What does 2017 look like for industry leaders?
For some reason, it is at this time of the year that many of us start thinking about the future, or at least what our next 12 months will look like. On the personal side, you see gyms receive a spike in their membership registrations, dry January becomes a thing, and job titles on LinkedIn start changing much more often. From a company’s perspective, it’s the time of year when new budgets are allocated and new projects and resources are given the go-ahead.
I myself have been reading quite a bit over the holidays and see that there is a lot of chatter about how companies are investing millions in new solutions involving Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic engineering. It looks like the world is changing, and will continue to change, at such a fast pace that for some it generates excitement and for others just a high level of uncertainty. So I thought it would be interesting to see what senior leaders think and what their plans look like for 2017.
Since I joined Momentum in November to manage the startup growth programme we are launching this March, I’ve had the privilege to speak with close to 100 senior decision-makers of FTSE250 companies, most of them now mentors of our programme.
The most interesting topics we discussed have been around retail transformation and the importance of providing customers an omnichannel experience. Some major high street retailers are transforming their storefronts into smaller and more experiential areas whilst converting their old storage areas into new localised logistics and delivery centres to facilitate online services such as click & collect. Other retailers mentioned to me that they are trialling drones to offer home delivery. Imagine being able to buy something online and have it delivered to your doorstep within the hour by a flying machine!
But all this said, the thing that surprised me the most was that no matter the industry leader I spoke with, the top 3 areas that most wanted to focus on in 2017 were based on these basic principles: People, Customers and Technology.
- People
As Richard Branson’s famous quote says, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to”.
Companies can only perform as well as their processes and their people so Sean McKee, Director of Ecommerce and Customer Experience at Schuh said “we’re introducing a development programme for the team so we can better skill and retain our people. A better skilled, more experienced team will be better placed to drive data-driven, educated change to our offering. What they do every day impacts customers”.
In a similar way, David Power, Chief Technology Officer at Wonga told me that one of his goals for this year was to “be more effective as a team at evaluating our performance, increasing the quality of our communication across teams and ensuring we generate positive energy in our interactions.”
2. Customer
There is no denying that without customers a business will never be able to succeed and as Jeff Bezos said during an interview “It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”.
On these lines, Dan Moross, Director of Customer Experience at MOO, told me that their goal this year is just that, “to implement a series of quick wins to ensure that the customer experience is always high”. One of these initiatives is to segment their customers better to enable them to serve their specific needs by “building a more compelling and suitable platform for a new Professional Designer segment. We will also be devising new ways to support these customers by adding extra design and printing support to their customer offering”.
Adapting your proposition and messages to each customer is such an important success element that Schuh has been trialling stores in Germany and will now be going all in by improving their mobile experience and cementing the relationship with the German stores and consumers.
3. Technology
In this day and age, there is no room for slow and deficient digital user experiences, that’s why MOO will continue to optimise their site and services, as well as simplifying their back-end systems to provide higher user speeds, says Moross. Wonga also wants to continue the momentum developed in 2016 in re-engineering legacy platforms and continuing their migration of services to AWS. Challenging work also lies ahead for Schuh as they will be re-platforming and giving a face-lift to their site.
McKee said “We continuously test and retest with live customers through A/B testing, as we aim to improve the customer experience, minimising customer friction. The new platform will bring all our current separate sites onto a single platform and allow us to iterate faster in future.”
Innovation (BONUS)
It seems like every year, more companies are launching programmes with startups with the goal of driving innovation into their organisations. Major brands such as Unilever (Foundry), Jaguar Land Rover (InMotion) and John Lewis (JL Labs) now have their programmes attracting dozens of startups every year. During my conversations with our mentors, many of them have admitted to launching or planning on launching startup programmes in 2017 as they want to stay ahead of their competitors.
I believe that it’s definitely a great start, but in many of these programmes there is a lack of return on investment for both enterprises and startups as there needs to be more focus on bringing solutions to real customer needs and facilitating collaboration between all parties to ensure that results are met. Most programmes, corporate or independently driven, follow the traditional schooling model which aims to put startup founders in a classroom, give them space to work from and provide them access to mentors who can provide some useful advice, but this is something that only works at very early stages.
Once a startup reaches a point where their product is ready to launch, all they should be thinking about is how to scale their businesses. This is why at Momentum, we attract only those startups which have validated their offerings with SMEs and are now ready to start selling into Enterprise. This year will be key as large enterprises need to continue to innovate and will do this more effectively if they work closely with the right startups.
I’m sure that every person and every company will be at different stages which will define the type of goals they set for themselves, but I think this is a perfect example of “you have to walk before you run” and companies cannot forget that there are 3 basic elements they need to take care of if they want to move forward in the right direction. I am happy to see that many leaders are also considering ways to integrate startup solutions into their world as they are an important piece of the puzzle. We have exciting times ahead so don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
What will your company’s top priorities be for 2017?
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