Investments For The Collaboration Community

While the collaboration community, in the long term, will require a significant investment in technology to build the infrastructure, the consumer facing software, however, can utilize a great deal of open social networking tools in building out the community.  The investment in time and resources to support the community will, by far, represent the greatest investment in the community.  It is important for the senior leadership of the retailer to understand this up front so that these resources can be provided with the skills, the numbers and also the understanding that this investment will continue as a cost of doing business in supporting the community.

I find it interesting that as businesses have begun to utilize social media and networking marketing and consumer relationships, the use of technology has required an increase in the number of people required by the businesses to support these requirements.  The requirements for the consumer community adds to this requirement for an increase in people and in this case it is not just an increase in people with customer relationship skills, this increase requires skills in technologies such as big data along with skills in marketing and design.  This increase in the number of people required is especially important in the beginning stages of constructing the community because it is important to continuously monitor the results and feedback from the consumer to adjust and improve the community features and capabilities.  

The challenge for the retailer’s leadership is the commitment and patience required to support the resource and skills requirements for the collaboration community to succeed.  This is a very big challenge because it requires a long term investment in people that can take quite some time to provide a return.  This can be off-set somewhat by utilizing cloud technology and open source social networking tools.  However the time required to develop the community and build the consumer participation in the community requires long term human resource support.  

The requirements for large chain retailers is changing and requires investment of skilled resources to monitor and manage these new strategic tools and initiatives.  The challenge in these investments is the potential duration of the investment prior to a return.  The benefits though of these tools and initiatives is the direct connection with consumers to guide actions and products and, possibly more importantly, the ability to deliver a focused strategic message across all changes and all regions.  These new tools will allow the large chain retailers to finally deliver on a true omni channel retail shopping and purchasing 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 consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s 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?

Defining Success Of The Collaboration Community

It is important for the retailer to understand the success factors of the collaboration community to ensure their objectives are aligned properly.  For this reason it is important for the retailer to expand their definition of success to include the information and intelligence that they will obtain from the robust interaction with the consumers and the retention factor of returning customers to the community in addition to the sales achieved as a result of the community.  This will allow the retailer to sustain and grow both their collaboration community along with the the sales of their eCommerce channel along with the brick and mortar channel.  

The collaboration community will provide the retailer with the ability to grow the sales in both channels as a result of the intelligence obtained along with the customer relationships that the successful collaboration community will encourage.  The retailer must treat the incentive and the encouragement of the consumer to return to the community as a first priority because this habit of returning is the factor that allows and encourages the retailer to obtain the intelligence that will allow the retailer to utilize the information to develop and grow their relationship with the consumer and the stronger the relationship with the consumer the greater the likelihood the consumer will continue to return and purchase.  This turns the definition of success of the collaboration community on it’s head.

The retailer must expand the success definition of their business to combine the not only the sales across all channels and they must define the collaboration community as a key factor to achieving their sales growth.  The focus of the success should be the encouraging the consumer to return and spend time in the community because of the intelligence that can be collected by this interaction.  With the consumer participation and retention defined as key success factors, the retailer must focus on the social networking tools that will encourage the consumer to return and participate in the community.  

The challenge for the retailer is supporting the resources, both people and technology, required to create and maintain this highly interactive community to encourage the return and participation of the consumer.  This requires a revision of the time horizon defining success.  The success of the community and the time, both investment and duration, required to achieve this success is much greater than the customary quarterly cycle.  This is why I recommend that the retailer must view the success across all channels to create a true omni channel retail environment.  The continued and long term success of the retailer is dependent on the success of the collaboration community and how  they utilize and incorporate the intelligence and customer retention driven by the community.  

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 consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s 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?

Constructing The Collaboration Community

Just like a physical community, the virtual consumer collaboration community requires construction of virtual buildings, rooms, highways and transportation methods to support and grow the virtual community.  This construction requires starting with the foundational framework and infrastructure that will robust and flexible to support the demands of the community.  The construction on this foundation must also be flexible and robust to support the demands of the community.  An open floorplan concept of the community construction is the term that comes to my mind to describe this flexible and robust virtual community.  

The key to success is starting with a flexible and robust foundation and any retailer would be severely hindering the long term success if they do not start with a robust and flexible foundation.  A key focus should be building the flexible foundation because the flexibility will allow the the foundation to be extended and enhanced and grown as necessary to support the changing demands.  One very important factor to remember is that the consumer community requires flexibility to meet the changing demands of the consumer.  The consumer has shown over and over again that their demands change and in many ways these changes may have been unpredictable prior to the change.  This factor highlights the need for flexibility and ability to change and improve the foundation to support these demands.

On top of this robust and flexible foundation the retailer must then focus on delivering the types of services and apps that consumers have embraced in their social media.  This is a type of portal of services and apps that  help the consumer to share ideas, collaborate with other consumers and most importantly to follow through to close the purchase.  This portal concept is only possible when coupled with a robust and flexible foundation.  The portal connects and provides a sandbox for consumers to land that is focused on the consumer’s shopping needs and allows the portal to become a community that draws consumers to return over and over.  The measure of success for this community should be the number of returning consumers, their return cycle and then how long they remain and follow through to purchase.

It would be a mistake for the retailer to try to force a purchase every time a consumer returns to the community because it will actually drive the consumer from the community.  The retailer must expand their definition of success to include the information and intelligence that they will obtain from the robust interaction with the consumers.  This interaction with the consumer will lead to increased sales as the consumer shares their activities with other consumers outside of the community and their reaction to suggestions from other consumers.  This builds an organic growth cycle that is much stronger than a focus on low cost and is more sustainable.  

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 consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s 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?