another weddings photo shoot to get better images of our Fascinators.

Read this week…

Doing next week…

  • Setting up Google Ads for ‘Charity wedding favours’.
  • Finalising the transactional email templates.
  • Arranging to visit Topman to learn how they are using Qubit to personalise their website.
  • Writing our strategy and plan for personalisation and optimising customer journeys so that we know how we’re going to use Qubit.
  • Adding links to the main website to drive more and better traffic to the Online Shop.

Interesting stat of the week…

  • Over the last twelve months, we had 373,500 visitors, 44% of which left the site without looking at a second page, which leaves 250,500 visitors. Of those, 11,815 placed an order. That means 238,685 visitors (potential customers) didn’t find anything they wanted to buy

In the not too distant future….

  • The personalisation and optimisation of the Online Shop.

My multi-channel customer journey with Autoglass

Roger on 06/04/2017

The windscreen on my car cracked and needed replacing. I checked on my insurers website and it gave me a number to call. When I called the number an automated message told me that they were very busy and that I could book an appointment on the AutoGlass website. So that’s what I did. This is my journey as I customer and what I thought about each step along the way.

1: Booking an appointment

Booking on the website was easy. The form had lots of steps/pages to go through but it was easy to follow and no obvious areas for improvement jumped out at me.

2: Confirmation Emails

I received a lot of email notifications to confirm my appointment. Calling it an appointment all the way through this part of the journey reinforces that the customer needs to remember when they are having their windscreen replaced and be at the right place at the right time.

3: Text message on the day

Ten minutes before the technician arrived I received a text message to tell me he was on his way, his name and his mobile phone number in case I needed to call him. As I walked out to my car he arrived. The only way I could think that this could be improved upon would be to ask a customer if they would like to share their location via their smart phone to help the technician locate them. I’m not sure there’s much need for this though, and this could be handled by two people speaking on the phone.

4: Signing agreement on a mobile device

The technician told me the things I had to pay attention to, such as not being able to drive the car for four hours after the fitting and that if my insurance company didn’t cover the cost of work I would be liable for it, and then I signed the agreement on his mobile device. The downside is that I didn’t get to read the terms and conditions and if anything went wrong it would become an argument about whether he said what he says he said.

5: The fitting

Pretty much the only non-digital part of the whole process. It still required a man to physically remove the old windscreen and fit the new one. He called me when it was done and as I walked out to my car he was adjusting the windscreen wipers.

6: Taking payment

The technician took payment through a bluetooth card reader.

7: The receipt

The receipt was emailed as a pdf. The email was a bit of a let down with it’s “Dear customer…”. It should have been personalised as they clearly had my name.

8: The review request

A few days after the fitting I received another email asking me to write a review about my experience.

Overall, I had a good experience and the customer journey had some clearly defined touch points that achieved the right goal at the right time. There were some things that could be improved but nothing that made the experience negative or seem unthought about.

Ten things John Lewis have learned about mobile shopping

Roger on 05/04/2017

John Lewis has been trading for 153 years, online for 15 years, and on mobile for 6 years. Here are Tom Rooney’s “Ten things we’ve learned about mobile shopping”:

1. Modern shopping journeys are increasingly complex

  • Customers go through the Research stage to the Purchase stage to the Fulfilment stage but the spaghetti of journey options means that there is no usual journey.

2.Customers love to tell us how they like to shop

  • Don’t need to envisage every journey.
  • Guerilla testing works great.

3. It’s all about the smart phone

  • Last Christmas mobile became the main way for customers to shop online.

4. Smartphones are not the same as tablets (yet)

  • Different sizes drives different behaviour.
  • But phones are getting bigger.
  • Phones early in the day, desktop in middle of the day, tablets in the evening.
  • Tablet use is declining, behaviour shifting to phone.

5. The product page is the new homepage

  • Journeys are less linear than before.
  • 30% of journeys start on product page.
  • Proposition and brand must come across well.
  • Home page is an important anchor that must still be available for customers.

6. Apps offer different opportunities to a website

  • Loyal customers love the app.
  • Features like barcode scanner and digital receipts offer something that the website can’t.
  • Apps are highest converting.
  • Apps used to enhance in store experience.
  • Apps need to have a purchase journey.
  • Journey needs to be slick.

7. Don’t forget your shop floor colleagues

  • It’s hard for shop colleagues to keep up with customers technology.
  • Solutions aren’t entirely digital. E.g. How devices are carried.
  • Encouraging discussion with customers goes along way.
  • Leveling the playing field between customers tech and staff tech is important.

8. Understand and respect your foundations

  • New tech makes new demands of old.
  • This has made building the future tricky.
  • The things we want to build always seem to be the most difficult.

9. Avoid solutions without problems and learn to say no

  • There’s lots of weird and wonderful technology out there.
  • Understand opportunities vs expectations.
  • Listen to your customers and work on what they want.

10. We’re not done yet

  • There’s a smart everything.
  • There will be new ways to shop.
  • The products themselves could directly contribute to the shopping ecosystems.

Catalysts of Change 

Roger on 04/04/2017

Graham Cooke – Qubit CEO

  • UK spend more per capita than any other country.
  • Demanding consumers.
  • Things changing faster than ever.
  • Does the customer drive the technology or does technology change the customer? 50/50 flipping change.
    • Internet was first big change driven by tech.
    • Cloud was tech change.
    • Mobile was consumer driven.
    • AI and block chain are the next big change, and they are tech driven.
  • Anything powered by data is like applying electricity to mechanical
  • Block chain decentralisation of trust
  • VR misses the tech/customer change drive, it isn’t here to stay.
  • Best way to stay ahead is listen to the customer’s
  • Switching industry is massive as lots of companies don’t satisfy customers
  • Competitors are a click away
  • Revenue 5% – 15% increase through Personalisation
  • Businesses need to serve customers better than ever before.
  • Data and knowledge about the customer
  • Sift through the data to make use of it.
  • 82% of businesses recognise that AI is going to be in their future
  • Stitchfix, preemptive sending of women’s clothing. Customer uses app to teach AI what they want. Customers get 40% of clothing from Stitchfix.
  • AI is about relationships between customers and automation.

Myf Ryan – Westfields Shopping Centre CMO

Using technology to remove pain points

  • If tech doesn’t remove a pain point or deliver a customer need, then we shouldn’t be using it. Don’t use it for the sake of it.
  • Discounts should be used to remove pain points, e.g. High prices, high stock.
  • Need to learn about consumers from their behaviour.
  • Provides first class customer experience.
  • Drive future engagement.
  • Amazon Go removes the pain point of queuing.
  • Are we solving a problem or enhancing the experience.
  • Reduce friction to increase conversion.
  • Keep learning.

Understanding the consumer

  • Achieving single view of the customer to deliver improved customer journey.
  • Costumers are channel agnostic.Important that people know that you know them.
  • Customers have to feel that they own their own data.
  • Challenges for achieving the single view of customer and then segmenting customers.

Daniel Murray – Grabble & Mobula

  • Future gazing on the next big mobile trends.
  • Ecommerce is built on infrastructure that doesn’t work for mobile.
  • Mobile web gets all the traffic, native apps get all the time.
  • How do we bring them together?
  • Grabble started with a social commerce website, then went to a mobile app.
  • Ecommerce has history, mobile has none.
  • It needs to inspire and delight your customers.

Rules for running an innovative startup

Rules for running an innovative startup
  • Sometimes intuition is more important than data.
  • Data and experience works together.
  • Mobile web wasn’t made for mobile.
  • Native commerce is disruptive.
  • Dwell time, discovery (on social apps), data (consumers give their data away in return for convenience), distribution, delivery (barriers torn down by mobile).
  • What’s wrong with mobile web?
  • What’s wrong with native apps? High churn, costly to develop.
  • Native apps create mini Internet for a brand.
  • Stream apps and Instant apps from Google.
  • What matters is where consumers spend their time.
  • Native in-app content for Facebook.
  • Instagram native commerce.
  • WeChat builds commerce experience in the app.
  • Mobula powers native commerce and is fully modular mobile first.
  • Don’t send customers to the website, host an experience in native apps.

Raphael Orlando – Tesco

  • Head to head with Amazon is not a strategy. How do you defend against Amazon?
  • Not really a retailer, they are a platform business.
  • Have to find pure water.
  • The basis for retailers to win: traffic, data, point of view.
  • 10% of groceries brought online in the UK
  • Sometimes digital should get out of the way and let the customer do what they want to do.
  • Think about what experience the customer wants.
  • Improvements in loyalty card and payment card on a mobile.
  • Stores of the future. Different vectors of change. Could be community focused, or marketplace focused. Community focused could be much more local and unique. Marketplace stores could provide outlets for other retailers.

Panel discussion

Panel discussion

What in technology excites you?

  • Pace of change. Shift in interface getting more rapid. Next ten years AR and VR.
  • Understanding what customers behaviours are offline.
  • Personalisation gives tremendous opportunity.
  • Understanding intent, along with behaviour. Understanding why they are doing it. Apply to look-alikes.

Biggest challenges

  • Legacy of embedded ways of working and mindset.
  • Lack of data
  • Prove value within the business.
  • Challenging assumptions.
  • How to use data to make decisions that benefit the customers.
  • If you ask a customer for a piece of data you should make use of it to give benefit to the customer.
  • The right data makes the right choices.

Catalysts of Change report