They’re growing up fast.

Think of COVID as something of digital grocery’s pubescent adolescence—an accelerated period of sudden and oftentimes awkward physical and emotional growth along a journey to adulthood.

And just as no two teenagers mature at precisely the same pace, retail grocers today find themselves somewhere along the continuum of providing shoppers with the tools, capabilities and experiences they need to serve this growing field most effectively, winning digital loyalty over time.

As Incisiv’s 2021 Digital Maturity Benchmark Study illustrates, the differences between the most mature and those still getting there are providing outsized advantages to the former as they chase a lucrative prize: Even as researchers slightly temper their projected growth pace of digital as the post-COVID shopping landscape comes into better view, online grocery penetration will more than double in the coming five years, comprising 20.5% of an estimated $1.285 trillion market in 2026.

Incisiv currently estimates online comprises about 9.5% of a $1.1 trillion market. The retailers it considers the most mature—or in the parlance of the report, the 13 “Leaders” emerging from 117 companies studied through observational assessments and consumer preferences analysis. The digitally most mature grocers are growing digital revenues at a rate of more than five times of their least-grown-up rivals. “That correlation,” says Amar Mokha, chief operations officer of Incisiv, “is only getting stronger.”

The report, whose findings are published here for the first time and detailed ahead, is loaded with insights that provide both the big-picture of the online journey and recommendations and examples illustrating the areas in which retail grocers need to continue to invest. Among its highlights:

• Online grocery adoption, which jumped almost 43% between 2018 and 2020, is expected to grow to 50% by 2022.
• As effects of the pandemic on grocery stores began to recede, some consumers—particularly, older ones—went back to shopping in-store. This and other signals triggered Incisiv to temper its projections for the rate of future growth slightly: While last year’s report anticipated 21% of total grocery revenue would be digital by 2025, new projections put the 2025 figure at 18.5% on the way to 20.5% by 2026. That’s still miles ahead of pre-pandemic estimates.
• The report for the first time examines differences in the demographic makeup of digital adopters and zip-code analysis of respondents, pointing to a largely underdeveloped opportunity to better “personalize” experiences for online shoppers.
• COVID sparked big progress and near-parity with all classes of trade in fulfillment last year, but in so-called “top-of-the-funnel” capabilities—search, discovery and navigation of e-commerce shopping sites and apps—grocery still badly lags them.
• The study no longer “ranks” grocers in a single best-to-worst list, but instead groups them into tiers based on their “maturity” among four key capabilities—Ease of Search and Navigation; Seamless Ordering and Checkout; Convenience of Placing and Receiving Orders; and Customer Engagement and Service—as Laggards, Followers, Challengers and Leaders. Their placement is based in part of their having reached “table stakes” or differentiating capabilities in those areas.
• As in previous years, the study examines dozens of discrete attributes making up each of the four key areas.

According to Mokha, the study is the most comprehensive and largest of its kind, with 42,190 discrete attributes assessed across 117 retailers, and analysis of nearly 12 million data points. In addition, Mokha adds, we collaborate on a shopper study with Mercatus on an annual basis that adds context .

Online Grocery Store Outlook

Despite a slight adjustment, online penetration projections are still well ahead of pre-COVID estimates.

Search & Discovery

With about 90% of shoppers checking the website before even planning their store visits, the research and discovery process of digital channels can be the most crucial element of success, but grocers have a long way to go.

Seamless Ordering & Checkout

Loyalty in online shopping is low; 50% of online shoppers defect for better deals. Retailers have to make the value tangible for the shopper beyond the product and make checkout an easy and frictionless process.

Convenience of Placing & Receiving Orders

Availability of omnichannel fulfillment options has become widespread, with 86% of retailers now offering BOPIS and 71% now offering curbside pickup. However, it is the ease and experience of ordering and receiving products that will determine its winners and losers.

Customer Satisfaction & Issue Resolution

In the absence of physical interactions, customer satisfaction has to evolve from a call-center resolution function to a pro-active customer engagement and satisfaction engine that will directly contribute to shopper loyalty.

Meet the Most Mature

Ten U.S. retail grocery brands—BJ’s Wholesale Club; Costco Wholesale; Hy-Vee; Albertsons’ Cos.’s Jewel-Osco; Kroger; Ahold Delhaize’s Giant Co. (Giant/Martin’s); Publix Super Markets; Target; Walmart and Wegmans Food Markets—are included in Incisiv’s list of 13 global retailers recognized as overall leaders. Coop Group (Switzerland); Loblaws (Canada) and U.K.’s Sainsbury’s complete the list.

These brands “have a strong foundation of table-stakes capabilities along with leadership in the adoption of differentiating capabilities,” the report notes. BJ’s, the Natick, Mass.-based membership wholesale club, ranked No. 2 overall to Tesco in last year’s rankings and led all grocers studied in 2019.

The Leaderboard

The study grouped 109 brands into the following four categories based on their adoption of table-stakes capabilities and differentiators Leaders grew revenues by 11% last year; Laggards by 2%.

Q&A with Incisiv’s Amar Mokha

Big trends and big opportunities are all in the data.

Jon Springer: Let’s start with the market trends you see coming out of this study.

Amar Mokha: Digital share of revenue continues to grow: Adoption, which jumped almost 43% in 2020 over 2018, is expected to exceed 50% by 2022. So where does that put us? Last year, we projected that digital share of grocery would be about 21.5% of total grocery sales in the U.S. by 2025. That was middle of the pandemic when sort of things were shut down, and there were restrictions on going to the store.

Now that people see almost the light at the end of the tunnel, people are vaccinated, stores are open, and restrictions have come down, there is a fair bit of population that is beginning to shop back in store.

And what we are now projecting is that while the share of revenue would continue to grow, we’ll probably hit 20% by 2026 and not 21% by 2025.

In a recent shopper study we conducted in partnership with Mercatus, we also looked at demographic profiles, and for first time we asked about ethnicity. Younger consumers have a higher propensity to shop demographics. And when you look at ethnicity, African-Americans and Latinos’ digital adoption is almost 10% more than Caucasians.

In what areas have retailers made the most progress, and where do they still have work to do?

Grocers were quick to adapt because of the pandemic last year. And suddenly, they all ramped up their fulfillment capabilities, to be able do curbside pickup or buy online, pick up in store. That that is one area where grocery retailers are almost the industry benchmark when it comes to digital maturity.

But when it comes to the top-of-the-funnel engagement, the No. 1 friction point that consumers speak about is the inability to have a properly functioning search, the inability to have a streamlined navigation in their customer journey, in the same way a department store, apparel or direct-to-consumer [retailer] has, from a look-and-feel perspective: The slick navigation, single- step checkouts, etc.

Grocery retailers have thought of every conceivable function and feature when it comes to fulfillment—they’ve implemented buy-online, pick-up-in-store, same-day delivery, two-hour pick up. Now some are talking about 20-minute fulfillment also. Interestingly, while retailers are gung-ho on fast-track delivery, it comes with a cost to the customer. When you speak to customers about the propensity to spend for faster speed of delivery, is very low.

Another interesting insight was, if you look at home delivery, the adoption rates are dropping to pre-pandemic levels, where it was about 23% of all grocery orders placed online. It went up to almost 37% last year in the middle of the pandemic. But we see a significant increase in online orders being picked up in store.

Grocers have not yet really started doing much around personalization, and that’s where this discovery on ethnicity took us. So if a particular profile, whether it is African-American or Latino or Asian or Caucasian, is more valuable, then what makes the whole element of personalization become all the more important.

So, we should anticipate that search and discovery will be top priority for grocers? Where would you expect the most relative investment?

I have a two-part answer. Grocery retailers who got their house in order earlier around fulfillment and ordering are going to step back to basically align their operating models. Now, more and more orders are flowing through the store. Based on our findings in the Mercatus Shopper Study, the stores are going to end up filling almost 75% of them. So, they’re first focused on streamlining the operating margins, equipping the stores to be able to provide that experience, both to in-store customers and the customers ordering digitally but touching the store for fulfillment.

That is a big area where retailers are bleeding money, and taking a hit on customer service, because they’ve essentially had to throw more and more labor in to sustain that basic customer experience.

Once they’re past that, then we’ll see the next wave of investment. And if I have to make a call, my first bet would be experience on mobile, followed by personalization. The third would be on search and discovery.

When does this survey stop being necessary for the industry?

Even for the most mature retailers, I would say we still have two to three more years. On the front end, things are looking better, but still there’s a long way to go on the back end. And given the wrench that COVID threw in, suddenly everything’s sort of shifted towards digital. And everybody has to wait and watch whether this digital shift sticks or not across retail, and then, whether the investments will continue to yield the dividend that they’ve yielded in the last 18 months, or not. That’ll determine the next wave of maturity, and the evolution of digital channels.

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When we think about the recent buzz around the word “autonomous,” our minds often tend to think of vehicles, specifically the emerging world of self-driving cars. From Google, to Tesla, to mainstream auto brands; seemingly every manufacturer is charging after this segment. These game-changing vehicles are guided by artificial intelligence and have the potential to improve and dramatically transform transportation safety and its accessibility. And while once a futuristic concept, autonomous cars are becoming a reality thanks to this evolving technology. But this is not the only industry that’s about to be completely revolutionized by AI and the concept of the autonomy spectrum.

Autonomous is no longer just for vehicles – it’s on the cusp of transforming the world of customer service. Just like autonomous vehicles can interpret environmental factors, as well as driver and vehicle information in real time for optimal vehicle performance and safety, customer service technology now has the power to take a very similar approach. Enabled by advances in AI, there’s a new generation of customer service that’s automated, preemptive, journey-oriented, and ultimately puts the customer in the metaphorical (autonomous) driver’s seat – getting quality service without needing to put in much effort.

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Fueling the transition is the proliferation of digital touch points and conversational mediums like web chat, social media, chatbots, intelligent virtual assistants, and even advanced virtual reality, which have the potential to completely change the face of customer service for the better. And enhancing customer service experiences should be top of mind for every organization: according to a recent Pega survey, 77% of customers would take their business elsewhere if they received poor service.

Even if organizations are meeting customers on their preferred digital channels, 46 percent of customers don’t expect organizations’ current self-service to work, so it’s time to change the narrative. Organizations need to implement the right strategies in order for the service industry to continue on this potentially life-changing trajectory. Here is what to keep in mind when embarking on your own autonomous service journey:

Understand your customers – and your own business’ shortcomings

Today’s customers don’t care how an issue gets resolved, just that it gets resolved quickly. Particularly after living through a pandemic that forced them to seek service through other channels from the safety of their homes, they’re more willing than ever before to use self-service technology. In fact, 45% of customers are more likely to use self-service today than before the pandemic. This consumer willingness to use automated digital channels to resolve service issues is a great opportunity for brands not already taking advantage. The ability to solve service issues via autonomous channels frees up time and resources for agents to tackle higher-level service issues.

What’s critical here is also consistency in experiences. For many companies, phone calls with agents and in-person interactions may be significantly better than their chatbot capabilities, for example. That’s at the heart of the problem. Eighty percent of businesses admit that the level of service they provide is different across channels. It’s one thing to be present on all channels, but that’s not enough – brands need the ability to equally resolve issues on those channels. Customers need consistent experiences, and it’s on brands to meet customers where they are and get their issues resolved in that moment.

The final shoe to drop is continuity. For example, when a customer starts an interaction via text, that interaction needs to follow them through web chat or to an agent if it needs to be escalated. Autonomous technology can help sort through the noise and carry through that context seamlessly from one channel to the next. This results in not only shorter agent interactions (and lower average handling time) but also faster resolution for customers.

Organizing technology around the customer journey

Autonomous technology is here to provide better, more consistent, and faster service. This new generation of AI-powered autonomous service is fundamentally different. These advances in technology are not the same as the prior generations of chatbots and portals that can commonly frustrate customers and fail to ultimately contain the service inquiry.

The game changer is organizing autonomous service around the customers’ journey, which allows the business to extend the journey-centric insights and processes to any digital touch point. These touch points may include intelligent virtual assistants (IVA), email robots, and even contextual self-service portals that inherently understand each customer’s unique personal service journey. This allows the digital experience to, in many cases, present the very same level of journey-driven understanding and resolution they would receive via a human agent for massively different outcomes. This new generation of tech also has the ability to improve even agent-based interactions by applying the very same elements of AI and automation to “augment” agents’ abilities, allowing the tech to serve as a helpful co-pilot during live agent interactions.

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The benefits already speak for themselves: businesses that have applied this new form of autonomous service technology have observed extremely high resolution (containment) rates of their highest volume inquiries without requiring an agent at all. Additionally, this autonomous approach enables more centralized organization, rather than by channel, to maintain the customers’ journey state even as they move across channels. Customers no longer have to repeat themselves multiple times on a service call.

While this technology is exciting, it’s also important to note that not all approaches are created equal. It’s important to determine your customer strategy, goals you’re looking to accomplish, and find a solution (or solutions) that will help you get there. Quick-fix tech may provide a temporary band aid by solving a particular issue in the moment but may not be right for your long-term strategy. Look for smart solutions that will best support your employees and customers – both now and down the line.

Enter “Service Tech” – the future of service

We’ve all heard of MarTech, but now it’s time for the recognition of a new world of Service Tech – technology that forms the foundation to allow organizations to provide the best customer service they can, wherever and whenever it is needed. Autonomous technologies have made it possible to enter a transformative era of proactive and preemptive service. Here, the technology is able to use real-time AI, intelligent automation, and event/pattern detection to, at times, resolve issues before they even arise – much like the progressive levels of autonomous features in today’s vehicles.

Much like there is a spectrum of vehicle autonomy, where AI assists the driver with progressively more advanced capabilities, businesses may employ a spectrum of service autonomy as well. Consider that some vehicles have the ability to alert drivers when they leave the lane, others will gently nudge the vehicle on track, and others still may be nearly self-driving, depending upon the conditions and options selected. The same nature of augmentation is now coming of age in the world of customer service as well, where AI has the ability to automatically surface knowledge content, pre-populate responses, and even enter data into the screen, based upon what is said in the live conversation.

 This technology doesn’t replace your agents. Rather, it supports them. It makes them more efficient and allows them to focus upon the more meaningful, higher complexity interactions where the human touch and empathy is most required. In the end, those who are equipping their service departments with autonomous technology are the ones who will provide better customer service. A strong autonomous technology strategy and implementation not only helps employees increase productivity and enables them to dedicate more of their time to higher-level, more sensitive service issues, it encourages more brand loyalty in the form of happier customers.

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PHOTO:
Victor Garcia

Personalization comes in multiple shapes and forms, many of which businesses can put to effective use. But they shouldn’t make the mistake of launching all of them at once. An incremental approach works well here. And a good place to start is product hierarchies.

Why Start a Personalization Initiative With Product Hierarchies?

The way an ecommerce site organizes products is a primary mechanism for customers to discover products and solutions. When we know what we want, we tend to retrieve through search. When we don’t know what we want, we discover by browsing. People often shift from retrieval to discovery and back again multiple times during the course of their journey, and both of these mechanisms need to work in tandem on the site. 

Search alone only works when people know what they want and know what terms to use to accurately and unambiguously describe what they want. The challenge is the search terms people actually use are short, ambiguous and an approximation of the searcher’s real information need. Therefore, after retrieving the search results, the user often needs to fine-tune the results using browsing and refinement via navigation. Faceted filtering appears as navigation but uses product attributes to refine or expand results (size, color, brand, price, application, solution, etc.). Search and browse use cases inform the product hierarchy and filters, which are enabled by the product data model.  

Related Article: 5 Drivers of Personalized Experiences: A Walk Through the AI Food Chain

A Persona vs. an Audience Based Approach 

The ways that people browse or traverse the product hierarchy vary depending on how they think about what they need and how they go about fulfilling that need. What is most important to them? What do they care about? For B2B customers, an engineer cares about functionality and technical specifications, while a procurement manager cares about pricing, supply chain reliability and performance guarantees. Each user’s “mental model” varies depending on background, knowledge, objective, and communication and work styles, among other personal attributes.  

Target audiences fall into segments — engineers and procurement managers, in this case — but members of a given audience might have different work or communication styles. What an engineer fresh out of university cares about will be very different from the veteran engineer with 20 years of field experience. New engineers may have different expectations about how they interact with technology or how they collaborate with colleagues. In the case of consumers, some segments seek a trusted brand, while others might want the best price. Product hierarchies should allow for navigation paths that are dynamic enough to accommodate different types of users even within a specific audience segment. These different types of users are represented by personas — a description of an archetypical user and their personality with day-in-the-life scenarios as well as a narrative about their background, education, family status, personal goals and more. 

An audience can be made up of multiple personas and a single persona can represent multiple audiences. So, should design and testing be based on audience or on persona? The answer depends on whether the audiences have more things in common or personas have more in common.  

Let’s go back to that audience of engineers. The audience would undoubtedly include engineers who differed from each other across multiple dimensions. They would reflect different personalities, ways of working and communication styles for whom one hierarchical structure might be preferable over another. The question is whether “engineer-ness” is more impactful than their other characteristics. 

Optimizing for one audience segment at the expense of others — engineers versus procurement managers, for example — is clearly not ideal. Another option is to design for the least common denominator. Develop a common structure that satisfies across multiple audiences but does not optimize for any one of them. Or serve up multiple navigational constructs for different audiences, either through self-selection of role, need, industry, application, or other organizing principle, or through authenticated user profile information that contains those attributes. This approach is more nuanced, and has to be tested to ensure that the needs of different audiences are understood and that their choices are not being incorrectly limited. 

Ultimately, navigation should be personalized based on the results of testing various designs and the resulting behaviors. How those insights are activated to produce the experience depends on organizational process maturity, information architecture design, and the available technology stack.

Related Article: Personalization Prep Work: Is Your Content Ready?

3 Mechanisms to Use Data to Guide Personalization

1. Simulation to refine design

During the design phase of a project, different ways of organizing products are tested across scenarios, use cases, and tasks for different audiences and specific personas. The objective is to measure success or failure of task completion as well as the path that users took to achieve their objectives. Testing usually shows that different personas/audiences have very different needs, and those different needs are served by a different experience. 

2. Data from onsite user behavior

An approach may work in testing but it has to be validated or confirmed after deployment. As changes and course corrections are implemented, those changes also need to be monitored. Do people click through to product detail pages from product category landing pages? Or do they resort to search because the landing page does not contain the information they need? Or do they bounce out to a competitor’s site? Do they pick up the phone and call their rep to place an order? 

On-site behavior changes should trigger design evaluations and suggest updates. A metrics-driven governance playbook can be developed to guide oversight and form the foundation for more routine, rules-driven updates.

3. Real-time response to user behavior

This is the holy grail of personalization. The goal of personalization at scale is to embed human knowledge and skill in the digital infrastructure. The system should read digital body language just as a skilled salesperson reads physical body language and responds appropriately. This ability requires that knowledge is captured and componentized, that customer data models are rich with characteristics represented by metadata (all of the details we can personalize on–location, preferences, role, topics of interests, industry, objective, etc.), that product data contains the attributes that different audiences require, and that there is a detailed model of the customer journey that represent moments that matter, micro-decisions, and responses to various messaging channels. It also requires an orchestration and optimization engine, which depends on machine learning, to interpret the various signals that are coming throughout that journey and to associate messaging combinations and recommended content and products in real time.

These approaches differ in the timing at which insights from data can be acted upon (or activated). For simulation, the timing can be days or weeks for user behavior, it may be hours to days (or for some large organizations, weeks);  and for real-time response, it is essentially instantaneous or near real-time. Clearly, the more quickly that insights can be activated, the better.

Related Article: Personalization at Scale With Modular Content

A Foundation for the Personalization Journey

Data about behaviors is an input to design decisions and is essential for ongoing refinement of the experience. More sophisticated personalization mechanisms build on this foundation. Personalization is a process of anticipating what users need and surfacing information that meets those needs. Starting by adjusting navigational choices based on audience needs can evolve into more complex and real-time personalization of content, products and solutions that will one day emulate how human experts interact  with customers — guiding them through choices and selections unique to their challenges and situation. Starting with straightforward navigational constructs is a solid, easy to validate mechanism for beginning the personalization journey. 

Seth Earley is a sought-after speaker, writer, and influencer. He is the author of “The AI-Powered Enterprise” from LifeTree Media which was release in April, 2020.

Originally Appeared Here

“Our goal has always been to meet Samsung customers where they are, and offer services that are most convenient for them,” said Scott Messina, Director of Search and Design Strategy at Samsung.

This meant updating their support site experience during the pandemic, when many customers were working from home and using their cell phones more than usual. Traffic to the website exploded.

By taking this step, not only did Samsung avoid alienating users who needed help — they also managed to elevate CX and achieved a 19% increase in customer engagement on the support site.

Responding to the soaring volume of traffic

“While our primary focus is usually SEO, ensuring customers googling for answers find our content first, we knew we needed a customer experience to match once they hit our site,” said Messina.

In the first weeks of pandemic lockdowns, customers were finding Samsung’s support site. The problem for Samsung was what to do with customers when they arrived in such high volume. Samsung was using Elasticsearch, an open and free search and analytics platform, to power their help destination. Managing a site of approximately 2,500 help articles became too labor-intensive for Messina’s small team. They also found that the search tool didn’t always provide relevant results.

In response to the increased demand, they implemented Yext Support Answers, a tool introduced earlier this year by AI-powered search company Yext, which specializes in other webpage search applications.

According to Messina, Samsung also moved to a new chat platform, rolled out several big enhancements to their chatbot, and boosted offline customer service with “We Come to You”, which sends a technician in a van to the home for phone repairs.

Improving the help experience

The Samsung content team had created a vast library of articles, videos, FAQs and other assets. But they needed to be able to deliver these with an effective search tool. Additionally, search results themselves have to be intuitive and helpful. For some queries, the Yext solution uses Extractive QA, a natural language processing algorithm, to deliver a simple answer without having to send the user to another page.

If this improves the search experience and makes it more “Google-like,” then customers are less likely to feel like they have to go to Google first. They can go directly to Samsung for help. And this, in turn, leads to more interactions and data on Samsung’s site, which the company can use to further improve its experience. And it sets up the content team for success.

“Our ability to react to customer needs has certainly improved,” said Messina. “A big part of our content management process is collecting all the signals customers give us, making sense of them, and then addressing content gaps. So, in addition to data sources like the call center and surveys on the site, this richer search data and our increased ability to make sense of it has hopefully decreased the amount of time and energy we spend fixing issues and filling content gaps.”

Tracking performance metrics

Eleven weeks after the launch of the Yext Support Answers tool, Samsung saw issues resolved increase by 15%. Customers also wanted to tell Samsung about this improved help experience. Surveys were completed eight times more frequently following the launch.

For broader metrics, CSAT was up 33%, and NPS improved 45%.

“All of these programs have aligned and use similar goals, the main one of which has been improving our Net Promoter Score,” said Messina. “Our thinking is, if we encourage more and more people to recommend Samsung to their friends and family, the rest of the traditional performance metrics will take care of themselves.”

Solving for complexity with AI

In the online help game, a small percentage of customers need special attention. With a well-known brand like Samsung, they need to remain on top of all trending service issues.

“We usually have a pretty typical 80/20 split, where 80% of the service volume makes up only 20% of the unique issues we see,” Messina explained. “There are some typical ones, like customers struggling to get their product to turn on, or looking to get their cracked screen replaced, and it’s rare that a new, unique issue crops up in enough volume to catch us off guard. That said, whenever we have a new or trending issue, search data is often the first place we look.”

A robust AI engine makes sure that no new issues fall through the cracks. And this becomes even more important when a global event like the pandemic changes everybody’s lives and creates a lot of new problems.

“Customer support teams were inundated with new and complex questions related to the pandemic and were unable to keep up with the sheer volume of tickets, holding consumers up from getting the answers they needed,” said Joe Jorczak, Yext’s Head of Industry for Service and Support. “As customer support requests grow even more complex in nature, businesses need to equip themselves with the tools to efficiently and effectively handle them and deliver the experience that consumers expect today.”

He added, “One of the most valuable parts of our AI-powered Support Answers solution is that, unlike on Google, brands can actually see the search queries that are coming through their website, as well as the answers that are being surfaced for them. For brands like Samsung that want to make their customers’ online journeys as seamless as possible, that level of business intelligence — being able to identify trending issues or opportunities to deliver better answers to popular questions — is a game-changer. It’s the key to informing their service strategy and improving customer satisfaction.”

The customer journey if often routed through Google and there’s not much brands can do about that. But by improving the parts of the experience that they own, they can help make their customers happier — while learning more from data they don’t have to share with a walled garden.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
Originally Appeared Here

Verity White, Box’s regional director of partner sales for Australia and New Zealand, has departed the cloud content management software vendor after more than three years.

White revealed the change on LinkedIn, revealing she had moved to IBM as Asia-Pacific partner and ecosystem leader for its application resource management software subsidiary, Turbonomic.

An IBM spokesperson confirmed the hiring to CRN in a statement.

“We excited to welcome Verity White as the new IBM Asia Pacific Partner and Ecosystem Leader for Turbonomic, which forms part of IBM’s application management capabilities.”

“In this newly created role, Verity will be responsible for identifying, establishing and cultivating a new external marketplace of Turbonomic partners to meet the needs of Asia Pacific customers and drive the next phase of partner growth.”

At IBM and Turbonomic, White is tasked to lead Turbonomic’s partner channel and alliances business. She will be based in Sydney, but is expected to also spend time in Singapore and other Asian countries as part of her role.

Turbonomic’s platform uses APIs to improve a customer’s application performance and governance by allocating resources like computing, database, memory and storage depending on supply and demand forces across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Speaking on her new role, White said, “I’ve always looked to lead and learn from companies that have a passion for innovation, their people, partners, and customers – IBM and Turbonomic strongly embody this.”

“I’m excited to drive more growth and partner success in Asia Pacific and deliver on our customer strategy, which is fuelled by growing customer demand to truly optimise applications in public cloud, leverage hybrid cloud, and edge technologies.”

White joined Box in 2018 as channel chief, following a seven year stint at Microsoft Australia and the United Kingdom, working up to become senior partner development manager for Microsoft Australia’s enterprise partner group. She also briefly worked at Sophos UK from 2009 to 2011.

Originally Appeared Here

Latest Emplifi Voice of Customer innovative features brings Decision AI and updated survey frameworks that offer valuable insights on campaign performance, product trends, and more

NEW YORK, October 18, 2021–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Emplifi, the leading unified customer experience platform, today announced the latest innovative features of its Voice of Customer (VoC) solution, offering Decision AI that elevates the customer experience and improves VoC use cases across marketing, product, sales, and customer service teams. The new updates include pre-packaged managed survey frameworks to help marketing, digital, product, ecommerce, and social media teams measure campaign effectiveness, gather feedback, identify product trends, and amplify shopping experiences.

“Customer expectations are higher than ever. In this new era of customer experience, listening to your audience is critical to a brand’s success. Businesses need access to innovative CX solutions that empower them to be responsive to their customers’ needs in real-time by monitoring customer expectations and perceptions at key stages of the customer journey and offering key customer-centric insights that drive measurable outcomes,” said Emplifi President and Chief Product Officer Alex George.

“With a focus on innovation and an unwavering commitment to evolving our solutions as our customers’ needs change, we built the latest version of Emplifi VoC to give CX teams heightened customer experience capabilities that allow them to make informed, rapid decisions by identifying trends, correcting issues, and tracking audience shifts,” added George.

The newly added Decision AI tool within the Emplifi VoC platform is constantly listening to survey responses to identify important trends and themes, enabling brands to proactively address any CX issues. The information and customer data gathered by Emplifi VoC is easily accessible to team managers and admins via an intuitive dashboard.

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Emplifi VoC is now available within the Emplifi Unified CX Cloud, a comprehensive customer experience platform that addresses the full customer journey by giving brands the tools they need to meet customer expectations.

The latest VoC features will be highlighted at the SOCAP Conference during a panel discussion with software solutions evangelist Doug Rippy and other CX experts. Emplifi will serve as a sponsor at this year’s SOCAP Conference which will take place in Clearwater, Florida October 17 – 20, 2021.

About Emplifi:

Emplifi is the leading unified CX platform that brings marketing, commerce and care together to help businesses close the customer experience gap. More than 7,000 brands, including Delta Air Lines, Ford Motor Company and McDonald’s, rely on Emplifi to provide their customers with outstanding experiences at every touchpoint. For more information, visit www.emplifi.io.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211018005545/en/

Contacts

Amlika Lal
Global PR Director, Emplifi
amlika.lal@emplifi.io

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PHOTO:
Annie Spratt

Understanding the customer journey isn’t possible without data. With more parts of the journey than ever before taking place online, customers are giving your business a wealth of information with every interaction. Companies can (and should) use this information to improve the customer experience and turn occasional customers into lifelong customers — but only if they use the data well.

One person who knows about the critical nature of this customer data is Mukesh Mirchandani, Vice President of Global Field Solution Engineering for Freshworks. Freshworks is a sponsor of CMSWire’s DX Summit Fall Session, taking place online Oct. 28 and Oct. 29. We spoke with Mirchandani on topics related to his DX Summit presentation, “Using the Customer Journey As a Vehicle to Break Down Data Silos.”

How COVID-19 Changed Customer Behaviors 

CMSWire: What did the customer journey typically look like two years ago and how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed that?

Mukesh Mirchandani: The customer journey has been a fantastic tool to understand both customer behavior and expectations. People make decisions on how to buy a product, service or solution for themselves or their company. There’s a lot of upfront research that happens in that process, especially if you’re buying something for your company. If you are buying a product for yourself, you are going to want to try the product in a store.

But how customers have changed their buying patterns will have an undeniable impact on the customer journey post COVID. Let’s look at retail as an example. Previously, if I wanted to buy a new product I would definitely check it out in the store. I’d want to see, touch and feel the product. COVID has impacted that; more people are making decisions online and remotely. The digital footprint of the customer journey has expanded because the in-person footprint has shrunk.

The second clear impact COVID has had is this: people want highly efficient products. This isn’t entirely new — people have always valued efficiency and effectiveness. But since COVID has shrunk consumer spending, people are optimizing for efficiency. That focus has definitely accelerated during the COVID pandemic.

Having said all this, the fundamentals of the customer journey are still the same. Customers are doing a lot of online research and making decisions that brands might not be aware of. Once a sale has been made, the expectations around customer service have become much higher and more pronounced.

CMSWire: Why is it important to gather data around the customer journey?

Mirchandani: The digital footprint is the highest it’s ever been. This means there’s at least three possible rich datasets businesses can gather and use. The first set of data is acquired in the research phase. People are researching brands and companies they’re going to buy from. They’re reading reviews online and googling before they make a purchase. People are spending way more time on your website than ever before. This creates a very rich dataset on what people have consumed and explored on your web and social properties. If a customer has spent a lot of time on a page you know they’re very interested in that product. Upfront research with or without you knowing who your customers are is a rich set of data. This goes beyond retail and includes researching B2B software.

The second set of data is acquired during the sales process. In retail that’s a short process. But in B2B it’s a longer process, and can involve an evaluation period, trials, proofs of concept and more. At the end of the day a rich set of data gets created here, which helps you understand your customers even better.

The third set of data comes about in the customer service phase. Think about a sale that’s already happened, which is when we transition to customer service and try to convert our one-time customers into lifelong customers. When customers reach out to you for any reason, their communications and how you respond to them creates a third set of data and a more robust digital footprint on your customers.

Three distinct sets of data come about in the customer journey: research, sales, service. Taken together, they give you insights into what your customers expect from you.

Data Collection Surpasses Data-Driven Insights

CMSWire: What do most organizations miss about gathering data to understand the customer journey?

Mirchandani: In the last five years or so many organizations have done a good job of collecting data. More CIOs realize the impact data can have on their success and they’re working with their teams to ensure the right data comes together.

What organizations are still working on is using data to garner insights. If a customer took Action A followed by Actions B and C, which resulted in a purchase, is this series repeatable? Do multiple customers follow these specific actions or is this one customer an outlier? Organizations are particularly struggling with it, because it’s a hard problem to solve. Customer experience platforms have been disjointed in the past. No one platform does sales marketing and service really well — which is one of the things Freshworks is trying to solve. Our aim is to create a unified customer record, having everything in one place being described by one data model.

CMSWire: Who are the stakeholders for customer journey data? Which teams can best make use of such data?

Mirchandani: The custodian of the data is IT and this should reside in the CIO’s office. Think about data at the layers that unifies the customer journey. Who should own it? If it’s marketing, they will focus on the marketing journey. Sales cares about the deal, about leads. Customer service thinks in terms of tickets. But how do you create a data model that transcends functions? IT has that broad view that brings the data into a unified model, which you then unleash for actionable insights. IT departments are the unsung heroes of any organization.

CMSWire: What are the biggest challenges to data collection relating to the customer journey?

Mirchandani: Getting insights from data. Think about what data does for you. A lot of sales organizations talk about ‘knowing your customer’ or ‘approaching your customers with empathy.’ But how do you know them? Without having access to the right data, can you be empathetic about them? Empathy and insights come from having the right data.

Organizations need a uniform way of describing a customer. The intent has always been good but there isn’t a formula for creating these insights. Only you as a company know the value of the action on your website. As such, data collection is somewhat of a bespoke process because your processes and services are unique. The right customer experience platform can give you a consistent way to describe that data. You decide the value of an action and we give you a consistent way to describe it. Once you have identified the signals you can then unleash actions to improve the customer experience.

CMSWire: How can businesses identify which customer journey metrics are the best to collect for their organization?

Mirchandani: The definition has to come from your own corporate strategies. Signals and metrics are different for each different strategy. What’s important to your business? Cross selling? Customer retention? Improve customer satisfaction? Based on that, different events will become important to you.

CMSWire: How can businesses transform customer journey data into actionable insights?

Mirchandani: Journey mapping is invaluable in discovering actionable insights and is something organizations are investing a lot of time in. But it should be done in the context of understanding your customers. One of the key advantages to journey mapping is its ability to identify two customer extremes, which will provide the blueprints for building a successful business.

The first is your most loyal customer. These are the people who shop your website every month. If you’re a B2B organization this customer buys exclusively from your platform. Mapping this customer gives you insights into maximizing wallet share. The second extreme is the unhappy customer, the person who did business with you once but never again. If you do good journey mapping for these two customer personas you’ll get insights on actions that led to your most loyal customers and missteps that led to your least loyal customers.

CMSWire: What does the future look like for the customer journey?

Mirchandani: There’s a lot of optimism around the pandemic being over soon, with many people hoping we can get back to a semblance of normalcy. That said, it’s hard to say how organizations will evolve post pandemic. However, I imagine a couple of things will continue to happen:

First, customer expectations around convenience and efficiency will stay. People have realized the power of convenience and that isn’t changing anytime soon. Second, post-pandemic customers will continue to expect high empathy and personalization. If organizations want to retain customers they have to care. Organizations that don’t demonstrate empathy will struggle. All in all, the future is going to be about data, knowing your customer and creating insights from the knowledge you’ve gained.

Claim your free pass to DX Summit here.

The events staff at Simpler Media Group, publisher of CMSWire and Reworked, work to inform our readers and community on our two conferences, the DX Summit and the Digital Workplace Experience. Find out everything you need to gear up for two of tech’s premiere events.

Originally Appeared Here

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

By Mark Hamstra, Contributor to CO— by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Companies are rethinking their approach to digital advertising amid changes in privacy policies on major digital platforms like Facebook and Google, and as online marketing becomes more ubiquitous, according to retail presenters at a CommerceNext event attended by CO—.

Online retailers are conducting more testing of creative approaches and of different platforms, adjusting their advertising strategies in real time and focusing on bolstering their customer databases as new privacy restrictions take effect.

Facebook, Google and other platforms have upgraded their privacy features to give users more control over how their data is used, which can in turn provide challenges for marketers.

Suruchi Shukla, vice president of marketing and omnichannel growth at Tailored Brands, the parent of Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, said the company is taking an in-depth look at how it’s using its data, and how its customer targeting strategies should be built, as digital platforms have applied more restrictive privacy policies.

“As Facebook and Google and others start to change their algorithms, the customer journeys shift, and our ability to adapt to a shifting customer journey is what I am focused on,” said Shukla.

Tailored Brands is working closely with its digital agencies, but also directly with Google, Facebook and Pinterest, to try to stay ahead of ongoing privacy policy changes that will impact the company’s data-driven marketing strategies.

“It’s a combination of being a little nimbler and more adaptable on our end and understanding what data we are collecting and how we apply it, and then having a direct relationship with some of the people [at the major online platforms] who have a direct impact on what we are trying to do,” Shukla said.

Related: How the Pandemic Helped Brands Like Moët Hennessy Uncork New Revenue Streams

Tailored Brands: Testing ‘out of the box’ marketing that breaks through the digital clutter — and reaps results

Meanwhile Tailored Brands has been actively testing creative approaches to stand out as consumers have been increasingly inundated with digital advertising, she said.

“We are looking at generating creative that is pushing us to think out of the box, something that sticks with consumers a little bit more, something that carries the brand personality, along with it being this ‘never done before’ type of creative,” said Shukla.

In order to quickly gauge the effectiveness of its digital ads, the company has been working with digital marketing agency New Engen to put in place a rigorous testing framework. It is testing a range of ad formats, such as video versus stills, audio versus no audio, and product-oriented messaging versus lifestyle messaging, among others.

Shukla said that by testing what digital ads work and which ones don’t, Tailored Brands has been able to quickly take non-performing creative out of circulation.

CarParts.com: Analyzing the customer path to purchase to see what clicks become sales

Houman Akhavan, chief marketing officer at CarParts.com, said the explosion of digital advertising is also impacting its marketing strategies. The company has been leveraging data-driven attribution (DDA), a function driven by machine learning, that helps the company analyze its customers’ path to purchase.

DDA essentially assigns a weight to each click a customer makes before they actually buy a product online, so that CarParts.com can better gauge what media and messages are driving customers to make a purchase.

“A lot of the attribution models we have seen in the past have been ‘one size fits all,’” said Akhavan. “What we do know is that every customer journey is different, and the path to purchase is complex. Consumers are getting inundated with so many different ads, and there are so many different clicks taking place.”

Related: How a New Wave of DTC Startups Are Tapping Big Retail to Scale Growth

Joybird: Engaging consumers during their online shopping journey to ask, ‘Why aren’t you checking out?’

Eric Tsai, vice president of marketing and business development at online furniture store Joybird, said the company has long been a rigorous collector of its customers’ data and has shared its data analysis with Facebook to help it tailor the brand’s marketing on the platform.

It also leverages data points from throughout the customer journey to help it improve customer service. For example, Joybird initiates contact with customers who dwell too long in the online shopping cart without checking out to see if they are having any issues that could be resolved to help complete the sale.

“It’s important to ask people when they are in the cart, ‘Why aren’t you checking out? What is the problem here?’” said Tsai.

Then, other customers could be asked if they encountered similar challenges in completing their purchases.

Similarly, Joybird has also leveraged insights from online chat sessions to help understand its customers better, and often uses pop-up questions to gather feedback from shoppers, such as asking if certain content was useful.

Joybird, long viewed as an innovative e-commerce retailer, also continues to seek to break through the online clutter with new creative strategies and tools to coax customers along their path to purchase. Among its most recent digital marketing efforts is the launch of “Inspired by Pinterest Trends,” which allows customers to create 3D images of rooms filled with furniture.

“We like to engage with our customers on the creative,” said Tsai. “You can click on the Pinterest ads and design your room right there.”

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

Originally Appeared Here

DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ServiceSource International, Inc. (NASDAQ: SREV), the customer journey experience company, today announced it will discuss its newest insights to equip today’s technology leaders with selling strategies for the digital era at Technology & Services World (TSW) Conference, Oct. 18-20.

During the event, ServiceSource’s Vice President of Global Account Management, Charlie McCarter, will present a speaking session entitled “Maximizing Customer Relationships in a Virtual World.”

“We are amid a great technological transformation that began a few years ago but has accelerated significantly through the pandemic. Customers are more informed and tech-savvy, and companies now have a plethora of digital tools and channels to connect with and educate these customers more intelligently, intently, and proactively. This paradigm shift means that the need for human connection or the coveted ‘moment of truth’ in a customer journey experience is now more important than ever,” said McCarter. “During this session, we will explore how to use best practices for virtual selling in today’s business-to-business climate.”

In the Expo Hall at Booth 115, company representatives will discuss how ServiceSource helps the world’s leading businesses create exceptional customer journey experiences (CJX®) using its High-Performance Sales Methodology and an industry-leading combination of people, process, and data-powered insights. ServiceSource drives billions of dollars of incremental revenue for its clients each year using its inside sales, customer success, renewals, and channel management solutions that give its clients the ability to quickly scale resources, increase speed to market, and amplify growth.

Held virtually and on-site at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, TSW features the world’s leading tech companies discussing how to respond to today’s technology and services challenges and is an event of The Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA). To learn more about ServiceSource at TSW, visit the company’s event page.

About ServiceSource

ServiceSource International, Inc. (NASDAQ: SREV) is a global outsourced go-to-market services provider that accelerates B2B digital sales and customer success transformation. Our expert sales professionals, data-powered insights and proven methodologies scale and reimagine customer journey experiences (CJX™) into profitable business outcomes. Backed by more than 20 years of experience, ServiceSource drives billions of dollars in client value annually, conducting commerce in 45 languages and 178 countries. To learn more about how we design, develop and manage CJX solutions that transform the agility, speed, efficiency and value of our clients’ growth initiatives, visit www.servicesource.com.

Connect with ServiceSource:

Website: http://www.servicesource.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicesource/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicesource

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the success of our methodologies and solutions. These forward-looking statements are based on our current assumptions and beliefs, and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. Those risks and uncertainties include that we may be unable to attract and retain the highly skilled employees we need to support our planned growth; changes in market conditions that impact our ability to sell our solutions and/or generate service revenue on our clients’ behalf; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be obtained online at the Commission’s website at https://www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Trademarks

ServiceSource®, and any ServiceSource product or service names or logos above are trademarks of ServiceSource International, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.

Originally Appeared Here

These days, there’s a lot of talk about what you should and shouldn’t do as a business to woo new customers and keep existing ones happy. Just read any one of the many marketing-friendly guides out there and you’ll see a host of tips about improving your customer service, adding new features, beefing up product quality, and so on. Indeed, these are all good changes to make, and they lead to a more successful business overall, but they have one thing in common, and that’s why they make such a difference. They are customer-centric. They put the customer’s needs and experience first while improving the general experience for everyone else.

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that aren’t. But that’s such a broad term, and it could reference so many different facets of a business from customer service to product delivery and personalization. Where is the best place to start, and what should be a core focus? It all boils down to creating and delivering, a seamless, connected experience for employees and customers alike. In other words, “customer-centric” can be achieved today by deploying an integrated unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution like RingCentral. Wait, what? Slow down.

Why do unified communications matter?

Think about it like this. Customers, or people rather, no longer spend their time on a single platform. Even Facebook is sharing a piece of the pie with other social networks these days, like Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, TikTok, and more. It means that most people are no longer content with a single communications channel. They want to be able to interact across different channels, but not just that, they want their experiences to matter and to carry over between them. They don’t want to start talking on one platform, move to another, and then have to reboot — explaining everything all from the beginning. Chances are, your customer service team doesn’t want to deal with that either. Your employees want to follow along with the customer’s journey and meet them on whatever platform they’re using. Cue UCaaS and CCaaS platforms, combined as one, to deliver the best-connected experience for everyone, including customers and employees.

When combined, these platforms can help build confidence with customers, deliver a top-notch experience(s), connect your business communications and call center activities, as well as boost value and ROI across business or customer communications. Finally, the tools also improve communication with customers by putting you, and your team, in the right place, at the right time. In fact, merging UCaaS and CCaaS creates something so valuable, proponents have seen the following results, according to a RingCentral and Metrigy report:

• A 56% increase in customer satisfaction ratings.
• Reductions of 19% in operational costs.
• Another 23.4% reduction in monthly per-agent spending on licenses.

Where’s the proof?

These are some bold claims, and while it’s not difficult to figure out that being a customer-centric business is beneficial, there’s no hard evidence that unified communications can make that happen, at least not yet. There are four major benefits that RingCentral’s unified communications — UCaaS and CCaaS — can provide.

1. They help build confidence with customers by empowering your customer service team and supporting CRM integrations.
2. The tools combine business and call center communications to help solve customers’ problems faster and better and keep agents in the know.
3. Unified communications deliver high value and exceptional ROI results across business and customer communications, by supporting better resources, smarter experiences, and cross-collaboration.
4. With RingCentral, customer service teams can meet with customers in the right place, at the right time, across a variety of platforms and services — from phone calls and video meetings to live chat and social media.

A prime example is Gempler’s success story. The nationwide supplier of farms, Gempler, experienced high growth in 2019, however, their ordinary telephony solution could no longer support their needs and growing demands. Their team was relatively small, at about 60 agents, so they needed to choose something that would accommodate them. They landed on RingCentral’s UCaaS and CCaaS solution, making it the single vendor for all their business and customer communication activities. Gempler’s agents grew to be 28% faster, which has led to a 70% reduction in abandoned support calls, and a drop in response times to email from 14.5 hours down to 6 hours. They’re faster, better, leaner, and more successful!

Gempler isn’t the only team that’s seen success after implementing RingCentral’s solutions. There are many others, including the University of Radiology, virtual assistant provider Pheonix Virtual Solutions, Goosehead Insurance, and more.

Unified Communications: Message, video, phone, and contact center

Customers are the lifeblood of your business, and they should be treated as such. They drive revenue, profits, and in many ways, the success of your marketing and advertising initiatives. If they respond positively, the benefits and rewards are limitless. The best way to appeal to them is by developing a customer-centric team that puts them first and makes them a priority. Deliver a unified communications experience that merges all potential channels and platforms and empowers meaningful conversations, regardless of where they’re happening.

Wondering where you should start or where to go for more information? RingCentral is an award-winning provider of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, and they can help you up your communications game fast — faster than ever before.

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