With smartphone use growing and tablet sales set to hit 126 million this year, it’s all too easy for marketers to become overwhelmed by the challenges of multi-channel retailing and e-Commerce. But multi-channel commerce need not need be complex if we remind ourselves that it’s for people that interact with brands, not algorithms or stats on a dashboard.
These five tips, gleaned from our work with leading multi-channel brands, will help make the challenges of multi-channel retail surmountable, by bringing users into focus.
1. Act on Insight and Data, not Hype
It’s all too easy to get carried along by technical hype. Although this can be exciting and enjoyable, it’s fraught with danger if you don’t measure impact and base your business decisions on data, rather than what’s cool.
In a recent Forrester study this conclusion rings very true: “that in spite of technology advances and more sophisticated marketing techniques — nothing has really changed when it comes to what drives people to buy online.”
2. Do as Little as You Can for Tablets
You probably need to do very little to optimize the user experience for tablets. Just identify the big usability problems and fix them — such as removing Flash and adjusting presentational elements that may prove fiddly. And don’t yawn next time your tech team reminds you of the importance of standards compliance.
3. Focus Smartphones on Existing Usage Patterns
Smartphones need more attention. Let your existing data guide how you tailor for this touch point: are users primarily searching on smartphones and purchasing (later) on another device (e.g. tablet or pc/Mac)? We’ve observed this pattern in the fashion sector in particular.
The good news is you can already compare usage patterns between smartphones and fixed web using your web stats package by filtering by device type.
4. Think About Donald Rumsfeld when Choosing Your Data Analysis Tool
As touch-points multiply it’s tempting to seek out an analysis tool that can help make sense of this multitude of unstructured data by applying some form of sentiment analysis. But, as exciting as many of these tools are, they tend to only reveal “known-knowns.” We’ve never heard of a single client reveal a single “unknown-unknown.”
You’re probably better off talking to your call center staff for an hour each week — since they, as humans, can interpret other people’s sentiment better than machines.
5. Observe Your Customers
There’s no substitute to observing behavior: be that in-store, on-line or on a mobile. Whether it’s in a usability lab or conducted remotely getting into the heads of real users completing tasks (using whatever touch point they’d like), this will be a great source of qualitative data to see how to optimize each of your channels.
Fast Company speaks with Pandora CTO Tom Conrad about the challenges of squeezing social, informational, and profile features into an app that's all about simplicity.
Pandora CTO Tom Conrad insists his number one priority is to make the best playlists in the world. But he’s also aware that users increasingly expect more than a simple music-listening experience from their music apps.
Nowhere are these competing priorities more difficult to balance than on the small screen of a mobile device. On Monday, he and Pandora will release their best attempt: Pandora 4.0 for Android and iOS.
The new apps include the extras Pandora has added to its website throughout the years such as song lyrics, profile pages, and integrations with popular social networks. But it downplays features that aren’t core to the Pandora listening experience in favor of preserving a simple experience.
Menu items such as "feed" and "profile,” for instance, aren't visible within the radio listening experience. Instead they're accessed by clicking a subtle icon in the corner.
“If we’re going to make a mistake,” Conrad tells Fast Company, “I’d rather meet people who say, boy I wish I could learn more about artists on Pandora, or I wish I could make a profile for myself on Pandora, or I wish I could share songs to Facebook and Twitter on Pandora, and to say, oh, let me show you how to do that, rather than lose users in that experience.”
He adds: “It’s that kind of thing of making sure that the tip of the iceberg that sits above the iceberg of the water delivers the core differentiating experience of Pandora, and then having all of this ability sitting there underneath the water for people who want to explore more.”
A service that puts together Internet radio stations was more than anyone had thought to ask for in 2000, when Pandora was founded. But competitors in Internet radio have since emerged with a wide range of offerings. Songza offers human-curated playlists. Subscription services such as Spotify and Rdio have plugged into social discovery. Microsoft already entered the streaming game with Xbox Music, and Apple is reportedly preparing to do the same (a Pandora representative said the company did not comment on competitive moves).
Users expect more, and Pandora would be foolish to ignore that.
“You need to understand there are 150 million people who enjoy Pandora [as registered users],” Conrad says. “Even if 10% of our audience, for example, is interested in sharing music socially, it’s still 15 million people.”
Pandora’s mobile apps clock in 75% of the 1.1 billion hours listeners spend on the service each month, and adding extra features to the mobile experience had to happen. Those features might help keep Pandora in the game, but, says Conrad, they’re still not what it competes on.
“The singularity of purpose and focus of being the best in the world at delivering this personalized radio experience is really a critical part of differentiating us from the literally hundreds of music startups that we’ve competed against throughout the years,” he says.
Gartner has just been published its latest edition of "Magic Quadrant for Social CRM" — and with it, the challenges facing vendors in this space have finally been articulated. Not least of those problems is the need for vendors to demonstrate the economics of deploying these Social CRM systems in multiple customer relationship management use cases, including marketing, sales and customer service.
Social CRM Magic Quadrant
What is interesting about the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM is that it is one of the only MQs researched and published this year where the Niche Players vastly outnumber both the Leaders and the Challengers, while only two companies made it into the Visionaries quadrant.
The Leaders, as might be expected, include Salesforce, Jive and Lithium, while Oracle — surprisingly enough — only made it into the Challengers Quadrant, along with Bazaarvoice.
Whether the low number of Leaders is due to the fact that Social CRM is still an emerging market remains to be seen. But, Gartner notes, one of the key characteristics of the market over the past year has been a burst of acquisition activity as vendors jostle for position.
Today we will take a look at the market itself as well as emerging market trends. On Thursday, we will take a look at the Niche Players — who constitute the vast majority of players in the Quadrant — to see whether this situation has evolved because individual vendors develop a single product in a niche area and stick to that, or whether there are other reasons.
If the "niche product" trend is indeed the case, then next year it will likely be dominated by more acquisition activity, with the larger vendors seeking to fill holes in their own portfolios by buying up what they don’t have already.
Gartner Defines Social CRM
How does Gartner define Social CRM? According to the MQ, it is a business strategy that generates opportunities for sales, marketing and customer services, while also benefiting online communities.
To succeed in the market, vendors need to provide ways for the customer to manage their relationship with the enterprise. The result is that Social CRM applications need to provide a number of different customer engagement levels. Gartner says that all Social CRM applications should:
Encourage many-to-many participation with customers
Share user-generated content and data
Provide communities with high levels of autonomy and engagement levels
Provide the community with balanced purpose
It only works if users participate of their own accord — and generally, they will only do so if there is some kind of reward system in place. However, enterprises also need to be able to see measurable benefits, or they will not be inclined to invest in Social CRM technologies.
Value and profitability are provided by:
New customer insights
Products and services differentiators
Pushing sales
Building brand trust
Improving customer experience
Overall the, Social CRM applications should:
Provide customers with the feeling that they are involved in making decisions of their own accord — as opposed to feeling forced into something by the enterprise producing the product.
Give customers more control in their dealings with the enterprise, particularly in the customer’s online presence and their online reputation. It should also give customers control over what personal information is used.
Provide customers with the feeling that they belong to an identifiable community.
There are other tools outside of the Social CRM space that are used by marketing, sales and customer service — like multichannel campaign management, e-commerce, and web content management — but Gartner has not looked at those in this MQ.
On Wednesday, we spent our lunch break discussing what we liked about SharePoint, what we considered to be its biggest challenges, as well as what we looked forward to most with SharePoint 2013. But just because we spent an hour talking about SharePoint doesn't mean it was serious business. Who knew that SharePoint could be this much fun?!
With SharePoint 2013 on the brain, many of us were eager to dive in, but that would come later. First, we needed to focus on SharePoint 2010. What is it that we appreciate most? Overwhelming, managed metadata was the most popular, followed by the Ribbon, document libraries and workflows.
Not surprisingly, user adoption drives SharePoint implementation. We all know that SharePoint's usage within companies is constantly called into question. Rest assured, though, EIMChat participants were also focused on issues of planning and governance, as well as storage, price and flexibility when deciding to take the SharePoint plunge.
Whether or not SharePoint's slow rate of release is an issue or not depends on who you ask. Many are able to put it into perspective, arguing that a 3 year cycle provides ample opportunity for users to gain familiarity with the platform. However, others are less forgiving, claiming that it's bad for customers and really good for its competitors, who can release updates quicker.
