Commerce 2.0 Communication

Two way communications is an important building block within the framework of social shopping and it is also one of the most difficult and especially for large retailers.  Two way communications is a powerful method of customer engagement and it is also a very difficult method of communications because of the effort and focus required to maintain the conversation.  Two way communications requires both sides be engaged in the conversation and actively participating, which includes active listening.  This is the most difficult aspect for large retailers because it requires maintaining the continuum of the conversation and this is very difficult when multiple representatives and systems are involved from the retailer perspective.

A major challenge is to create a method to capture the continuum of the contacts and conversations with customers.  When I think about my contacts with companies, not just retailers but any contact with a company I realize that the most successful contacts are due to the companies ability to maintain the string of the conversation from previous contacts.  This ability to access the previous communications and contacts with the customers is the factor that makes the contact personal and maintains the relationship with the customers.  All customers realize that they cannot hope to maintain the contact with the same person over and over throughout their relationship with a company, customers do expect however that the person that they are dealing with will have access to the information discussed previously and also have all of the previous purchase information for the individual customer.

As I have previously discussed, active communication requires that the retailer listen and respond to the specific customer comments and questions and not respond with ‘canned’ responses.  This is why it is so important for the retailer to maintain records and transactions related to the customer to support the communication.  Perception is critical in the communication and in order for the customers to perceive that the retailer is listening and engaging their customers the retailer must maintain all contact and purchase information.  Think about your relationship with a local small specialty retailer, or even hair dresser, one of the important aspects is the retailers memory of your interactions, they remember your name or remember what you purchased, or remember you conversation.  This memory of the relationship allows them to build the personal relationship and two way communication.  This memory also makes the customer feel like their business matters, it makes the relationship personal and encourages the customer to return over and over again.  The trick is for larger retailers to create the same ‘memory’ of the customer relationship that can carry over from contact to contact.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Engagement

The word engagement is a powerful word that people tend to throw around a lot in discussions related to the retail market.  How to engage consumers to grow sales?  How to engage consumers to retain their sales?  I am sure you have heard many of these.  Everyone has an opinion on customer, or consumer, engagement and I think that just means that there are many different aspects to engagement that in fairness must be explored to evaluate the effectiveness of the particular engagement actions.  I too have my own opinions on methods to engage the consumer and my opinions focus on two aspects; the social aspect and continuous improvement.  This should not be a surprise to any regular reader because continuous improvement is one of my regular mantras.

Let me start with the social aspect of engagement.  I believe that a key aspect of engagement is active, two way, communications.  In other words, the retailer must communicate with the customer and not talk to, or at, the customer.  This is a simple and yet very powerful difference and can be manifested in simple ways that all focus on one aspect, active listening and communication skills.  I have been discussing all along what I feel to be the key aspect of the new eCommerce and that is the social shopping aspect.  There are two parts to this social shopping;

1. The interaction of the customer with friends and other customers.
2. The interaction of the customer with the retailer.

In this discussion I want to focus on the interaction between the customer and the retailer.  Retailers have embraced the omnichannel market and tools to simplify and speed the purchase process and the marketing process.  You have all been subjected to the endless streams of emails and Facebook pages that promote the retailer and special events or sales.  These are all basically one way communications from the retailer.

The next phase of eCommerce is incorporating two way communications with the customer and practicing active communications with the customers.  This includes engaging the customer to provide feedback on items, such as the program instituted by Amazon to invite customers to provide product reviews and then take the next step of reaching out to the customer to respond to other customers’ questions regarding the product.  On the other side of the coin, active communications is not sending the customer a survey after the purchase that consists of a list of questions regarding the sale.

Active communication requires that the retailer listen and respond to the specific customer comments and questions and not respond with ‘canned’ responses.  This is opening the door to the customer becoming a part of the product design and selection team or becoming a part of the marketing team to provide insight into the specific demographic desires.  Consumers want someone to listen to them and when they find this in a retailer they will remain a customer for a long time.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Relationships

Consumers have been building virtual relationships for years while retailers have been building a virtual presence.  Consumers are now beginning the extend these virtual relationships utilizing mobile technology to support their shopping needs and desires.  This expansion of the virtual relationship is a logical progression that will dramatically impact the retailers, and especially large retailers.  Mobile technology has made this expansion easy and the consumer is simply utilizing these tools to support their shopping demands.  The interesting point is that these mobile tools were provided by another retail market segment to maintain their sales.  This shows the relationships between services and products provided by one retailer that directly or indirectly impact other retailers, or in the case of mobile technology the entire retail marketplace.

As I have previously discussed, consumers are open to building relationships with other people and organizations, you can see this from the participation in meet-up type groups, Yelp, Foursquare and also the participation in the social aspect of Amazon.  This openness should be no surprise to retailers, because consumers have been reacting on Facebook to retailers both positive and negative for quite some time.  Retailers have realized the importance of a presence on Facebook and each have developed the presence to interact with consumers.  Facebook, however, is mostly just another marketing and sales outlet for most retailers.  In addition, the younger consumers no longer utilize Facebook to the extent they once did.  The challenge then for retailers is to identify the social networks they in which they should participate.   

Retailers must focus on engaging with the consumer rather than selling to the consumer.  This is an important distinction that differentiates the retailers current use of the medium and tools from their future use of the tools in order to be successful.  What I mean by this is that most retailers today maintain a one way communication link to consumers with the key direct feedback from consumers being the service surveys that I think do more to annoy the customer than to collect actionable information from the consumer.  Retailers depend on the sales data and the industry new product events to determine what to offer the consumer.  This is fine as a starting point, is should not be the ending point though.

Retailers that spend the time to engage the consumer will realize greater benefits than they ever would have simply through the one way communication practiced today.  Retailers must realize and embrace the social aspect of the marketplace or the consumer will go to the retailer that does.  This means that retailers must change their culture from one that focuses on protecting the sale to one that focuses on the consumer desires in order to maintain success.        

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Retailer Relationships

Retailers relationships with their customers has changed over the last few years due mainly to the technology tools and services available to consumers.  The impact to the retail industry continues be impacted by these tools and services as a result of the expansion of mobile technology.  In the past, retailers would have been successful in their strategy and actions to fight and limit the impact.  Due to the broad impact and the consumers’ embracing these services and technology the ability of retailers to limit their use of these services is almost non-existent.  

Retailers have lost the upper hand in their relationship with consumers and the simple fact of this new reality is that retailers must maintain the focus on the personal relationship with the consumer and demonstrate that this relationship is important.  Consumers now have the technology to turn the purchase experience into a shopping experience.  These same consumers have been searching for the ability to create a shopping experience for a long time, they have missed this shopping experience due to the increased demands on their time that limits their ability to spend time physically with friends and family.  The new technology and especially the mobile technology allows consumers to blend the virtual with the physical to create a shopping experience.  Retailers that focus only on the purchase transaction will lose the battle of customer retention that maintains their sales.

Retailers must change their culture to focus on the relationship with the customer in order to remain successful.  This needs to be a critical factor in hiring practices and it also must be front and center in the reporting and business strategy development.  This is a dramatic change in strategy for most large retailers and this change needs to come from the top in order to change and this means that the senior leadership must show in both words and actions that they have embraced this change.  Large retailers must re-learn the techniques that small and local retailers have always maintained as a cornerstone of their business.  This can be difficult for the large retailers, this is a dramatic change in focus and requires a continuous focus from leadership in order to institutionalize the practices.

I am sure that everyone will agree that relationship building is very difficult, and especially when you are trying to institutionalize these habits in a culture that did not previously place a high level of importance on building and maintaining relationships. Consumers now are demanding this relationship and are actively engaged in developing these relationships utilizing the technology, tools and services in new methods and cannot be ignored.  No one can say where this will lead, what we can say though is that future success depends on recognizing and embracing these new demands from consumers.  To ignore these demands will only lead to failure and the demise of the retailer.     

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Retailer Assumptions

There are basic differences in the types of relationships with consumers that small retailers and large retailers build and maintain with the consumers.  Small retailers build a personal and collaborative relationship with their customers while large retailers focus on a transactional relationship that is based on the sale.  This change in relationship with the consumer seems to be based on the size of the retailer and this size relationship also develops a culture that is impersonal and based on the transaction or the sale.  

The growth of a business, and this is any business in any marketspace, seems to naturally generate a greater focus on the sales and profits while reducing the focus on the personal relationship.  I don’t believe that these businesses purposely reduce the focus on the personal relationship, I think that is simply is not a priority and step by step is just eliminated from the culture.  There are some areas that may not require a personal relationship such as receiving product, however all businesses large and small require a personal relationship with their customers.  Small businesses have this as a key focus area and large businesses lose this focus as they grow and believe that they must focus on the impersonal objectives in order to grow.

Someone told me a long time ago that all business is personal and over the years, over and over, this has been proven true.  Why is it then than businesses lose this with their end customers as they grow?  I think one reason for this is the distance that grows from the senior management of a company with the end customer as the business grows, the senior levels of management lose any personal interaction with their end customers and focus more and more on the impersonal objectives.  On the other hand, the small business owner starts on the front line with the end customer day in and day out. They develop a relationship with their customers and this relationship retains their customers and the resulting sales.  Small businesses understand that this relationship is key to their success and they nurture this.  This means that they order specific products at their customers’ request and by the same token, the customers are willing to pay a little more for these services.

The $64,000 question is how can large retailers maintain the relationships with their end customers and be successful and profitable?  The simple answer is that they must maintain the focus on the personal relationship with the consumer and show, from the top, that this is important.  This needs to be a critical factor in hiring practices and it also must be front and center in the reporting and business strategy development.  This all needs to come from the top in order to change the culture and this means that the senior leadership must show in both words and actions that they have embraced this change.  One important thing to remember is that personal means people and not electronic surveys or electronic measurement of sales.   

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Consumer Engagement

Consumers and third party services have developed a model to incorporate new mobile tools and services in their shopping practices.  This model, as a general rule, does not include the retailer, aside from the mentions and notifications from the retailers.  These services come and go in their consumer acceptance based on the usability and value provided to the consumer.  These services are easy to find from a variety of offerings and all of them have incorporated an array of social networking capabilities that support two objectives; notifications to the subscribers of events and offerings, encouragement of subscribers to invite friends to the service.

We have seen the services rise to a level of community and consumer acceptance as in Yelp and we have also seen these services fail, or consumed by other services.  I find that the most interesting aspects of these services and tools is the way that the retailer, or the end target of the services has been left out of the discussions.  The retailers, restaurants, theaters, etc, all have one thing in common as far as these services are concerned, they are the target and consumers utilize the service to identify sales and deals, or rate the target.  For all intents and purposes, this model follows the same shopping practices utilized for shopping  and purchasing for decades, the only change being that technology has opened a new channel to support these same practices.  Instead of a newspaper providing sale flyers and coupons, consumers use email and location based mobile services.

Forward thinking retailers such as Amazon and Google are beginning to use these capabilities now to engage the consumer.  For instance, Amazon encourages shoppers to ask questions and will pose those questions to previous purchasers.  Google is using search algorithms developed to support their search engine to enhance the purchasing and searching capabilities of the Google Play store.  This is the type of experimentation that retailers need to incorporate into their commerce shopping support capabilities.  

These commerce shopping support capabilities do not require custom development on the part of retailers to incorporate.  The initial cost of entry is to simply expose the retailer’s internal services through a social commerce gateway to allow access through standard Internet protocol services.  The technology though is not the difficulty, the difficulty is taking that first step culturally to change the practice and the relationship between the consumer and retailer from adversarial to participatory.  This is what I reference when I say the only way to implement a change of this size and nature is one step at a time.  This first step in this case is to change the culture to engage the consumer as a partner and not an adversary.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Consumer Quality Tools

Inviting consumers to participate in the product selection and quality review process is a great way to engage the consumer.  People in general are social beings and they will communicate and develop communities to share and socialize both physically and virtually.  Consumers have demonstrated through social networks and the tools supported through these networks that they are anxious to engage in the shopping experience with both other consumers and the retailers.  The retailer that channels this engagement will become very successful.  There are two challenges the retailer must overcome to successfully engage and develop a relationship with the consumer; culture and capabilities.

The capabilities challenge can at first seem overwhelming.  After all, how can one company hope to keep up with all of the varieties and types of tools that consumers use in their social networking and then add to this the mobile capabilities and tools supported that both crossover and add to the choices.  Add to this the internal culture and potential staffing requirements and the task at hand can very easily become overwhelming.  

It seems like a long time ago when eCommerce was first incorporated into the corporate and retail culture providing another channel to sell products to consumers.  When Facebook started to expand into common use by the public in general they started using the platform as a means to share views about companies.  Companies then incorporated Facebook as another marketing channel and customer service channel.  Customers embraced this channel as an electronic link to retailers, and retailers used this channel as a marketing tool.  This tool required additional levels of staff to monitor and respond.  All of this occurred however prior to the explosion of mobile technology and the resulting increased velocity of change.  

The explosion of mobile technology is allowing and encouraging consumers and retailers to extend the link and the types of interaction.  Consumers have embraced these capabilities and have been expanding their actions into a social shopping community that utilizes the capabilities and technology to create new communities.  These capabilities and technologies though are all built on a standard open framework and only really require network bandwidth to support.  Consumers have been expanding their capabilities and use of services and tools to change the landscape of shopping.  We have reached the tipping point where the acceptance and utilization of the tools has become pervasive.  This speeding of change and increased use by consumers of tools can seem overwhelming to the retail industry and generate a bunker mentality to fight these practices.  

This is exactly the opposite of the appropriate response to these changes.  Wishing it will go away and fighting the challenge will only leave the retailer further behind the curve.  The only way to overcome any challenge that seems overwhelming is to start, just take the first step to identify the capabilities and then take the next step to identify the challenges, and then take the next step…..

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Consumer Quality

A consumer quality feedback program is a key area of improvement that is dramatically enhanced by the eCommerce and mobile tools and technology.  This area deserves a formal program with all of the measurement tools to monitor progress and areas for improvement.  A prominent area for engagement with the consumer is a consumer feedback loop.  This consumer feedback loop is important for customer retention and quality improvement.  The consumer feedback loop allows the retailer to develop a conversation, feedback loop, between the consumer and the retailer.  

Retailers and manufacturers have developed supply chain feedback loops that monitor and continuously improve the quality of the products, packaging and transport.  The consumer quality feedback program incorporates these same principles for a consumer feedback loop.  Without a consumer feedback loop the retailers and manufacturers lose a very valuable voice in product development and delivery.  In addition the consumer feedback loop engages the consumer with the retailer in a partner relationship where each partner benefits.  This consumer feedback loop can utilize the same tools and technology that retailers are incorporating into their omnichannel market support to provide the additional data points to improve the demand forecasting, sales and manufacturing of the products.

A very important area for success in retail is the customer retention.  Due to the instant availability of products and services at competitive prices, the retention of the customer is critical to the future success of retailers.  One tool in the customer retention toolbox is engaging the consumer for advice and feedback that can be incorporated into the retailer’s product, sales or marketing programs.  Consumers can find coupons and lower prices with ease from many new services that pop up almost on a daily basis.  Retailers cannot fight these services by simply lowering the prices.  Instead the retailers should focus on engaging the consumers in their target market to develop a relationship that discourages the consumers from looking around for lower prices.

The consumer quality feedback loop provides the methods to engage the consumer and incorporate their feedback into the retailer’s omnichannel strategy.  The retailer should look around, as if they were a consumer, to identify the programs that would enhance their own personal shopping experience, or better yet, engage consumers to provide the feedback and then engage these same consumers to ‘test’ new programs and products.  This consumer engagement process will provide more value and higher retention than any price matching program and does not cannibalize the sales, or more importantly the profits. It simply utilizes tools and procedures that you may, or should, already be using with your supply chain partners.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Quality

The quality feedback and improvement loop process will be another area of great improvement as a result of the collaborative marketplace that I call Commerce 2.0.  There are two types of performance improvements that can be achieved through the collaborative marketplace; shopping performance quality and product performance quality.  Up until now I have been discussing the shopping performance and engagement aspect of quality and now I will begin a discussion on the product performance quality.  It is important to establish the customer communication and engagement model to provide a feedback loop to the product quality.  Product quality then engages the entire supply chain from materials to the customer delivery.

Lets start with the customer feedback loop as the beginning of the process.  The customer determines the starting point for the quality discussion.  This is where the product style and material used to produce the product are determined.  The retailer selects the market and the products to offer to the customer, the target customer has been defined for the particular market along with the value and cost of the products offered to that market.  This is true of any product from produce and groceries to automobiles or appliances.  The retailers’ first requirement is to understand the market and the products included in that market.  

Customer feedback is important at every step of the product supply chain, whether it is direct or indirect.  The retailer starts with indirect feedback that pertains to the market, types and cost of the products, then as the products flow through the extended supply chain there are customer feedback points along the way.  Each step along this chain the various customers will provide feedback on the product and quality until the product reaches the point in the chain where the end customer, or consumer, gets involved.  

The retailers, and especially the leading retailers, will have a quality assurance program instituted for the manufacture and delivery of the products to these retailers.  This includes product sampling and testing, packaging and delivery to the retailer.  There is also a consumer quality assurance program that is not generally as well defined, however it also includes sampling and testing (through shopping) packaging and delivery and then in addition there is an additional feedback loop from the customer returns, or reverse logistics.  

Each program has been instituted with varying degrees of formality and measurements.  The key area of improvement to be captured from the collaborative marketplace is the consumer quality program.  This area deserves a formal program with all of the measurement tools to monitor progress and areas for improvement.  The most prominent area for improvement is the consumer feedback loop.  This is where it is important for customer retention and quality improvement to develop a conversation, feedback loop, between the consumer and the retailer.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Conversation

The collaborative marketplace, or what I am calling Commerce 2.0, is all about the impact of social networking as a type of shopping tool that is supported by mobile technology.  This mobile technology supports extended collaboration within and around the consumers’ omni channel retail purchasing.  This extended collaboration through the changing mobile technology is essentially about extending conversations and introductions.  Consumers desires and demands have essentially running at direct odds to the retailers’ desires and demands - consumers search for the social interaction and not the purchase and on the other hand, retailers’ search for a low cost purchase solution.  If the retailer would support the social interaction in addition to the purchase they would provide consumer with critical reason to return again and again to the retailer for purchases.

Consumers have accepted this difference because in the long run, a key factor to the consumer’s purchase in the eCommerce environment is also price.  Retailers have focused on the market channel of the purchase because research has shown that multi-channel customers, ones that purchase from more than one outlet, are much more valuable than any single change purchasing customer.  I think though that this has relied on the traditional shopping paradigm - consumers felt more comfortable seeing and touching the product themselves.  This has traditionally been a valid shopping trend, or paradigm, for a very long time.  

This paradigm is shifting again though based on two factors; the reduction in free time available for the consumer to go to look and touch the product; and the increase in capabilities of mobile technology combined including the expansion of the wireless network capabilities.  These factors are allowing the consumers to add the social aspect to their eCommerce shopping.  This added social aspect is the addition of the conversation and the introduction to the eCommerce shopping experience.  This added social aspect is changing the methods that consumers incorporate in their shopping practices and these improved social networking aspects supported and enhanced by mobile technology will change the way that consumers shop across market channels.

The addition of mobile technology and the wireless network capabilities combined allows the consumer to converse during the eCommerce shopping experience.  The ability to converse with other consumers, whether or not in real time during the eCommerce shopping experience actually reduces the need for consumers to touch the product and this in turn reduces the dependence of consumers on the brick and mortar retail channel.  

These capabilities are all being embraced by the consumer now because of acceptance that has been achieved by social networking over the years.  Mobile technology in combination with the availability of wireless networks has simply allowed the consumer to expand their social networking into more areas of their life.  Consumers now use the mobile technology capabilities as natural extension of the conversation while they are shopping.  Retailers would do well to recognize and support these extensions of the conversation to develop their positive shopping experience.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Partners

Collaborative partners are another important aspect to success in the new Commerce 2.0 environment.  There have been dramatic strides in the ability and even the openness for developing partnerships over the recent years.  The realization has finally been embraced that collaborating brings dramatic benefits that would not have been possible in a lone wolf model.  Collaboration allows the partners to overcome their weaknesses through the strengths of their partners.  How does this relate to the eCommerce collaborative marketplace?  The partners in this particular case should be engaged to provide the marketplace consumer shopping capabilities.  

The leaders in the omni channel market have done a very good job in developing their extended supply chain and partnership supporting the purchase and delivery to the consumer.  This includes both the purchase, or outbound logistics and the return, or the reverse logistics. There will always be  need to monitor and improve the execution of the purchase and the extended supply chain partners provide an important ingredient for these capabilities.  The mobile technologies and increasing usage by consumers though requires the purchase and delivery of the product to be a more robust and flexible capability to meet these changing consumer demands.  

The changes to mobile purchasing is only a small function in the overall changes that are being driven by mobile technology.  Another aspect that will cause the greatest disruption in the eCommerce market is the social shopping capabilities that are supported by the mobile technology and the expanding data and network capabilities.  These capabilities will drive the greatest marketplace disruption and they will also drive the greatest value and retention of customers.  Mobile technologies allow the consumer to turn the eCommerce marketplace into a social collaborative marketplace that utilizes all of the social technology (Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram) for the communications aspect and the location networking technology (yelp, google+) for their store and product ratings.  These technologies turn the consumers’ smartphone into a virtual neighborhood shopping mall experience.

This virtual neighborhood shopping experience is where a new set of partnerships are required to support the demands of the consumer.  There are many services now offered on a subscription basis to consumers the providing specials of the day even based on location for instance.  We’ve all used one or another of these services.  The retailers’ objectives now should be focused on embracing these services and then adding a social layer to their eCommerce that allows consumers to connect and participate to provide feedback and recommendations to share with other consumers.  So the additional partners that retailers must integrate are the marketing partners that offer specials and incentives to the consumer and the most critical partner is the consumer themselves.  The retailers must create a two-way conversation with the consumer in order to create this collaborative marketplace and also to increase customer retention.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Methods

Commerce 2.0 methods must focus primarily on defining, developing and implementing flexibility in controls.  Controls, however, in the collaborative marketplace that will be Commerce 2.0 should be defined as principles of operation.  In these initial stages of developing the Commerce 2.0 collaborative marketplace, and actually this will probably continue into the foreseeable future, the market is changing quickly, in both demands and capabilities.  These discontinuous changes in demand require a flexible framework to guide the methods in which the retailer supports the changes.  The principles of operation will support this flexible framework in which the retailers can support the changes in the collaborative marketplace.

I am a big believer in the ‘Process, People and Technology’ business process methodology and there is a great significance on the sequence.  I always start with process because we must understand the process in order to determine where people are required and what skills the people will require, and then you are at the point where you can determine the technology required to support the process and people.  This is where the principles of operation come into play, this provides the framework and the rules that will support managing change. It is also important to have this framework in place early so you don’t get swept away with the excitement or immediacy of a change.  The principles of operation should define your methods of evaluation and adoption of change.  Think of it as a type of checklist to review throughout the change evaluation and implementation process.  

Adopting and implementing a repeatable process to address change will allow you to speed your change implementation process.  The retailer must be careful not to be swept away in a wave of technology change and end up with a cobbled together solution that is not flexible and boxes them into a very expensive resolution to increase flexibility.  Discontinuous change is a difficult process to manage and retailers have entered into a storm of discontinuous change that will disrupt their business model to meet the demands of the consumers.  A repeatable process of ‘Process, People and Technology’ that is guided by a robust principles of operation will help the retailers navigate these changes in a manner that does not paint them into a corner.

In order to ensure the long term viability to meet new consumer shopping demands of the collaborative marketplace the retailer cannot expect that a single technology will meet the needs.  On the other hand, the retailer will collapse from complications if they adopt new technology after new technology simply based on industry trends or technology marketing, unfortunately there are no silver bullets. This is why the retailer must adopt the repeatable process supported by a framework that allows speedy review and adoption of new processes.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Commerce 2.0 Decisions

As a baseline assumption, in order to support the demands of consumers as they change and increase in flexibility demand due to the integration of mobile technology in consumer shopping the retailer must move into a collaborative marketplace framework.  This in itself is a fundamental change in philosophy; from a purchase based method to a shopping based method of interaction with the consumer.  In order to achieve this change, the omni channel framework must also change from a closed, purchase based framework to an open, collaborative marketplace framework.  I don’t think there is much of a decision to be made to change the philosophy and framework, it will be a requirement to maintain the business.  The decisions come from how quickly you can move to this new framework and how you will integrate this new framework.

How will you support the consumers’ demands in shopping?  This is a discussion in customer retention and engaging the customer in the experience.  I think this is becoming the key to customer retention; engage the customer so they are invested in the shopping experience.  The customer is driving towards a collaborative shopping experience the crosses channels and utilizes mobile technology as the glue.  Customer service surveys after the purchase will no longer meet the customers’ desire to engage, the retailer must engage the customer in the product decision making process.  In the past this was done as a type of passive customer evaluation, by this I mean that retailers would analyze the customer purchases to select the products with the highest sales as a guide to customer likes.  This is not true; this only identifies the customers choices across the offerings from one retailer.  Retailers should look at this as the customers notification of the product they feel sucks the least.

Consumers on the other hand would be happy to share their thoughts with retailers, if they would only listen.  You find this desire to share across many of the Internet sites that are very popular from Angie’s list to Yelp.  The retailers would be well served to provide product reviews and ratings from customers as a starting point to help shoppers make a decision.  This would simply be a starting point however and should be expanded and encouraged to engage the customers more in product selection and also in pairing items.  Retailers are simply not paying attention to the marketplace and consumers demands when they do not provide these opportunities to collaborate with their customers.

Retailers should stop trying to control the market and the consumer shopping methods simply because it will not work any more with the increased availability and capabilities of mobile tools and technology.  Retailers would be better served to focus on engaging their customers directly, because their customers are definitely engaging without the retailer through new web services, mobile and social technologies.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumers’ experience?  Improving the consumers experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?