It isn t often that a panel discussion hosted by the august Churchill Club has me thinking that I ve stumbled into a book club debating the latest dystopian novel from the author of the Hunger Games.
But there on the SAP campus in the hills above Palo Alto recently, a crew of retail experts was talking about dominance, survival, agility, staying hungry and living by one s wits. The topic was the future of retail — online and in-store — framed by the combative title Battle for the Buy.
The short summary: If you re not Amazon, you re dead. OK, if you re not Amazon or maybe Walmart, you re dead. OK, maybe you ll make it if you re not Amazon or Walmart and you come up with a killer customer experience. Oh, and you re going to need machines to make it happen. The world is moving too fast; inventories are too large, and changing too quickly; and individual consumers describe products in too many different ways for humans to possibly keep up.
Oh, one more thing from Brian Walker, the senior vice president for Hybris, an SAP-owned e-commerce platform provider: I think it s also about business processes and being willing to fail fast while you learn how to engage with your customers in a new way that is mobile first, digitally enabled.
Got that?
Survival for the unAmazons is simply going to take a new way of thinking, Walker and others on the panel said.
Technology is an enabler, Walker said, but it also has to do with the processes and the mindset within an organization, developing more of a one-to-one relationship with your customer, talking about merchandizing in that same construct, getting beyond simple personalization engines into thinking about driving a more holistic engagement with customers, where you are giving them a reason to come back.
The talk wasn t all gloom and doom (as you can see in the video of the lengthy discussion below).
The panelists offered potential solutions. And if any group would have ideas about where retail is going and how retailers should navigate the future, it would be this crew. Besides Walker, the panelists included Venky Harinarayan, a digital commerce veteran, who worked at Amazon and @WalmartLabs; Ratnakar Lavu, Kohl s senior vice president for digital strategy and Patricia Nakache a general partner at Trinity Ventures, who focuses on e-commerce among other things.
Harinarayan was perhaps the staunchest of the Amazon-will-conquer-all-crowd. He pointed out that it s nearly impossible to beat Amazon on retail s three key differentiators.
You re not going to win the selection process with Amazon today, he said. You re not going to make it up on price or convenience anymore. You truly have to be honest with yourself about how you re going to play that game with Amazon.
But Walker and others said, not so fast. Brick and mortar stores and online retailers can turn to the customer experience. In-store beacons are coming — technology that will let store employees know that a particular customer has arrived, provided that that customer elects to check-in. Sales associates can be armed with information about that customer s likes and other information that would help the associate anticipate the shopper s intent.
Call centers can be reconfigured to cater to in-store shoppers, customers who have specific questions about what s right in front of them, or what they can t find. Physical stores can morph into centers that are part showroom and part fulfillment center, serving as warehouses for shipping or pick up.
The possibilities online are even more promising. The personalization that Walker mentioned? Walker and Ratnakar agreed the technology is all but here to provide one-to-one personalization, treating each customer as a distinct individual with individual preferences.
Yes, there is still work to do, Lavu told the crowd. But, I do think for the first time, actually, the technology is there. Whereas if you asked the traditional retailers in the past, like five years ago, we would have said, Absolutely not.
But with big data advances, such as Hadoop, he said, retailers can analyze large sets of data, use predictive algorithms and build a one-to-one understanding.
And on the consumer side, technological advances are both increasing the flexibility that customers have and raising their expectations regarding their shopping experiences. Take the explosion in mobile phones and tablets. Mobile is growing wildly and has tremendous potential, Nakache said.
You want them to be able to shop right then and there, she said of consumers. You need to design an experience that is simple and as frictionless as possible.
Given smartphones small screens and tiny keyboards, customers need to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimum effort. And if they start their search on mobile, they don t want to have to start their quest all over, should they later move to a tablet or laptop.
By the way, Walker added, the customer just expects consistency, relevance and context. The device? The screen you re using? That s just a mechanism, he said. Adding later: It s not just about converting on mobile devices. You have to tie all those channels together and it has to happen right now.
It all sounds so urgent, the way Walker puts it. And after listening to him and the others at the Churchill Club, it s hard to argue that it isn t.
Photo by Paul Sakuma/Associated Press archives
