Complex Retail Strategies

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Customer feedback methods

Candidate features are sometimes thought of as the crown jewels – they need maximum protection. Or at least that’s how some organizations act! They want to protect them until it’s time for the big reveal.

The challenge with this approach is the idea might not be as hot in the customer’s mind. By involving customers in the process, your organization reduces the chances of getting it wrong. And the earlier, the better!

A common barrier to externalizing ideas is the fear of competitors copying them. After all, they might swoop in and copy the output of all your hard work. But without all the capture, strategy, and line of sight, they are nothing more than short sentences. For example, Monzo externalizes ideas. Does that enable RBS to come along and build such a great platform? No.

A restricted view can be enacted by an ambassador council, where a small number of customers are consulted and often rewarded. At the other end of the spectrum are publicly viewable boards containing voting tools. This enables the organization to get an acid test understanding of what is most popular. It also has a wider objective, in building a community and showing that your organization cares about what its customers want.

Extending customers’ experience

Your organization can only do so much, whether that’s about supporting a brand, or creating infrastructure or geographical reach through customer support. We are never more than a tap away from a competitor.

APIs make services available to other providers. They enable specific capabilities to be presented without the look and feel – just the service.

By developing multiple APIs you are extending your Customer Experience indirectly to other platforms. This is where your Experience Principles really come into their own. There is no comfort of your familiar logo or design language. Customers can only feel what it’s like to interact with you via a third party. Think about what APIs your organization has and how you might be missing out on extending your services to create a better CX.

Complex Retail Strategies

Aligning bricks, clicks, and people

New services or changes to existing services can often be restricted to the owned platform. But organizations who deliver only changes to the clicks (or taps) part of their strategy are missing out.

A better integrated or blended retail approach is to plan for changes in three areas:

• Bricks
• Clicks
• People

Look at the impact of a new digital service

• How can it be fully integrated?
• How can it be a destination that improves the customer experience?
• Are your people trained in it?
• Are they fully on board?

Instead of thinking in channels, much like the layer cake of the canvas, think about moments in time. Planning for this change can initially appear more complex than simply launching a shiny new website or app, but you are setting up success right from the outset, as failing to plan is planning to fail.

Change management

With a change in strategy to support your new CX, a change in organization design will most likely be required. This is something many organizations fail to comprehend. They believe by simply producing more digital services, they can improve the CX.

To support the future ambition, you must have a clear view on what design for the organization itself is, including roles, processes, responsibilities and ownership.

By undertaking these change management activities from the outset, and not once the new service is built, the organization has set up the S from the MARS model – we have a process that defines when to do this and we follow it all the time.