The rise and rise of consumer commerce expectations
Long gone are the days where being online was a strategic advantage. Today, most businesses have an online presence, and most of them sell online. It is estimated that there are more than two million e-commerce stores selling products on the internet around the world today. Amazon alone offers more than 3 billion products worldwide.
Online shopping has been embraced by New Zealanders too — with more than 2.5 million Kiwis making a purchase on the internet in 2018. New Zealanders spent a total of $10 billion online during the same year. E-commerce is the new normal, to say the least.
And the online ecosystem is becoming exponentially more complex. Today’s customers own multiple devices — with two third of New Zealanders owning more than 3 internet-connected devices. Most of those devices are mobile. In 2017, there was a total of 3.8 million mobile phones with active internet connections in New Zealand.
Everything is not only becoming more complex, it’s becoming faster too. Even the customer pace of life is speeding up — the average person now walks 10% faster than they were a decade ago. So it is not surprising to note that today’s customer expects retailers to deliver a fast experience. 53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Not only e-commerce is changing, but the society around us is also evolving. Even if most individuals want to feel unique and expect hyper-personalization and individual gratification — we are also seeing more collective trends appearing around the world. Social platforms are now part of our daily life and are responsible for multiple global movements. The sharing economy is growing as well, with platforms like Cityhop, Airbnb, Lime and Uber becoming mainstream. It’s the paradoxical rise of both individualism and collectivism.
Due to the rise of both movements, today’s customers are looking for brands and experiences — not products — that will make them feel both unique and part of a community. The customer will not only look at what they are buying but also from who are they buying it and how it makes them feel — hence the importance of corporate responsibility in today’s customer eyes. When possible, today’s customer will always buy from the good guy — the one that satisfies its needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.
Omnichannel as the foundation
We, at AKQA Auckland, were lucky enough to have recently been involved in the development of an e-commerce solution for one of New Zealand’s largest retailers. While they may be a little late to the party from an online retailing perspective, the approach they have taken has enabled a much more future focused direction than if they had tried to build around legacy systems.
Central to their approach is the idea of developing a platform that enables the development of a complete omnichannel commerce experience from the ground up. While the idea of omnichannel is not necessarily new, there are few retailers who have managed to really make the transition from multi-channel to true omnichannel. And when we say omnichannel we’re talking full touchpoint integration across every stage of the retail journey.
Principal Analyst at Forrester, Brendan Witcher, outlines his view of omnichannel commerce in the recently published Omnichannel Commerce Playbook. According to Witcher “omnichannel commerce is the coordination of traditional channels (marketing, selling, and fulfilment) and supporting systems to create a seamless and consistent customer experience.” Transitioning fully from multichannel to omnichannel commerce requires digital businesses to evolve in four key areas:
An enterprise-level, single view of the customer. Delivering nearly every omnichannel capability — including engagement, fulfilment, and pricing — depends on your ability to identify a specific customer across your brand’s entire ecosystem. Why? Omnichannel means seamless and consistent customer experiences. On the operational side, you need analytics that helps you understand customer behaviour across channels in order to optimize programs. Digital business professionals recognize that they must switch from legacy spreadsheet measurement techniques to advanced solutions that combine data across all conversion points and engagement channels in order to analyze their unified impact.
Seamless customer engagement. Digital business pros must find ways to eliminate conversational breaks in the buying journey when a customer uses separate screens, channels, and technologies. To ensure that you optimize every part of the customer journey, you must also address service as part of your omnichannel capabilities. Why? Customers expect a consistent customer service experience across touchpoints. For example, when they begin a conversation in one channel and switch to another, they do not want to repeat themselves.
Anywhere, anytime fulfilment. Customers often chose e-commerce for its convenience, so they expect the shipping portion of the e-commerce experience to be as convenient. They don’t only expect your package delivered fast — they also want it when it’s convenient for them. For every customer, it may be a different hour of the day and a different location — home, work or even collect it in a store or specific drop-off point. In New Zealand, New World is doing just that. Order online and collect your groceries in-store or get them delivered to your home or workplace at a time that suits you. Also, 79% of US online adults say it’s important for a retailer to offer visibility into items that are available in the store, and 34% are less likely to visit a store if its in-store inventory isn’t available online.
Product and pricing parity. Forrester estimates that digital touchpoints currently impact over half of total US retail sales, so you can’t afford to lose sales simply because you are unable to allow customers to pay the same final price, regardless of where they choose to transact. This “one brand to one customer” presentation consistency extends to pricing, which has unique challenges, given that it often varies based on location in B2C or a specific customer in B2B. These challenges grow as companies attempt to apply markdowns, discounts, promotions, and even shipping offers to a customer’s order.
An evolution like this requires the connection of many moving parts. For our recent launch, we put the Sitecore Experience Platform at the centre of the solution, plugging in a number of intelligent connectors that enabled us to leverage the best of native Sitecore functionality combined with best of breed third party products and bespoke software driving the internal systems.
The end solution includes a single view of the customer through an integrated experience database connected to the organisation’s physical transactional database, multiple options for fulfilment, with the Sitecore commerce front-end sitting on top of a bespoke commerce engine driven by a single pricing and promotion database.
The reason all of this is important is that without a platform that provides the foundation for true omnichannel commerce, retailers are likely to be left behind as the demands of consumers evolve.
With expectation comes opportunity
This faster, more complex and ever-changing world may sound scary — but is actually full of opportunities.
Make your marketing personalized and fully integrated with your business strategy. As customers are connecting to your brand on multiple touchpoints they expect their marketing experience to be tailored to their interaction with your brand. If they love a product on social it should reflect their website product recommendations and if they buy something in-store please don’t bother them by remarketing the same product to them online.
Make your customer feel valued with a loyalty program. Customers can literally switch to a new retailer in a few clicks. So when they are loyal to you, they expect to feel like you value them. Make them feel unique and give them special attention from time to time.
Be where your customers are. Customers are on so many platforms and they expect you to be too. Make it easy for them to buy from you by making your product catalogue available on all the platforms your customer are on. Today’s customers expect to find you on social platforms, in marketplaces and even expect to be able to order by voice on their home device. And if they take time visiting your own platform (website, app or store) — they expect an even better experience.
Be offline too. Customers expect to interact with your brand outside of their screens. Amazon investing in stores should give you a hint of the synergy that exists between physical presence and online presence. Being out there will give you stronger, tangible brand presence and give your customer the opportunities to “feel” your products and brand.
Be fast — everywhere. It was true yesterday and it will be even truer in the future. Customers don’t want to wait for you or anything else. Your site and service should be seamless: load fast, shipping fast and your customer service should resolve their issues as soon as possible.
Help them find the right product for them. With so many products available online, what your customers need now is help in choosing what to buy. They expect great recommendations and even a product curation experience (e.g. stylists picked clothing). Stitch Fix in the US does just that. The customer shares their style, size and price preferences with a stylist and gets hand-selected pieces of clothing delivered to its door! And if your site can’t give them all the info they require they expect to be able to talk to someone that will help them make the right choice. Shopping made easy.
Let them experience it before they buy it. Nothing more annoying than receiving an item that is not what you expected. With VR and AR, the customers are able to get a closer look at the items they are looking to purchase before they buy it. That way, they will get the right product in the right size/colour. Resulting in less frustration for them and fewer returns for you. IKEA Place, which let you visualize furniture in your house before buying it, is an excellent example of AR done right.
Make payment as seamless as possible. The worst part of shopping? Paying. Whatever it is online or in-store, customers expect to pick the item they want and have a frictionless checkout experience. A good example of this? Uber. Unlike regular cabs, you get in and out of the car without feeling like you are part of a transaction.
Think of your packaging as an extension of your brand. The package they receive may be the only physical contact the customers will ever have with your brand. When they receive a product from you — they expect to connect with your brand and feel good about buying your product. For LootCrate, the box is actually part of the experience — with each box tailored to a specific product mix. Do you think that the customer doesn’t care? Ask the 200K users that have uploaded a Lootcrate unboxing video on Youtube…
From smart retail to a ubiquitous commerce experience
The retail landscape has changed a lot in the last few years, but it will evolve even more in the next few years. Done right, the foundations that are being laid now with your retail activity will set the scene for a continuous evolution towards an increasing omnichannel and seamless commerce experience.
It is not the end of physical shops. Remember when people said e-commerce will replace bricks and mortar? The role of physical shops will continue to evolve and they won’t disappear anytime soon. The store of the future will be even more connected and will focus on the experience instead of the product. Customers that enter your store will expect to connect with your brand on a personal level. What may have simply been a store that focused on visual merchandising & sales will now be an immersive experiential centre that gives consumers the opportunity to socialise, discover, learn, share and participate.
Payment will be invisible. We mentioned it before, but the payment process is always the worst part of the shopping experience. In a not so far future, the old ways of paying will disappear and be replaced by invisible payment methods. You may have already seen beacons or geolocation replacing payment (think Uber) but in some part of the world facial recognition is the new payment method. Why carry around money when your body could soon be your wallet?
Convenience products shopping will become automated. Out of milk? Out of soap? Does your toothbrush need to be changed? In the future, you won’t have to give this a second thought. With smart home and smart appliance, your shopping list will be connected to your favourite retailers (or cheapest if you prefer!) and they will make sure you never run out of your favourite products. Seems like sci-fi to you? With the new Amazon Key, your grocery may soon be delivered directly to your fridge.
Retailers will understand customers needs better than customers understand them themselves. With all the data collected and the increasing use of AI, retailers will soon be able to know the customer better than customers know themselves. Enable customer to get a fully personalized experience and to buy the product that is perfectly tailored to their need.
Touchpoints will become touchless. It’s not only physical stores that will evolve as digital touchpoints of tomorrow will also advance. They may no longer involve touch. Voice is already becoming mainstream. In the US, around 40% of adults interact with their mobile voice assistant and 20% have a smart speaker at home. Businesses are already hard at work developing brainwave-controlled software and hearing aids that can assist with your daily tasks. It wouldn’t be surprising to see any of those used to enhanced shopping in the future.
Sustainability is not a fad. We live in a world where sustainability will only become increasingly important. With a world of information at fingertips, expect customers to be even more aware of the choices they make in the future. Even today, studies have found that 66% of global consumers are willing to pay more for a product that is environmentally or socially sustainable.
Crawl, walk, run
The road ahead is exciting, but there are a few obstacles between most retailers and our vision of the future.
Most of the opportunities of tomorrow are based on customer data-driven insight. Today most businesses data is siloed and hard to access. Also, with so much data at hand, it is hard to make sense of it and even more to act on it.
Not only the data is siloed, sometimes businesses are too — it is not rare to see a marketing function planning strategies without understanding what the operations or IT teams are working on. Fragmented teams and strategies are one of the main obstacles that will face most retailers in the next few years.
Your technology stack too is likely to give you headaches. Investing in the right technology partners and deeply understanding your full stack is surely going to be one of your greatest assets in the future.
On top of that, all retailers will want to make sure that what they are doing will end up being profitable. ROI calculation and understanding attribution of all their investments will become increasingly complex and increasingly important.
But you know what? Change is risky but — let’s face it — status quo is even riskier.
Have a vision, but start with the basics, and if possible build from the ground up. Integrate disparate systems using intelligent connectors, ensuring that the transactions and activity you’re tracking in the offline world connect to online activity. Be flexible in how you think about fulfilment, and above all, be where your customers are, when and where they want you.
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