Social, mobile and other bright, shiny objects

It’s official. Social media and mobile commerce are this year’s bright, shiny objects. I recently attended a couple of industry conferences where those two topics dominated the agendas, and the trade mags and email newsletters are full of articles on everything social and mobile.

Heck, I’ve also written a white paper and blogged about social media.

Don’t get me wrong. I think social and mobile are important opportunities for us to improve our businesses. I just don’t think we should focus on them to the exclusion of some of the core aspects of our sites and businesses that still need a lot of work.

The level of our success with any of these new technologies is going to be limited by the effectiveness of our core site capabilities and constrained by any internal organizational challenges we might have.

Here are some topics I’d love to see get a little more press and conference content time:

• Usability
  From my vantage point at ForeSee Results, where I can see customer perceptions at many different retailers, it’s clear that our sites have not come close to solving all of our usability issues. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying improving usability is the #1 way to increase conversion. I’m currently reading a book called “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. The book was written in the ’80s (I think) so there’s no mention of websites. Instead, he talks a lot about the design of doors, faucets and other everyday objects and, most interestingly, the psychology of we humans who interact with these things. The principles he discusses are absolutely relevant to web page design. Other books, such as “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and anything by Jakob Nielsen are also great sources of knowledge. I’d sure love to see us cover these types of topics a little more in our conferences and trade mags. Also, how do different retailers approach find and solve usability issues? In the end, if the experiences we create aren’t usable our social and mobile strategies won’t reach their potential.
• Organizational structure
  How often do we come back from a conference with great new ideas about implementing some new strategies (say, a new social media or mobile commerce strategy) only to run into competing agendas, lack of resources or organizational bureaucracies? Discussing and writing about organizational structure doesn’t have the panache of social media or other exciting new frontiers, but there’s little doubt in my mind that the structure of our organizations can make or break the success of our businesses. When we were first setting up the organization for the new Borders.com, we spent a LOT of time studying the structures of other companies learning about the pros and the cons from those who lived through different schemes. It was hugely useful and more interesting than you might think. Mark Fodor, CEO of Cross View, just wrote an excellent piece for Online Strategies magazine that discussed the hurdles involved in going cross-channel and included a very good discussion about the need for mindset shifts. I’d love to see these topics further explored in interactive environments at industry conferences.
• Incentives
  Books like Freakonomics make strong cases for the fact that incentives drive our behaviors. I’d love to hear how other companies set up their internal incentive structures. And there are multiple types of incentives. Certainly, there are financial incentives that come in the form of bonuses. But there are also the sometimes more powerful social incentives. What gets talked about all the time? How do those topics of discussion influence people’s behaviors? How do all those incentives align with the needs generated by new strategies to maximize the power of social media or mobile commerce?
• Data/analytics storytelling
  We have so much data available to us, and we all talk about being data driven. But how do we get the most from that data? How do we use that data to form our strategies, support our strategies and communicate our strategies. John Lovett of Web Analytics Desmystified wrote an excellent piece on telling stories with data recently. There are also several great blogs on analytics like MineThatData, Occam’s Razor, and the aforementioned Web Analytics Demystified. I’d love to see more discussions in trade mags and conferences about how to get the most from our data, both in analyzing it and relating the findings to others.
• International expansion
  We used to talk a lot about international, but it doesn’t seem to be a big topic lately. Yet the opportunities to grow our businesses internationally are immense. So, too, are the challenges. Jim Okamura and Maris Daugherty at the JC Williams Group wrote an absolutely excellent white paper late last year on the prizes and perils of international expansion. Jim did have a breakout session at last year’s Shop.org Annual Summit, but I’d love to see more discussion from retailers who have gone or are going international to learn more. Or it would also be good to hear from those who simply ship internationally or those who have decided to stay domestic to learn more about their decision making processes.
• Leadership
  Leading lots of people and convincing big, disparate groups to do new things is hard. I just read the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Dan and Chip Heath. There are some amazing tips in that book about implementing change in organizations (and in other parts of life, for that matter). I would love to see more discussion of these types of leadership topics that help us all implement the changes we know we need to make to take advantage of new opportunities like social media and mobile commerce.

I know a lot of these topics are more business basics than retail or e-commerce specific. But the reality is we need to be our absolute best at these business basics in order to implement any of our new ideas and strategies. I personally always enjoy talking to other retailers about some of these basics, and I certainly never tire of reading books that expand my horizons. I’d love to see more about these topics in our conferences and trade mags.

But these are just my opinions. I’d really love to know what you think. As a member of the executive content committee for Shop.org, I’m actually in a position to influence some of the excellent content that my good friend Larry Joseloff regularly puts together. But I’d love to know if you agree or not before I start banging the drum. Would you mind dropping me a quick comment or an email letting me know if you agree or disagree. A simple “Right on” if you agree or a “You’re nuts” if you don’t is plenty sufficient; although, I certainly appreciate your expanded thoughts if you’d like to share them.

Please, let me know what you think of my little rant.

Beyond the Buy Button: The Huge Additional Value of Retail Websites

Sometimes, I think we focus so intensely on the e-commerce sales of our sites that we miss the overwhelming additional value they bring to our businesses. Retail websites, particularly for multi-channel retailers, are more multi-dimensional than any other channel and any other brand vehicle. We fail to recognize the value of these sites beyond the buy button at our own peril.

Some are starting to see the additional value. During her presentation at the Retail Innovation and Marketing conference in San Francisco last week, Express Chief Marketing Officer Lisa Gavales talked about her epiphany surrounding Express.com’s value to the brand. It was Express.com’s traffic numbers that sparked the light bulb in her head. She realized that Express.com got as much traffic in a week as all of the Express stores combined. In other words, half of Express brand interactions were occurring on Express.com. Lisa immediately understood the marketing value of such high levels of engagements from Express’ customers. So much so, in fact, that she came to a conclusion she deemed controversial during her presentation — Express.com should be a marketing vehicle first and a direct sales channel second.

After the presentation, my good friend Scott Silverman, Shop.org’s Executive Director, asked me if I agreed with Lisa’s positioning of Express.com. I rambled on a bit before essentially saying “yes and no.” I’ll now take this space for what I hope is a more coherent answer.

I completely agree with Lisa that retail websites are much more valuable to the overall business than their direct sales indicate. Applying resources and strategic importance to sites based only on their percentage of sales is a mistake that could prove very costly in the long run. Customers use our sites for many reasons beyond direct transactions and our failure to highly prioritize those intentions is a disservice to our customers that will affect our bottom lines. But the value of our sites goes well beyond just marketing and direct sales and simply switching priorities is not enough. Furthermore, I worry that prioritizing marketing higher than everything else will lead to the types of conversion problems I previously discussed in my post “Conversion tip: Don’t block the product with window signs.”

Let’s consider some of the many values a retail website provides for a multi-channel retailer:

• Marketing vehicle
  As Lisa noted, the marketing value of our websites is immense. We are getting tons of traffic, and each engagement is an opportunity to enhance our brands. (Of course, if we’re not careful, the opposite is also true.) Websites are a highly efficient way to strengthen the Customer Engagement Cycle. Both online and offline marketing vehicles can direct customers to our sites to further enhance our messages. Our sites are also a great way to tell people about our stores on both a collective and an individual level.
• Merchandising vehicle
  Customers come in droves to our sites to learn more about the products we sell, whether they intend to buy online, over the phone or in our stores. Our sites have to essentially be our best and most knowledgeable merchants. They have to lead customers to the right products for them and provide the right information for them to make a selection, regardless of the channel where the purchase takes place.  This is a huge, often untapped, opportunity for quality merchants to reach their customers and sell them the right products.
• Customer research tool
  This is a bit of a double entendre. As mentioned above, our customers are certainly using our sites for their research. But we can also use our sites to learn more about our customers. There is a wealth of information to be had about what our customers are doing and what they desire. Not only can we see what they purchase, but we can also use web analytics to see what they look at. With tools like those provided by ForeSee Results (shameless plug), we can also know what they are thinking, what they are intending to do, and how they are perceiving our brands. All of this can be done fairly easily and inexpensively in ways that are either impossible or impossibly expensive in the physical world.
• Customer relationship enabler
  We can continue to build relationships with our customers by applying what we’ve learned above to give them better experiences. The applied knowledge of our merchants combined with the long-lasting memory of our websites should allow us to constantly serve our customers better. As we focus on building those relationships with more personalized site experiences, more informed personal interactions via contact centers and in-store, and more relevant email and direct mail communications, we will build stronger loyalty with our customers.
• Community builder
  Websites also give us ways to connect our customers with each other. Our brands can act as a central hub for like-minded customers to find each other and help each other find products that meet their needs or solve their problems. How great is that? We can make these connections both via our own sites and via social networks like Facebook. Either way, it’s another way for our brands to provide services for our customers. Our sites can also allow our brands to be more localized by providing additional vehicles for our stores to connect with their communities.
• Sales driver — in-store and online
  And, of course, we can sell stuff. We can sell lots and lots of stuff online. Our sites are still not where they need to be for maximum usability, so we have plenty of opportunities to improve their ability to sell directly. But we also have lots and lots of opportunity to drive traffic into our stores. We can show inventory; we can let people buy or reserve online and pick up in-store; we can host coupons;  we can help people find a store close to them; we can provide reviews and recommendations to people standing in our stores (whether via kiosks or mobile phones). The possibilities are endless.

These site values are not mutually exclusive. Their value in combination is exponentially higher than any one individual value. Therefore, it’s critically important to consider our sites holistically when determining their place and priority in our strategic plans. We need to consider their combined value when we determine allocation of resources and organizational structure.

Too often, though, resources and executive attention are not apportioned to the site according to this additional value. And we often don’t even measure these additional value points (which might explain the lack of resources and executive attention). If our most important measures of our sites revolve solely around direct sales, we will continue to minimize the importance of all other values of our sites.

I believe the multichannel retailers with the brightest futures in this new decade will be those who fully embrace and leverage the multi-dimensional value of their websites.

What do you think? How is your site valued in your organization? What retailers do you think are most recognizing the additional value of their sites?

You ARE a technology company

In this day and age, pretty much every company is heavily dependent on technology to operate. But if you have an e-commerce operation (or really any sort of transaction website), you are a consumer technology company. The sooner we recognize and accept this fact, the sooner we can get on with leveraging it to our competitive advantage.

We often talk about focusing on our “core businesses” at the expense of everything else. At a conference I attended last week, I heard a number of speakers and attendees reference Amazon as a “technology company” as sort of a dismissal. They were basically saying, “Yes, Amazon has lots of great features and functionality and people rate their experience highly, but they’re a technology company. We’re retailers. We can’t compete on that level with them.” This type of statement draws the obvious retort: “So, then, on what level do you plan to compete?”

While Amazon does generate some revenue from selling technology services, the vast majority of their revenue comes from retailing products. Their financial statements look pretty much the same as most retailers (except they have much bigger numbers and growth rates). But Amazon and other pure play online retailers are not burdened with the type of legacy thinking that exists in a lot of multichannel retailers. They understand full well the value of creating a quality online experience, and they understand that technology is part of their core business.

Competing with Amazon is clearly very difficult for a variety of reasons (price being high on the list), but how many business elements can we abdicate to them before our very survival is at stake? Shifting our mindsets regarding our sites is one key way to claw back into the game.

Our websites are consumer software applications, in many ways like Microsoft Word or Quicken. And this means that online our business is technology.

People use our website applications to accomplish tasks like buying our products, learning more about our products or getting inspiration. Their perceptions about the quality of our applications can absolutely make the difference in whether or not they complete their tasks and whether or not they return to use our applications again.

And their perceptions of our brand can also be influenced by the quality of our site experiences. A study by ForeSee Results on the Internet Retailer Top 100 sites found that people who were satisfied with the online experience of a retailer were 44% more likely to purchase offline. That indicates significant value in making sure the website is a quality software experience.

Our websites are also an opportunity to differentiate from our competitors, particularly if we’re not selling proprietary products. If consumers can buy the same North Face jacket or Nikon camera from a variety of different retailers online, the quality of the online experience will be a contributing factor in the decision.

Let’s do what it takes to include the quality of our site experience in our value proposition.

Here are 3 ways to get started towards becoming a consumer technology company:

1. Organization
   We will likely need to make organizational structure changes to support a consumer technology focus. I previously made a case for changes in E-commerce IT organization that goes into more detail, but suffice to say the technology strategy and the business strategy need to be not only aligned, but integrated.

   Furthermore, we need think about different types of roles. Software companies have product — not project — managers and product teams who are dedicated to building customer focused product strategies and life cycles. A quick check on the Amazon careers page reveals many product management positions. Do you have product management positions in your organization?

   Check out a typical set of responsibilities from Amazon’s Baby Registry product management gig and note the mix of business and technology functions and responsibilities:

   • Research and identify opportunities for Amazon to further distinguish our Baby Registry offering.
   • Define a long-term product roadmap, including technical, business development and marketing initiatives.
   • Develop new strategic partnerships ad drive day-to-day partner relationships.
   • Conduct business and financial analysis, including forecasting, monitoring, and reporting.
   • Define requirements, and drive customer experience projects and work with all relevant cross-functional areas and our technology teams to guarantee smooth, efficient implementation.
   • Manage bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs, balance the business needs versus technical constraints, and maximize business benefit while building great customer experiences
   • Work cross-functionally with designers, software development engineers, salespeople, product managers, and other internal partners.

2. Budget/Investment
   How might our current budgets change if we considered ourselves  technology companies? Maybe not at all, but we should nonetheless re-examine our customer investment strategy in such a light. At the very least, we might consider revamping our budget processes to accommodate a fast moving, highly innovative competitive marketplace where the features and functionality of our website “product” are key parts of our business strategy and our ability to differentiate from our competitors.
3. In house or outsource?
   Often we decide to outsource technology (and other elements of our businesses) because they are not “core” to our business and other people can do a better and more cost effective job. How does our thinking on outsourcing change if we consider ourselves technology companies? We might still legitimately consider outsourcing or licensing third party software, as many software companies do. However, we might also consider building up true competencies in at least some areas of software design and development because of the need to differentiate and deliver quality branded experiences for our customers.

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Recognizing and accepting the fact that developing an e-commerce operation puts us in the consumer technology business is an important first step to successfully competing in the online marketplace. Once we’ve achieved the consumer technology mindset, we’ve got to take steps to create an organizational structure that executes like a consumer technology company. Without such steps, we will fall further and further behind the companies who are leveraging their technology focus to create the positive customer engagement cycles I discussed in my previous post.

What do you think? Do you think being in e-commerce means you’re in the in consumer technology business? How is your company organized?

Photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann

The Case to Cross It Up

For any retailer with more than one channel, becoming cross-channel is a critically important way to fully leverage its assets to provide a greater experience to its customers, which ultimately leads to more customer retention, brand loyalty and, of course, sales and profits.

In an effort to highlight and tackle the issues associated with implementing cross channel strategies, Kasey Lobaugh of Deloitte Consulting and Jim Bengier of Sterling Commerce pulled together a Cross Channel Retail Consortium of retail thought leaders that included executives from a cross section of retailers as well as some industry analysts, vendors and yours truly for a day of discussion this past Sunday on the strategy, tactics and challenges of implementing effective retail cross channel experiences for our customers.

Before I delve deeper into my thoughts on the day, it’s probably worth defining “cross channel.” Many times, “multi-channel” and “cross-channel” are used interchangeably, but I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. “Multi-channel” is simply operating in 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. It’s 1+1=3.

Sounds great, right? So, why aren’t more retailers doing it?

Three basic themes emerged from the group:

1. Lack of executive and board level understanding of the value of customers transacting in multiple channels (and, conversely, the negative affects that occur when customers are prevented from interacting with a brand across channels)
2. Lack of incentives for various employees, from executive to front line staff, to encourage shopping across channels
3. IT systems limitations

So, let’s tackle these issues one-by-one.

1. Lack of executive and board level understanding of the value of creating cross channel experiences

The group agreed that getting the buy-in of the CEO is critical. No one believed, and I certainly agree, that a strategy as all-encompassing as creating a cross channel experience has any chance at success without the CEO actively driving it. So, just get the CEO to support it. Easy, right? Not so much.

In my experience, the best way to convince a CEO of the value of any strategy is to show him or her how it will maximize profits. One retailer in the room was able to show the value of customers shopping in multiple channels pretty easily by tracking customer transactions in all channels through a loyalty program. Others were able to do the same in various degrees, but the general concern was the potentially high cost of discounts provided in exchange for such information. (I have lots to say about loyalty programs, but I’ll save that for another post). Janet Sherlock of AMR Research extolled the virtues of emailed receipts as an environmentally attractive and altogether less costly alternative option to harness ID’d transactions. I find that proposal extremely intriguing.

While transactions tell us about customers who completed transactions in each channel, they don’t tell us about customers who researched online to buy in store or customers who took a look at products in store before buying online, and the group longed for an industry standard metric that could be used to assess the amount of sales influenced by the another channel.

Another driver of CEO support is attention to the issue from the Board. One retailer said all it took was a bad experience by one 17-year-old granddaughter of a Board member to get the issue front and center. Funny how life is, isn’t it? Who could imagine that one young girl’s frustration can drive a strategic shift in a major national retailer? But maybe the lesson here is about the importance of getting decision makers’ heads out of the financial spreadsheets and into real-life experiences to help them understand how their companies are (or are not) serving their customers.

2. Lack of incentives for various employees to encourage shopping across channels

One retailer described the challenges of focusing on customer experience at a retailer that is driven by “an imperialist merchant organization.” (There was no way I could write this piece without including that quote.) Merchants, by their nature, tend to care a lot more about product than customers. But in the end, they’re generally heavily driven by sales, margin and turn metrics. There are many cross channel strategies can be implemented to help merchants drive these key metrics.

For example, the web has many selling capabilities that are nearly impossible to achieve in store because of physical constraints. Customer reviews are extremely popular online and customers regularly report using them to make purchase decisions (both online and in store); however, they are very difficult to make available in a physical environment. Some retailers are making them available via in-store kiosks, but the kiosks are a large capital investment to make if they’re not already available. But just about everyone’s got a computer in his or her pocket or purse these days. Let’s make more use of mobile phone technology to give people access to customer reviews, recommendations, wish lists, gift registries, etc. in store while they’re standing in front of the products.

There are also advantages in stores than can be leveraged online. Many retailers have incredible experts in their stores. How can those experts build content that can be used by customers and other employees alike to improve the shopping experience? How about security? Should retailers start to look for ways to accept payment in their stores for web orders when customers aren’t comfortable paying online? Believe it or not, there are still a lot of customers out there who aren’t comfortable using a credit card online, and in this economy there are more and more customers who aren’t comfortable or aren’t able to use credit cards period. But they’re still interested in buying from us, and we should find every way we can to help them do so.

3. IT systems limitations

There’s no question that IT legacy systems cause us a lot of trouble when we try to integrate our customer experiences. But I also wonder how many times we fall back too easily on such an excuse. I’ve written about my Tree Stump Theory previously, and it’s certainly prevalent in this case. We have a lot of compelling reasons why systems prevent us from implementing such key capabilities as the ability to accept returns of online purchases in store. But guess what? Our customers don’t know those reasons, and even if they did, they don’t care. While many retailers have found ways around the returns issues, just as many still have not. Either way, the case to prioritize such efforts should rely on some of the same techniques described above to make compelling cases to the CEO and the incent imperialist merchants.

Pure play retailers, and especially Amazon, continue to grow at rapid rates by pulling more and more market share. Multi-channel retailers have assets in their stores that pure plays don’t, but it’s going to take implementing true cross channel strategies to leverage those assets in a competitively advantageous way. Let’s cross it up!

What cross-channel strategies have you implemented or are considering implementing? What are the barriers to cross-channel in your organization?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Case for an E-Commerce IT Org Change

As multi-channel retailers move more and more towards implementing cross-channel strategies, organizational structures need to change to support those new strategies. I am a huge proponent of breaking up most e-commerce silo  organizations and integrating online and in-store marketing and merchandising teams to ensure a common vision and voice across channels. For IT, though, I actually recommend the opposite approach. I believe technology  professionals who work full time (or near full-time) on the e-commerce site should report directly to the head of e-commerce.

While at a high level is seems like technology should have the same kind of continuity as marketing and merchandising, I believe a close look tells a different story.

Here’s why e-commerce IT is significantly different from traditional IT:

In e-commerce, the business is technology

Traditionally, IT creates tools that help employees be more productive and efficient. However, in e-commerce, IT is actually creating software designed to generate revenue. E-commerce “stores” are really self-service software  applications designed to help customers perform a service — in this case it’s to buy the products and services we sell.  Intuit has Quicken; Microsoft has Word and Excel; retailers have our e-commerce sites. We really need to think about  our sites more as software products and organize our teams in a product management type of structure.

Also, a particular pet peeve of mine is when IT folks refer to those in other functions of the company as “the business.”  Just that reference alone insinuates that IT is not a crucial part of the overall business and creates a separation that  frequently leaves IT coming across as second class citizens, which they are not. While I’ve never liked “the business”  reference in any circumstance, it’s doubly bad in e-commerce where success absolutely depends on technology team  members actively working as part of the business.

Self-service applications require a different mindset

Working on an e-commerce application that is designed to be used directly by customers requires a very different  mindset than what is typically required when working on applications that support employees. Even when the  underlying technology is similar, the mindset required is substantially different. New employee applications usually  come with training programs and manuals. Moreover, employees are ultimately forced to use the app; they get used to it and get incrementally better at using it over time through daily usage. Customers, however, don’t get the benefit of manuals and training programs. They’re on their own. And if the experience doesn’t satisfy them, they give up and the sale is lost.

Site functionality and customer experience are major components of the e-commerce business strategy

The website application is a key differentiator for the business, and customer experience is hugely driven by site functionality. While functions other than technology certainly contribute to an e-commerce site’s success or failure, there can be little doubt that the quality of the technology is a massive contributing factor.

E-commerce is 100% dependent on technology to be open for business.

While technology is critical in all areas of the business, most retailers have offline contingencies for stores so they can  continue to make sales even if the system is down. Websites obviously don’t have an offline mode.

Web businesses are still immature and need considerable agility and flexibility to mature as quickly as possible

For many absolutely legitimate reasons, most IT organizations at multi-channel retailers have significant (and some might say onerous) processes in place to manage technology requests and roadmap prioritization. Because requests for technology improvements come from all corners of the company, it’s important for CIOs to ensure they are spending their resources on work that is thoroughly vetted and likely to generate the highest return on investment for the company. But given the absolute dependence of the e-commerce business on technology, typical IT prioritization and allocation processes are too slow for e-commerce businesses that need to be able to adjust quickly to issues that arise with customer experience.

The e-commerce competitive marketplace innovates far quicker than the brick & mortar marketplace

The CEO of a pure-play e-commerce company is in basically the same role as the head of e-commerce at a multi-channel retailer. If for no other reason than there is no alternative, the CIO of a pure-play reports to the CEO. This reporting structure gives the pure-play leader a leg up in agility and the ability to react to customer needs. In a multi-channel retailer, the CIO must split time between many functions of the business, and I find e-commerce often gets time allocated in a ratio roughly equal to its financial contribution to the business. While such an allocation is understandable given everything on a busy CIO’s plate, I believe this lessened focus can lead to stunted growth and lost ground to competitors such as Amazon who are more devoted to improving their software application and increasing their customers’ satisfaction with their site customer experience.

I believe if a head of e-commerce is to be truly held accountable for the success of the site, he or she should have  appropriate authority over such a major contributor to the success of the site.

So why should the head of e-commerce have authority over e-commerce IT and not e-commerce marketing and merchandising?

To me, it’s all about what faces the customer and what doesn’t. A brand should be clear to its customers about who it is and what it stands for, so continuity in marketing and merchandising trumps silo control over those aspects of the business. Site functionality has no parallels in other parts of the organization. Since it is both unique and customer facing, I believe the head of the online channel should maintain the authority to develop and execute the technical strategy for his or her business unit when it directly affects the customer relationship.

I’ll add this final point: I’ve lived through many different org structures surrounding e-commerce IT, and the only times I’ve found the pros to outweigh the cons of an org structure have been when e-commerce IT was part of the e-commerce operation and reporting to the head of e-commerce.

What do you think? Am I completely misguided? What structures have you seen work and not work? What structure do you think is ideal?