This year, we started preparations last month and after having finalized the theme – Digital India, Digital Retail — we started exploring the topics for discussion in line with the theme and the need of the industry in the current context.

Advocating advocacy

I believe that if every business starts focusing honestly on its customers, then not only is it on the success track but it also doesn’t have to waste a lot of money on marketing channels. I also believe that acquiring customers is easier than making them buy from you regularly. What’s the toughest and most important is making them your brand advocates. I always root for allocating a major portion of marketing budgets on this rather than on customer acquisition. Hence, at every available opportunity, I try to push for these ideas.

So while we were discussing the topic ‘Customer Management’ for the conclave, I was very keen on having a session on ‘Customer Advocacy’ as well. Many among my colleagues did not welcome the idea as they felt India is probably not yet ready for advocacy. I feel, however, that advocacy has nothing to do with the readiness of a market but the brand. Customer advocacy is part of every brand marketing cycle if the brand has established its original proposition in the minds of its customers. In fact, most of the times, if the brand is truly delivering the promised value, its customers automatically start talking about it to others. They do this not with the intention of influencing others but out of sheer excitement of sharing their brand experience. By doing this, they actually land up being brand advocates. Therefore, the marketing teams need to be empowered and focused on ensuring that brand delivers its promise truly to its customers.

Identifying the gap

I once asked the CMO of a large brand why CMOs aren’t able to exercise control on brand delivery. He explained that it was because in India most consumer companies operate in silos. The marketing department communicates the brand in the market whereas the delivery is controlled by the operations or customer service team. According to him, the time has come for the problem to be discussed at the board level and for businesses, especially consumer businesses, to start implementing required technologies and processes to bridge the gap between marketing and delivery team.

Yes, technology can play a very important role in tracking and delivering brand value to customers. That’s why we see some of the e-commerce brands now adopting advocacy as the strategy for growth. Look at the recent ad campaigns by Flipkart and Amazon. They strongly communicate the confidence the companies feel in the experience they have delivered to their customers so far — A guy staking his annual increment while advocating Flipkart to his boss or a bride-to-be risking her wedding wardrobe with Amazon are very strong and bold messages. I am sure both companies have enough reasons to believe that their customers are ready to advocate their brands. Since both the brands are technology-driven on delivery and service aspects, they have enough reason to be confident of their readiness on advocacy based marketing.

If advocacy is the key aspect of their marketing strategy, then I am sure brands need to work towards putting the required technology and processes in place. The time has come for Indian retail industry to take this more seriously.

Syndicated with permission from ajayaggarwal.net.

Here are the three must-have strategies to help you adopt omni-channel retailing:

1. Customer-centric Approach

Building a sustainable relationship with customers is key to achieving omni-channel success. Retailers need to provide seamless access across web, mobile, and store channels for customers and convert these into richer engagement. To achieve this, retailers need to implement:

Personalized campaigns and promotions: Mere personalization is not a good-to-have strategy anymore; Relevance is the key to winning customer loyalty. To design and run personalized and relevant campaigns, retailers need to integrate structured and unstructured data, use advanced analytics to identify shopping preferences and buying behaviour. The predictive analytical capabilities enable retailers to launch personalized campaigns and promotions, resulting in improved loyalties.

Location-based customer engagement: New technologies such as NFC and iBeacon enable retailers to personalize customer engagement based on proximity. It allows advertisers to embed customer preferences and information with real-time context and send relevant notifications. Thus, location-based marketing connects the digital and physical marketing channels, and helps in deeply engaging mobile shoppers.

Social engagement: According to Hubspot, 71% consumers are likely to make a purchase decision based on social media referrals and as per SproutSocial 74% shoppers rely on social media networks to make purchase decisions. Social media marketing should be an integral part of retailers’ marketing strategy today. It provides an extensive platform to expand reach, connect with target audiences, and explore exponential growth. In addition to this, engaging with customers through social media channels not only provides an opportunity for social commerce, but also helps gain customer insights, by integrating customers’ social interactions.

Care everywhere: Retailers must care for customers across their journey – before shopping, during shopping, and post shopping through modern ways such as shopping assistance, one-touch support, recommendations, post-sales service, 24/7 helpdesk, and call centre support.

It is critical for retailers to stand out in the cluttered marketplace by effectively reaching out and engaging with their target audiences, while optimizing returns.

2. Unified Commerce Platforms

A survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, Ecommerce Europe and Ecommerce Foundation, in partnership with Demandware early this year, indicates that a high percentage of respondents are in favour of a unified commerce platform. Out of approximately 300 U.S., Australian, and European retail business executives, 53% of respondents said that they were going to deploy a unified commerce platform, an increase of 50% from last year. Adopting the right technology platforms can help transform the business model, and establish a centralized system that enables consistent service delivery across channels. Leading unified commerce platforms offer highly scalable and integrated IT solutions from engagement to fulfilment. The flexible architecture of these platforms supports the integration of multiple data sources and augments surrounding technologies such as e-Commerce, mobility, and analytics. The major advantages of adopting unified commerce platforms are:

Single view of customers across channels: Provides 360 degree view of customers regardless of the channels that helps enhance analytical capabilities, augment actionable insights, and offer personalized experience.

Inventory visibility across channels: Provides real-time and holistic view of inventory, optimizing operations, and reducing out-of-stock scenarios.

Optimized cross-channel order management: The integrated order management system enables seamless order flow across channels.

Enhanced order fulfilment capabilities: These platforms can be easily extended to fulfil orders through multiple ways, like home deliveries, click and collect, and temporary pickup locations.

Integrations with social media and online marketplaces: These platforms are flexible to integrate with social media and online marketplaces, providing complete visibility into order and inventory data.

Scalability: The unified commerce platforms are highly scalable in nature and supports business growth seamlessly.

3. Agile Work Environment

It is not enough to unify systems and build comprehensive consumer database spanning web, mobile, and store. To maximize potential, retailers need to eliminate the distinction between business units and reorganize team structures. For example, target and incentives should be re-designed to account for overall sales, than just measuring channel-specific performance. Agile work environment is about bringing people and processes in sync with technology to find the most appropriate and effective way of working collaboratively. To realize omni-channel imperative, businesses need to eliminate siloed work culture amongst channel-specific teams by creating cross-functional teams based on shared company goals.

Preparing for the Future of Retail

Achieving omni-channel excellence requires defining clear objectives and extensive executional, tactical, and strategic capabilities. Retailers who move away from siloed and legacy systems to modern unified solutions, offering highly-scalable unified platforms, have great potential to successfully adopt omni-channel strategies. Such platforms ensure successful integration of various touch points and offer great potential to retailers to gain competitive advantage.

Having said that, collaborating with strategic implementation partners with relevant industry-domain knowledge and experience will allow leveraging the partner’s expertise in implementing best-fit solutions and providing omni-channel retail services.

The consumer need for product data
The consumers are interacting with their products and brands very differently than in the past. The convergence of online search and social media engagement has made consumers more connected than ever, and entirely comfortable interacting digitally with brands and retailers.

Today’s consumers don’t care if they shop in a store, via a phone, or online. They want easy-to-use solutions that satisfy their lifestyle needs and preferences. As a result, industry has focused on providing them with a seamless shopping experience.

Moreover consumers have a more holistic view of retail options as a result of online reviews and social media – and they are quickly learning whom to trust. Therefore, Consumers are demanding more digital product information from a trusted source to be linked to the physical products they use and consume across multiple channels – anytime and anywhere. In addition, regulators are becoming advocates for the consumer – demanding greater disclosure and data accuracy.

A deluge of digital data
Data has never been easier to find. At the same time, it has never been as challenging to find accurate data consumers can trust. With this in mind, consumer trust and brand recognition is of utmost importance to businesses today.

To meet consumer expectations and help to connect them with the information that they are looking for, product data must be presented online in a consistent, searchable way that both humans – and machines – can understand and use. This in turn, will enable Retailers and brand owners to comply with emerging regulations for online information sharing.

Leveraging the power of data
If Retail community is to fully utilize the power of the Web and deliver value to their consumers, they must first agree on a standardised way to represent product data using global standards. Without this, brand owners and retailers will not be able to reap the benefits of optimized product visibility and searchability. Worse, search engines will continue struggling to understand and navigate the mountains of unstructured information that companies publish online every day.

To reach a global audience, retailers and brand owners need to agree that accurate and trusted data is essential. Questionable data will turn off potential customers and undermine brands.

Thinking Total Retail

• There was a clear difference between how the retailer looked at customer experience and what the shopper wanted.
• To bridge this gap, it’s important  for retailers to break the silos and create a unified experience.

Technology has raised the bar and a unified brand story across all channels that promises a consistently superior customer experience which ensured that the marketing department is integrated with the back office supply chain facilitated by agile and innovative technology–together which constitutes the building blocks of the next retail business model.

Key Trends Found in the Study

• My favourite retailer: The customer is still deciding
• Buying pattern: Leveraging the best of both worlds
• Why do customers buy online or in-store? It’s not price. It’s trust.
• The ‘social’ usage of social media
• Smartphones and tablets: The game-changers

Key Trends Found in the Study

The key trends will drive the business model for the ‘total retailer’ and blur the lines between  online and in-store.

This phase of change will be led by the customer, and it might make business  sense for the retailer to co-create their business model with them.

Conclusions

Retailers will need to manage the physical as well as the online store as a portfolio of stores.

On the customer service side, managing online customers requires additional rigor;  as compared to managing those who walk into the stores.

The online customer today is more proactive in sharing his or her overall shopping experience on social networking sites

Customer analytics is a key area of focus for all retailers.

Retailers who are successful in differentiating themselves in the market are the ones who are agile to change, can build a flexible as well as scalable business model that seamlessly integrates the front and back-end processes in order to meet customer expectations and build trust.

Total Retail: Customer Trends that are Changing Business Models – Report by PwC Presented by: Ms. Rachna Nath, Head of the Consumer Products Practice – PwC

The second edition of Google’s Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) had more than 200 retailers participating in the virtual shopping fest. India’s answer to the internationally popular Cyber Monday saw nearly 16 million people within four days (December 11 to 14 2013) buying everything from homes, to cars to apparels. The festival drew in the first time online shopper in huge numbers, 60% of the total number of buyers experienced virtual shopping for the first time.

E-Retailers’ response
“We have seen a phenomenal increase in the traffic and sales right from the first hour of the festival –  premium brands have seen the maximum traction.  Revenue during the festival has increased five-six times more than a usual day,” said Manu Kumar Jain, co-founder of online lifestyle store, Jabong, which was among the many e-commerce firms which hopped onto the online shopping festival platform.

Tata Housing sold more than 50 apartments with a sales value of over Rs. 25 crores across four projects during December 11-14. About 30 percent of the booking came from NRIs and 40 percent was from tier II cities.

Vikas Ahuja, CMO, Myntra, said, “GOSF 2013 started on a great note for us and we saw positive results from day one. Our traffic grew approximately 2 times and revenue growth was 3.5 times, versus the preceding few days. We saw significant pick-up across all our core categories. This was in line with our expectations.” While Mukesh Bansal, CEO & co-founder of Myntra, added, “Such customer reactions are a testament to the promise and future that online shopping holds in our country.”

Rajan Anandan, Vice-President & Managing Director, Google India, said, “With over 200 million internet users in the country, more users are opting to shop online fuelling the growth of both large multinational and home-grown companies. Industry estimates suggest that there are close to 20 million online shoppers in India and it is estimated to grow to 50 million in the next few years, making it a $16 billion industry.”

e-Cheer
E-commerce majors, Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong and Snapdeal, were the most visited sites during the event, but brands like TATA Value Homes, Nissan, BlueStone and TATA Motors were the highlights as the Indian consumer, not only shopped for apparels but bought houses, cars and jewelry online. Tata Value Homes claimed that its GOSF initiative took off strongly. In one of the first online real estate selling initiatives, Tata Value Homes claims to have sold 22 units in just 2 hours and ended up with a tally of 55 units in the four days of GOSF ’13.

For most participating e-tailers,  the online festival acts as a catalyst to attracting the first time buyers. Given the dynamics of the e-commerce business where the cost of customer acquisition is high, the payoff from offering higher than normal discounts during GOSF will come about if they are able to convert first time buyers into regular customers.

Snapdeal.com Vice President (Marketing) Sandeep Komaravelly says as much: “Initiatives like GOSF act as a catalyst to further boost adoption of online shopping in India. In fact, a lot of these new shoppers become repeat buyers and add up to the traffic on the website,”

Paying your way
Payment partners of GOSF 2013 included the organizations like Airtel, Intel and Paytm who not only used the platform to sell but also helped create awareness about online shopping and drove user participation. Airtel, for instance, offered flat 10% cash back on all online transactions on top of other offers by participating websites to customers who transacted using Airtel money. The company also gave away a free dongle on new 4G and a free Wi-Fi modem on new broadband connections.

Targeting the first time buyer
GOSF helped convert first time buyers.  Normal per day volumes on all e-commerce portals in India is about 1.5 million, GOSF days attracted 4 million people to explore these sites. Demographic proportions remained largely unchanged with females outnumbering males and SEC B, C, D and E audiences leading the segments. The GOSF site got 2 million unique visitors this year with 62% of shoppers in the ages 18-34 and almost 50% being women. The most viewed categories according to the internet search giant were electronics, shoes and watches.

Non Metro Customers abound
One more interesting trend observed during the event was that the non-metro residents, in large numbers, logged in to shop. Last year, according to the online marketplace, Snapdeal, a majority of sales during GOSF came from metro cities at 66% followed by tier 1 cities at 17%, tier 2 at 9% and tier 3 at 8%. This year the tier-wise sales distribution was more homogenous with metro cities at 34%, tier 1 at 22%, tier 2 at 25% and tier 3 at 19%. Studies also showed that more than 40% queries came from mobile phones.

The event not only benefitted but also contributed to the flourishing space of e-tailing in India by introducing a huge pool of first timers. A recent report put out by KPMG-IAMAI estimated that, over the past three years, the Indian e-commerce industry has grown 150%, increasing from $3.8 billion in 2009 to $9.5 billion in 2012. More than 200 million internet users, penetration of internet through mobile phones and safe and easy payment methods are the factors that are contributing to increase in online shopping. Industry estimates suggest that there are close to 20 million online shoppers in India and it is estimated to grow to 50 million in next few years, making it a $16 billion industry.

Not without its teething problems
The largely successful GOSF 2013 was not without its share of problems, e.g.  the crashing of the website due to huge traffic on the first day and issues related to availability and delivery. Google recovered from the initial surge in volumes within hours and was able to use it to its advantage by extending the festival.  Some of the operational glitches were due to the fact that e-tailers were not prepared for volumes surge ranging from 3x to 10x.

Given that online shopping is still at initial stages in India, experiences like these will help the organizers be better prepared the next year and focus on improving the overall shopping experience.

Formal consumer feedback studies are awaited on GOSF – for now, from a business perspective the event was a success and is likely to see it’s third and subsequent editions.