data – Data Pulses storytelling

Zippin through the store

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A Bay Area startup has launched a small public demo in San Francisco that will grow into a full-sized AI-driven convenience store in the coming months.

A Cooler with soft drinks and sandwiches and a shelf full of crisps is just the beginning for this start-up Cashierless C-store concept by Zippin that launched recently. But the Beta concept will scale rapidly Into a fully fledged C-Store as learnings are applied.

The concept uses relatively inexpensive cameras and weight sensors on shelves. The camera feeds are analyzed by algorithms trained through machine learning to recognize the appearance of each product the store carries.to accurately understand when a customer picks up items and puts them in a bag or pocket.

An app is used to sign in and complete the checkout. This also improves the customer experience as customers get used to the technology, and learn how to use it by signing in ( we found that helps customers know that we know they aren’t stealing things ) as well as quick payment.

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Amazon-Go is rolling out in further stores in San Francisco and New York as well as rumoured to be looking in London. Walmart has just announced a larger less tech but still cashierless store in Dallas.

Zippin will provide another technology that will allow retailers to compete with Amazon-Go in the Better, Simpler, Cheaper stake.

Seven new realities of retail world

data-driven-marketing-4 Consumers have fundamentally changed how they shop and how they buy. This shift has forced retailers to adapt to a new paradigm. Here are the seven realities of the new retail world

A proliferation of new technologies has created substantial new opportunities to understand and serve customers, which means organisations must put forth the effort to integrate new technology into regular processes and procedures. Don’t start with technologies but start with people & processes.
Removal of the Silos of data and departments must be broken down to enable centralized data.
Retailers must build complete, 360-degree portraits of customers to recognize them as individuals and understand their buying behaviors. Consumer personas are key to relevant and personalized experiences for customers who represent high-value potential for pro tability.
Brands must reach across all channels and devices to provide meaningful experiences based on each consumer’s demonstrated preferences.
The Customer Shopping Experiences across physical and digital channels should be seamless for consumers, while digital and physical measurement and attribution should be seamless for retailers.
Consumers now expect personalised and relevant content that retailers can and must deliver, using data-based insights, to drive the best customer experience.
All data must be handled in a transparent and ethical manner, with retailers accountable for ensuring it is used in ways that bene t consumers and protects them from harm.

5 tips for driving (digital) success

5 fingers Here are 5 simple tips will help drive success in your organization and make you a (digital) hero:

1. Identify and understand the problems
This is so trivial but yet incredible important and frequently ignored. Companies, governments and other organizations try to solve problems without understanding them. The first step of solving any challenge, with our without technology, is to identify and understand the problem(s). I use plural because we often jump on the first problem when there are several. There’s a myriad of great tools to identify problems including the 5 Whys, Customer Journey mapping, Customer Research, and more.

2. Be inspired and challenged by great people
The honest truth is that most people are comfortable with what they have and know. The unknown and change is frightening. But to survive in the current competitive, fast-moving world we need to challenge ourselves to consider other points of view, think differently, and to change fundamentals.

These are a few ways you can challenge yourself:

Follow people on Twitter and LinkedIn such as Tom Goodwin, Martin Lindstrom and Benedict Evans
Meet and hire partners that will challenge you (and don’t always agree)
Talk to the competition’s customers

3. Always involve unbiased customers
Another basic mistake too many organizations make is solving problems without involving the people that are intended to use it. For example launching a website without testing the concept, content and final design on the intended target audience or deploying an expense management tool without including employees in the evaluation and implementation process.

Lack of time or cost are common excuses, but how much time and money do you lose when a website or software doesn’t achieve its goals?

Always involve end users at every step of the way. Remember that colleagues or the boss are usually not representative of the end users.

4. Define clear success factors, measure and follow-up
How do we know if we’ve achieved success if we didn’t define it in the first place? Many organizations have too generic or end-goal-centric metrics. The most common measures of success are revenue growth and cost savings. The challenge with these is that it’s usually not possible to measure success until e.g. 3-6 months after the project has been completed.

A better alternative is to include success factors that can be measured throughout the project. For example user task completion rate, satisfaction and sticking to the MVP timeline.

5. Understand why Culture eats Strategy for breakfast
Want to change the business or organization? Think that a new app, knowledge sharing system or HR website will achieve radical change? It won’t unless people want change. Ensure that every initiative to change has a plan to get buy-in from the organization including the grass roots. No. 3 above will help, but is not enough.

Use these 5 tips in whatever you do and I can promise you a greater chance of success. Furthermore there’s a pretty good chance that the organization will consider YOU a digital hero.

7 steps Data-Driven Customer Growth.

seven steps

Accelerating customer growth to drive commercial success through data is challenging and requires commitment and alignment from around all the organisation to be successful, but there are 7 steps that make the journey more successful

Identify the commercial & customer Goals in next 18m-36m
Build a clear vision of a radically different data-driven customer experience, working across digital & bricks & mortar and align across the organisation.
Remove Silos of data use creating a single version of the truth, with a data strategy linked to business goals e.g. Unified View of customer data, GDPR ready and tools developed to meet commercial goals.
Breakdown the institutional fear of data & digital at all levels through training & doing: it’s a tool that anyone can use to do what you have been doing better
Use Data Analytics to Map & Prioritise customer journeys & personalised experiences across human & digital touchpoints and align organisation capability to deliver for customer.
Identify & Build the capabilities (Process, Tools People) that will be required to transform process design from efficiency focused (cheaper) to customer focused (better simpler cheaper) , specifically putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalised journeys
Foster stronger bonds between technical and different business people. This is a two-way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.

Using Data & Advanced Customer Analytics to put the customer at the heart of an organisation is a transformation that future looking organisations need to start implementing now.

Transformation to ensure data is part of the DNA of an organisation takes time and a holistic approach.

Physical to Digital – Phygital

kroger alibabab

How Kroger is driving Physical into Digital

Kroger is accelerating it’s Data and Digital capability fast , after buying out the JV with dunnhumby a few years ago, it’s announced two new strategic partnerships with Ocado and Alibaba

Two Partnerships

Kroger, which was founded in 1883 in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the United States’s largest supermarket chain, and in fact is one of the largest such chains in the world. With stores in 34 states, Kroger is a household name that for many typifies traditional brick & mortar stores. This week they announced a partnership with Chinese internet giant Alibaba, specifically to open an online storefront on Alibaba’s platform for international brands, Tmall Global. This first move into overseas sales is part of grocer’s online retail push. This sits alongside a recently announced plan with Ocado, to launch Kroger Ship an online food delivery service picked from automated warehouses.

Organic goods, dietary supplements, and other private-label products are expected to be included in the initial product offering.

Competitive Landscape And Why This Is Big

Kroger’s move comes as its traditional competitors aggressively cross into the digital space, while “digital” companies barge into what used to be Kroger’s exclusive territory.

Walmart, for its part, recently acquired a majority stake in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Group. It has been pursuing a strategy of leveraging their physical store base to drive them forward in the ecommerce landscape. What’s more, Walmart owns a 12% stake in JD.com Inc., Alibaba’s largest rival in China.

Amazon has been doing the opposite, particularly with their Whole Foods purchase, as they seek to expand their physical footprint while taking advantage of their digital strength.

Alibaba already owns 2 of China’s most popular e-commerce websites and is staving off competition from the aforementioned JD.com. They have also been active in signing on other US brands, such as Macy’s, Costco and Starbucks.

Digital For The Win

Digital is the way forward for even the most traditional brands. While perhaps a bit late to the party, the Kroger-Alibaba deal shows that companies not harnessing the power of ecommerce effectively have to have a smart strategy to catch up – and succeed – in the new era of ecommerce. This could be through acquisitions, mergers, or allying with the right digital partner. the proposed Asda / Sainsbury’s Merger is another example of retailers merging to compete vs digital competitors ( in this case amazon in UK)

When it comes to that right partner, companies both large and small are seeing the need for a holistic picture of their own operations, as well as the industry at large. Today, successful companies are leveraging data to spot future trends and markets, as well as to fine-tune minute details such as ranges, pricing, availability.

5 ways to compete with Amazon

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5 ways to compete with Amazon

One of the biggest challenges that face retailers at the moment is how to compete with the jugganaut that is amazon. Powered by the profit driver in Amazon Web Services and more recently Amazon Advertising Services the retail industry fears the arrival. But there are ways of defending by attacking

Strategy #1: Own the pre- and post-transaction experience
Amazon are very focused on making the transaction as easy as possible at low cost, but we still have to assemble solutions on our own. If an organisation offers a ready-made solution that saves us time and effort (at a price we can live with), we’re grateful.

Meal delivery companies, for example, have leveraged this basic insight to create a new category. Cooking a meal is time consuming: go to the supermarket, fight through the crowds order to find a few ingredients, wait in a long line, lug your bags home, put everything away, measure and chop the ingredients, and assemble the meal.Meal delivery companies like Gousto, HelloFresh, and simply cook eliminate all of these chores but the last one by shipping pre-made meals that require very little prep. (Amazon launched their own meal kit delivery service in July in order to catch up after falling behind for five years.)
Furniture or Clothing : Virtual Reality is allowing you to select and choose furniture or clothing that fits your room or you.Once you’ve selected what you want to buy, sometimes extra effort is needed to actually assemble, install, learn how to use it, customize it, and then repair it once it breaks.
Electrical retailers: DixonsCarphone Warehouse are competing vs amazon in electrical by offered get technical support pre and post purchase. Installing Fridge freezers, Kitchen ranges / recycling fridges.
Garden Retailers offering Garden Services
Mothercare offering to come and assemble the cot or bed for you rather than you have to put things all together.
Laura Ashley assembling beds.

Strategy #2: Turn your services into a platform
The fastest-growing companies in history, such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and Netflix, are all platforms. The platform business model captures the most profit, builds a moat that is hard for competitors to cross, and scales quickly once it reaches critical mass. While building up a global workforce of employees to offer support services may take massive amounts of time and capital, a platform can get there in a fraction of the time. And, if you don’t do it in your niche, it’s likely that Amazon will — if it hasn’t already.
Amazon Services uses a platform model to deliver hundreds of services at scale including services with and for the home, automotive, electronics, yard and outdoor, assembly, health and wellness, lessons and classes, and pet services. It even has an Uber-like service, Amazon Flex, which has drivers in 30 cities who deliver Amazon products.

You can build a platform by focusing on your niche , playing to your strengths, particularly your unique understanding of your customer, in order to more effectively recruit, vet, train, and manage a network of service professionals and help them solve the specific problems that customers in your niche face. The most successful platforms in the world aren’t ones that offer every service under the sun. They are ones that are the most focused.

Uber is a platform that has focused on logistics and transport
Netflix is not trying to meet all entertainment needs, but focused on emotional connection

Netflix founder Reed Hastings: “We’re not trying to meet all needs. So, Amazon’s business strategy is super broad. Meet all needs. I mean, the stuff that will be in Prime in five or ten years will be amazing, right? And so we can’t try to be that — we’ll never be as good as them at what they’re trying to be. What we can be is the emotional connection brand, like HBO. So, think of it as they’re trying to be Walmart, we’re trying to be Starbucks. So, super focused on one thing that people are very passionate about.”

Strategy #3: Reduce every point of friction in your customer’s journey until you hit a ‘wow tipping point’
To reduce the friction at every step of your customer’s user journey, leverage your own customer data to uncover friction points and relentlessly remove them. Start by removing glaring problems. Then keep going until you reach the ‘Wow!’ tipping point
A hallmark of many of today’s most successful companies, is that they don’t stop improving their product once it’s good enough. They identify every interaction their brand has with a customer and aim to make it a ‘Wow!’ experience. It’s not just tech firms; retailers are taking note as well.

Strategy #4: Create a must-have brand and then use it as leverage
One of the biggest threats to Amazon is the power of brand. A truly powerful, must-have brand like Apple or Disney doesn’t need Amazon to succeed. They have built a direct relationship with the consumer. As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars in potential revenue because people buy Apple products on Apple.com or in the Apple STore. Furthermore, Amazon’s whole business model is antithetical to people’s innate desire to display their personality and status through what they purchase. There is always going to be a segment of people who value self expression over low prices and convenience. The luxury category is one of Amazon’s Achilles’ heels.
Amazon is confronting the ‘brand’ threat in two ways.

First, amazon has shown that it’s not afraid to build or acquire its own brands (19 in total). Amazon also leverages its data on which products sell best in each category to launch its own generic brand, Amazon Basics, which now has over 3,000 products. In each category these products appear in, they are featured.
commodifying brands by forced discounting, using its direct relationship with customers and audio purchasing to push competing commodity brands. With Amazon Alexa, customers can say, “Buy toothpaste,” and Amazon will send its recommended toothpaste rather than the toothpaste with the best brand, for example.

Make no mistake, Amazon is trying to destroy the value of branding overall and learn from your customers in order to compete with your most profitable products. Bezos’ famous saying, “your margin is my opportunity,” is particularly relevant here. Branding creates a perception that facilitates charging a higher price. Bezos is attacking that pillar of higher prices.
By having a must-have or a luxury product, you give yourself choices on how to leverage your brand:

using an embargo period Netflix keeps its original content exclusive to Netflix for a certain number of days and then sells it on iTunes and other platforms. The other platforms are not only sources of cash, they are also marketing.
allowing just some products to be sold on Amazon (sell some brands on Amazon and others only on your own site),
not selling on Amazon at all (Birkenstock, for example, prohibits its sellers from selling on Amazon. Sales tripled to $800 million last year),
partnering exclusively with one brand. (Martha Stewart has a multi-year exclusive agreement with Macy’s).

Strategy #5: Defining the problem & Extreme Experimentation

Amazon really understands the problem that they are trying to solve. and works hard to clarity the brief for any new innovation, making it crystal clear what the customer problem is they are trying to solve and then how they will develop a proposition to solve that problem .

This, more than any other strategy, is why Amazon is so successful: Amazon is not a traditional business. If you think it is you have already lost. You are competing against an economy.

Part of what makes the Economy Pyramid Model so successful is the sheer quantity of experimentation. Amazon’s culture of listening to customers , defining the problem & experimentation is so deeply ingrained that Bezos has repeatedly gone on record saying that Amazon’s success is directly correlated with the number of experiments it performs.

Amazon isn’t just experimenting internally with new platforms like Alexa, Kindle, Flex, Marketplaces, and dozens of others. Each of those platforms then empowers an economy of producers to create millions of experiments. In so doing, Amazon passes the cost of experimentation on to producers, receives income for each experiment, and then doubles down on the blockbusters by creating their own competing brand. It’s a brutally effective strategy. Amazon aggregates producer experiment data to launch its own competing products.
In a world that is rapidly changing, the companies that succeed will be those who increase their rate of experimentation faster than the environment changes. And Amazon is a core part of that environment.

If you need help in defining the problem and creating experiments contact me.

7 steps to data driven customer obsession

7 steps to data driven customer obsession

The battle for customers is not BAU, with data being “the New Oil” that can transform the customer experience through advanced customer analytics. Creating a Customer Obsessed Organisation that puts the customer at the heart of the business and designing the human and digital customer experience are top priorities to win in the age of the Digital Customer.

The road to travel on to build advanced Customer analytics that transform the customer experience is challenging and requires commitment and alignment from around all the organisation to be successful

Identify the commercial & customer Goals in next 18m-36m
Build a clear vision of a radically different data-driven customer experience, working across digital & bricks & mortar and align across the organisation.
Remove Silos of data use creating a single version of the truth, with a data strategy linked to business goals e.g. Unified View of customer data, GDPR ready and tools developed to meet commercial goals.
Breakdown the institutional fear of data & digital at all levels through training & doing: it’s a tool that anyone can use to do what you have been doing better
Use Data Analytics to Map & Prioritise customer journeys & personalised experiences across human & digital touchpoints and align organisation capability to deliver for customer.
Identify & Build the capabilities (Process, Tools People) that will be required to transform process design from efficiency focused (cheaper) to customer focused (better simpler cheaper) , specifically putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalised journeys
Foster stronger bonds between technical and different business people. This is a two-way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.

Using Data & Advanced Customer Analytics to put the customer at the heart of an organisation is a transformation that future looking organisations need to start implementing now.

Queen of Internet Predictions 2018

Mary Meeker:Queen of the Internet Speaks in 2018

Once a year everyone in Tech looks to one woman- Mary Meeker. The internet oracle spent two decades at Morgan Stanley, working on things like Google IPO, before joining the VC fund Kleiner Perkins in 2014. Every year she delivers an Internet trends report to the world and her predictions are scarily often right….. ( check her out on Wiki if you want to know more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/mary_meeker )

She called email as being the internet’s killer application in 1995, predicted browsing through information services to be the next big breakthrough and foresaw Amazon’s rise to the top. This year she had a 294 page presentation in 30 minutes covering everything from smart phones to education and property and tech competition.

Full copy of presentation Link here: http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

My key take outs:

Discovery vs Digital : consumers are using social media for discovery more and more, and then going onto shop. Retailers are focusing on Amazon but the Facebook threat is under the radar. Discovery is less in store now. 80% people report Facebook as the platform to see a new product (with 60% Instagram) and 55% people claim to end up buying a product online after discovering on social.
Shopping & Entertainment blending together. entertainment is becoming a big part of the shopping experience. Owning the pre-&-post transaction keeps the transaction
Discovery sites developing commerce. Commerce sites developing discovery (Amazon has higher search levels that Google in US now) and discovery sites are developing Commerce ( Facebook & Google shop)
Consumers want location based personalisation: Google searches that include the phrase near me ( eg restaurants near me ) skyrocketed 900% in last 2 years. This tells us that consumers actually do want location based personalisation so retailers and restaurants have a clear directive to step up.
Personalisation = higher customer satisfaction . Brand that personalise score higher customer satisfaction levels. Customers are beginning to expect it.
Subscription drives Sales: users are increasingly willing to pay a monthly fee for easy access to content, using an ad-supported limited access tiers to upsell subscriptions
China is coming: Alibaba + Amazon have similar focus areas, Amazon may have higher revenue but Alibaba has higher volume and is aggressively expanding into countries like India and Indonesia. Both are bundling services with a breadth and price that competitors can’t match. China now hosts 9/20 top global internet companies while US hosts 9/20. all are poised to collide as they all seek to invade developing nations to find growth.
Just Teach yourself: Opportunity and growth of cheaper online learning: YouTube saw 1 billion hours of educational viewing: Opportunity for Open University in UK and global market for UK education after Brexit!
AI is sexy but don’t miss the simple & obvious low hanging fruit. better utilisation of Wifi and Networks can connect consumers’ offline and online shopping and preferences to drive short term growth but AI if developed well will help drive longer growth
Privacy Paradox. Organisations are caught between using their data to provide a better Customer Experience & violating customer privacy. GDPR is taking a lead, but consumers in China are more relaxed about how their data is used : 38% China citizens willing to share data for better services , compared to 25% in US and 16% in UK. That means China could gain a data advantage that lets it more rapidly develop technologies & service

for a full view of presentation ( all 294 pages ) http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

Aligning Organisations around Transformation

data world Digital mastery in an ever increasingly digital world is one of the key priorities of an organisation. The road to travel on the journey to making your organisation more customer focused in a digital world is challenging and one that requires alignment and commitment from the CEO, the Board and Shareholders down.

There are 5 priorities for a chief customer officer / chief digital officer

1) Build a clear vision of a radically different future state and align it with Shareholders Board, CEO and Exec. ensure that they are involved in co-creating the vision and understand the elements of how it works. If you need to train them on Twitter, facebook, what’s app or programming, do it so they understand a digital world.

2) Engage Colleagues in a 18m-36m Goal and develop a clear action plan. Ensure that you have a detailed and well managed transformation programme with agreed outcomes. Engaging colleagues in building this will be critical. It’s amazing how digitally literate teens and twenty somethings in a retail organisation are!

3) Breakdown fear of data and digital across the organisation. Board-> Senior managers-> middle managers -> Colleagues. Communicate widely and use storytelling to engage at all levels. Be very pragmatic and engage people in learning by doing rather than telling ( run Twittter workshops, small projects designed to deliver quick wins, training by doing.) Focus on small wins early and let people tell these stories across the organisation themselves as their wins. Align objectives and remuneration to deliver the goal from Exec down to all colleagues.

4) Foster stronger bonds between technical and business people. This is a two way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.develop a data strategy aligned to business goals , build tools as required to deliver commercial goals.

5) Steer the course through strong Governance. Digital Transformation should be governed through the EXEC as well as relevant touchpoints to ensure continual alignment.

These 5 priorities along won’t drive the transformation but applying them is a start that many organisations who are now Digital Masters followed.

Clever Cars

clever cars 2

What can your driving habits tell us? A lot is the answer. In fact, where people drive can reveal a lot more than Google searches and this is what advertisers, startups, and car-makers are quickly realising.

For years car companies have been installing software and sensors that collect driving behaviour and location data from our cars. This is invaluable to advertisers & car companies alike.

Car companies argue this data will enhance the driving experience CX. It could help to predict flat tires, find parking spaces or charging spots, alert authorities to dangerous crossings & even track criminals fleeing from crime-scenes.

Advertisers are even more excited. Israeli startup, Otonomo, cleans up and organises data for carmakers. They let drivers select the information they’re willing to share with companies in exchange for rewards & discounts – imagine leaving work late and a £5 Dominos discount coming up on your display 🍕

This is only the start. Ford estimates that by 2020 their vehicles will have 100m lines of code and Gartner estimates 98% of new cars in the US & Europe will have an embedded cyber connection.

clever cars

What about BIG data?

The real interesting part is when all this data is aggregated. With all this data, companies can see trends that are linked to other events. For instance:

Hedge funds could use boot sensor data to see how much people bought when they went shopping which would show consumer spending
Banks could see how many people had stopped driving to work, thus suggesting they’ve lost their jobs, and if this number began to rise they could anticipate an economic downturn
3rd parties could track trips to the police station, domestic violence shelters, STI/HIV testing centres and infer sensitive information about drivers’ health and relationships.

Autonomous cars won’t stop us…

One of the most important big-picture outcomes here is that car manufacturers are not only hardware companies now, they’re also software companies. It’s often been suggested that traditional companies will die off with the coming of autonomous cars, but this shows they’re using tech themselves to find new sources of revenue.

People need to be aware of the level of privacy they’ll be giving away. Soon your car could know more about you than your family…

Data driven fitness community

data pulse #43

sweaty betty tamara

Now I’m not one into female fashion ( just ask my wife) , nor do I hang around the shops but I do love how Tamara Hill-Norton has used data to create a passionate community with Sweaty Betty since she set up the first boutique in Notting Hill in 1998 . Initially targeting “yummy Mummies” but now broadened out to connect fitness and fashion.

Sweaty Betty is a British retailer specialising in active wear for women, featuring in 50 from London to San Fancisco and selling significantly digitally. Sweaty Betty aims to ‘inspire women to find empowerment through fitness’.

sweaty betty 2

Sweaty Betty has a real distinctive difference to its potential competitor Amazon : It distinctively moves beyond traditional retail practices with added value services as well as great clothing and builds an active community. This is achieved through regular Sweaty Betty fitness classes that are actively promoted to its customers. These classes range from yoga, run clubs and boot camps right through to Pilates, and are held in Sweaty Betty stores around the world. For those who can’t attend in person, there are also online fitness classes.

Sweaty Betty Live was a event where 3000 Sweaty Bettys came to sweat learn shop eat & get pampered:

sweaty betty carnaby

sweaty betty 1

Sweaty Betty was very clear on their purpose and had a very clear story that was developed starting inside the organisation, and building out into their community. A data driven approach to brand building and creating community, loyalty and interaction meant people starting telling the Sweaty Betty story themselves.

checkout Tamara story:

http://www.sweatybetty.com/meet-tamara/

Sweaty Betty leverages a broad range of data-driven social tools – Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are all used. They also created ‘brand ambassadors’ and allowed customers to have a conversation, helping to underline the sense that Sweaty Betty is a ‘fitness community rather than just a sportswear retailer

Starbucks data driven coffee

starbucks cup

Starbucks have adopted a data driven mobile first approach to making the customer journey simpler and easier in its coffee shops world-wide.

Innovating and transforming the Customer experience by leveraging data-driven analytics and technology is critical for success in a 21st Century convenient foodservice retailer. 21% of Starbucks transactions are now completed via mobile … in store at the till using Apple Pay via app or using Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay . What’s more is Starbucks processes more than 6million Mobile Order and Pay transactions a month globally.

Mobile Order & Pay is available on iOS and Android . It’s an established of the popular Starbucks mobile app that allows customers to place and pay for an order in advance of their visits and pick it up at a participating Starbucks location. Mobile ordering is emerging as the fastest and easiest way for Starbucks customers to order ahead , then pay and pick up their purchases, providing on-the-go customers a simple and quick alternative to get their favourite coffee.

The Mobile Order and Pay feature allows customers to choose a store from a (Google) map view , browse , select and customise drinks, view the estimated time the order will be ready and pre-pay the order. All within the Starbucks app, and integrated into the existing Starbucks app, and my-Starbucks Rewards loyalty programme. A simple easy way to sign up and earn Stars

PROBLEM: It’s Too popular….

The Mobile Order & pay is creating some problems, that Starbucks are working hard to fix. Customers expect not to wait at all, but at busy times the queue is building up and customers are waiting and creating a headache. Starbucks being Starbucks though is working it through operationally and using data driven technology ahead of its rivals to improve the customer experience

They have launched an AI driven Starbucks Barista where customers can text through their orders: Check out below

Starbucks are leading the way as Tech leaders in convenience foodservice, using data and technology in a way that McDonald’s , are starting to respond but need to respond rapidly if they want to meet customer needs.

Loose Lips cost Lives

strava military

I use Strava to map my runs & cycle rides but a recent article caught my attention on the importance of keeping your data private vs public.

Last November, Strava released a global user-activity heat map showing the running and cycling routes of people wearing fitness trackers. Some of those people work for the military & intelligence agencies.

Their data, which they neglected to opt out of sharing, reveals their daily routines and the contours of previously secret bases for anyone with a Strava account who might be looking. “A modern equivalent of the World War II-era warning that ‘loose lips sink ships,’ writes Jeremy Hsu, “May be ‘FFS don’t share your Fitbit data on duty.’”

So far, the breach hasn’t hurt anyone, and militaries and intelligence services will update their facilities (and personnel training policies) to render this particular vulnerability moot. But the unexpected risks of modern geolocation technology remain. “These digital footprints that echo the real-life steps underscore a greater challenge to governments and ordinary citizens alike,” Hsu writes. “Each person’s connection to online services and personal devices makes it increasingly difficult to keep secrets.”

Read the full article here

https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-fitness-trackers-privacy/

The story behind your Metrics

The Story behind your metrics

data pulse #36

Lines out the door. An email list that is growing at breakneck speed. Likes on Facebook. More users, subscribers or members all adding to the value of your platform. These are the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of.

Measuring growth and how it happens feels important. But ‘more’ isn’t the only metric of a good business, and it’s not the only thing that defines success.

Be clear on what your commercial & customer end goals are and then measure what will deliver that end goal. Focus on few things that really matter and don’t let the list get too long.

There is usually a way to find data that supports a worldview and nobody is immune to using data to confirm previously held assumptions. Qualitative data measures the things that align with the values we care about, those we want our employees to embrace and our customers to sense. When we measure in this way we take into account the story behind the data. The number of meals sent back to the kitchen, staff retention, customer referrals and on and on.

Questions that will set you on the path to measuring what matters

How do you track how business is doing? Make a list of everything you measure.
Which numbers do you want to go up? Why?
Which numbers need to go down? Why?
Why are each of these particular metrics important? Create a rationale for each one.
What story do the numbers tell you about how your customers and colleagues feel?
What story do you want them to tell?

It’s tempting to want to scale, that’s what businesses do after all. As you grow it’s equally important to understand what metrics are sacred and why they matter.

Data driven Easyjet flys easy

Data Pulse # 434

Removing Friction in the customer journey to make it easier is critical for future success, and is important as a way of telling your Brand story , particularly if you are called EasyJet. Digital transformation can accelerate this change if applied with a clear focus on the commercial goals combined with deep understanding of the customer journey .

Carolyn McColl at Easyjet made great strides at using digital technology to transform the organisation making it easier for their customers to travel, simpler for their colleagues and cheaper for the organisation. They started with a clear understanding of the commercial goal: More customers flying more often on Easyjet, and developed a series of customer propositions that made it easier to fly driven around the key hardware that most travellers provide themselves: The Smartphone.

Easyjet app developed with key functionality

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1) Book Flight

2) My Flights Booked

3) My Flights Tracked

4) Mobile Check-in and Mobile Boarding Passes.

5) Option to book HireCare & Hotel.

All personalised through MyEasyjet traveller registration , that uses customer data held, (including passport, address credit card details ) geolocation of all data, previous flights searched and taken to make it easier for booking.

I have just headed off skiing flying Easyjet:

The email alerts prior to travelled felt timely & relevant: adding personal information, and checking.
The mobile boarding pass removes friction in finding a printer to print a boarding pass and then not losing the boarding pass as you travel through the airport .
The Flight Status monitor is an easy way of seeing ahead of leaving for the airport if flights are delayed or reassurance.

Easier Self Serve Baggage Drop.

Easyjet now have self serve baggage drop in Manchester as well as Gatwick , which makes it easier and quicker to drop off baggage rather than queuing

What Friction Points Next?

TO AND FROM THE AIRPORT

I would appreciate Easyjet helping me get to the airport and then to my onwards destination. It would be easy to partner / connect with Google or Citymapper to provide live travel options on drive times, Trains/ buses to catch, or even a link to Uber to get a ride to and from the airport.

WALK THROUGH AIRPORT STRESS FREE.

I would really appreciate being walked through the airport with digital alerts that help me understand which gate to go to , the time to gate, and alerts on how busy it is at anyone time. This technology is available and has been piloted in London City Airport by Dan Byles and the team at PlanetIT. So watch out for a digital concierge helping you through the airport and ensuring you have enough time and and not be rushed.

Eat, Drink and Shop at your pace.

I’ll even be able to order ahead and have my Starbucks coffee and porridge waiting for me as I arrive through security !

I am a demanding customer but I am really just like everyone else just more vocal.

Good Luck to Johan Lundgren , new CEO easyjet in accelerating the use of data even further to make easyjet even easier.

H2 Accelerate growth using data

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Accelerating growth through data is challenging and requires commitment and alignment from around all the organisation to be successful, but there are 7 steps that make the journey more successful

Identify the commercial & customer Goals in next 18m-36m
Build a clear vision of a radically different data-driven customer experience, working across digital & bricks & mortar and align across the organisation.
Remove Silos of data use creating a single version of the truth, with a data strategy linked to business goals e.g. Unified View of customer data, GDPR ready and tools developed to meet commercial goals.
Breakdown the institutional fear of data & digital at all levels through training & doing: it’s a tool that anyone can use to do what you have been doing better
Use Data Analytics to Map & Prioritise customer journeys & personalised experiences across human & digital touchpoints and align organisation capability to deliver for customer.
Identify & Build the capabilities (Process, Tools People) that will be required to transform process design from efficiency focused (cheaper) to customer focused (better simpler cheaper) , specifically putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalised journeys
Foster stronger bonds between technical and different business people. This is a two-way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.

Using Data & Advanced Customer Analytics to put the customer at the heart of an organisation is a transformation that future looking organisations need to start implementing now.

Transformation to ensure data is part of the DNA of an organisation takes time and a holistic approach.

7 steps to data-driven customer obsession

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As we break for Christmas I have just had a great morning with DataIQ Leaders discussing how data can transform CX.

I led a discussion with a group of Analytical leaders with seven simple steps on the road to build advanced Customer Analytics. It’s challenging and requires commitment and alignment from around all the organisation to be successful

Identify the commercial & customer Goals in next 18m-36m
Build a clear vision of a radically different data-driven customer experience, working across digital & bricks & mortar and align across the organisation.
Remove Silos of data use creating a single version of the truth, with a data strategy linked to business goals e.g. Unified View of customer data, GDPR ready and tools developed to meet commercial goals.
Breakdown the institutional fear of data & digital at all levels through training & doing: it’s a tool that anyone can use to do what you have been doing better
Use Data Analytics to Map & Prioritise customer journeys & personalised experiences across human & digital touchpoints and align organisation capability to deliver for customer.
Identify & Build the capabilities (Process, Tools People) that will be required to transform process design from efficiency focused (cheaper) to customer focused (better simpler cheaper) , specifically putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalised journeys
Foster stronger bonds between technical and different business people. This is a two-way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.

Using Data & Advanced Customer Analytics to put the customer at the heart of an organisation is a transformation that future looking organisations need to start implementing now.

Don’t be a Grinch this Christmas

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Don’t be a Grinch this Christmas , Customer data needs to be lovingly tended and developed.

It’s tempting to think of customer data as the new oil , freely flowing and always available.Combined with advanced analytics, it offers the promise of creating strategic advance. By perfectly profiling an individual customer, marketing can be truly personalized, improving a customer’s experience, and eliminating waste.

But customer data isn’t a natural resource. It’s generated by people. And as our connectivity increases, so does our awareness of the data being collected and the erosion of our privacy.

With customers increasingly seeking more control over the data they share and with whom, access to customer data will become increasingly valuable, a source of competitive advantage, and a privilege to be earned. Brands will need to demonstrate to customers that they can be trusted with their data.

There are a number of practical steps that should be taken now:

Make sure you are using the data you already have to improve the customer experience, so it’s clear to customers what value they are receiving in return. This may seem obvious, yet I’m still struck by how infrequently the data I’ve shared is used to improve my experience. My inbox, for example, is still full of mass rather than personalized emails. Why not let customers feel the benefit of their data?
1. Mothercare have a personal email programme linked to explaining what you need to do and how they can help you through weeks of pregnancy & in the first few weeks after your baby is born.
2. Asda emails are linked to promotions in your favourite store on things we think you would like to buy based on previous shopping.
3. Starbucks use location data to prompt offers on the phone when you are near a starbucks
Give your customers more control over their data. Let them opt-in, for example, rather than have to opt-out, and be very clear what they are opting into. Be upfront about your cookie policy, and its implications. And give customers options over such questions as frequency and method of contact. Why not work with customers to figure out ways that you can turn data they could generate into something of value to them? Nike has done this to great effect, helping customers generate data to help with their own fitness, and in the process deepening their connection with the brand.
Only collect the data that’s essential to deliver the benefit to customers, rather than everything you can. And be clear about what data you need to collect, the reason why you need it, and what benefit they will get in return.

While data security is certainly a complex technical and legal challenge, it’s underpinned by a question of brand mind set.

If customer data is viewed internally as a commodity, then it’s something to be extracted from customers and traded…and customers will be wary, as behaviours will give the brand away.

But if access to customer data is viewed internally as a privilege, where we don’t own a customers data it’s their data we are only curating it and looking after it to improve our customers experience then it’s something precious that has to be protected…and the resulting behaviours will inspire more trust among customers.

Segmentation is a tool to grow customer numbers

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Delivering the most relevant, inspirational messaging and experiences through advanced segmentation and targeting is a key advanced use of data. Segmentation itself is relatively straight forward, we all do it all the time. The skill for CMO lies in bridging the technical teams and the business imperatives to develop segmentation that delivers on commercial objectives

Netflix is an organisation that uses data in three of the advanced states. Netflix micro-tagging of vast content archives allowed creation of nearly 77,000 film segments, rich data, views, searches , times, pauses and more is used to build behavioural profiles and predictive algorithms give uniquely targeted recommendations.

The segmentation techniques are not dissimilar to the segmentations that Tesco, Sainsbury’s , Coop and Asda built for segmenting customers. Both cluster users based on attributing product features to films / products and then clustering film watched/ products bought using analytics.

The difference is the Volume, Velocity and Veracity of data used.

Coop Food apply 7 segments to members annually,

Netflix create 77,000 segments on daily basis, continually refining which segment members are in so better able to predict your best next film.

More complex isn’t always better, as organisations need to WALK before they can RUN, and align people and processes before they build more complexity. Asda is now using customer segmentations and tools and processes for building ranges and promotional plans, and continually building and refining, as well as segmenting customer communication to improve the Customer Experience

Customer focus, data-driven to deliver commercial imperatives.

Building more sophisticated segmentations will develop but add value if they are aligned to deliver commercial objectives, so creating strategic and operational capabilities

7-11 crawl walk run

7-11 digital transformation using agile crawl- walk-run methodology to develop relevant data driven CX

Data Pulse #711

7-11 seized an opportunity to use the existing technology that most of its shoppers already had in their hands as they entered the store, and it did it from a standing start using AGILE methodology like a baby learning to CRAWL, WALK, RUN

7-11 can now push real-time, rules-driven offers to customers through the 7-11 app.

The decision was made to launch a mobile app in efforts to deliver what the customer wants, when they want it, where they want it. Offers take account of rich data about the customer, both live and historic:

Real-time transactional: current basket, comms received, channel, geofencing

Real-time contextual: location, location temperature, time of day.

Historic modelling: transaction data, profile data, modelling scores.

Insights gained from feedback to offers over time is incorporated into business rules in a process of continuous refinement.

So, for example, on a cold morning, 7-Eleven might push hot drinks offers. At midday, some customers might receive offers for packaged lunches while others receive promotions on fresh foods. In the evening, lifestyle insights might be used to determine that some customers might be tempted by pizza and a DVD rental.

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The battle to grow customers is not BAU.

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Data & Digital is transforming customer expectations

The battle for customers is not business-as-usual, with data & digital transforming customer expectations for personalisation, technology adoption moving fast & traditional loyalty structures changing. Creating a Customer Obsessed Organisation that puts the customer at the heart of the business and designing the human and digital customer experience are top priorities to win in the age of the Digital Customer.

Organisations grow if they have more customers visiting more often, meeting more needs of existing customers and attracting new customers: Use of Data & Digital is an opportunity to get closer to customers and do what good organisations do now better & faster.

There are several opportunities for Data & Digital to allow organisations to get closer to their customers and grow faster, and lots of learnings from other organisations that can be applied in a fast follower position.

Transformational understanding of the business to make it customer focused: better, simpler and cheaper for customers, colleagues and the organisation itself
Delivering a Friction Free Customer Experience
Delivering the most relevant, inspirational messaging and customer experiences through advanced segmentation and targeting

The road to travel on the journey to making your organisation more customer focused in a digital world is challenging and one that requires alignment and commitment from the CEO, CCO and across different departments.

Identify the commercial & customer Goals in next 18m-36m
Build a clear vision of a radically different data-driven customer digital future state, working across digital & bricks & mortar and align across the organisation.
Remove Silos of data use creating a single version of the truth, with a data strategy linked to business goals e.g. Unified View of customer data, GDPR ready and tools developed to meet commercial goals.
Breakdown the institutional fear of data & digital at all levels through training & doing: it’s a tool that anyone can use to do what you have been doing better
Use Data Analytics to Map & Prioritise customer journeys & personalised experiences across human & digital touchpoints and align organisation capability to deliver for customer.
Identify & Build the capabilities (Process, Tools People) that will be required to transform process design from efficiency focused (cheaper) to customer focused (better simpler cheaper) , specifically putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalised journeys
Foster stronger bonds between technical and different business people. This is a two-way process to ensure the technical teams understand the commercial imperatives, and customer solutions you would like to build, and the business teams learn to trust the expertise of technical IT teams. It will also allow you to improve data quality through showing the business impact.

Using Data and Digital to put the customer at the heart of an organisation is a transformation that future looking organisations need to start implementing now.

Three steps to Driving Customer Analytical Success

innovation

There are three simple steps to ensure Customer Analytics drive commercial success in an organisation

Strive for excellence in customer analytics matters (vs merely good average).
Establish a culture that values fact-based decision making and analytics
Secure senior management involvement in customer analytics.

Strive for excellence in customer analytics matters (as opposed to a merely good average). More than 85 percent of companies that report extensive use of customer analytics (in terms of IT, analytics, and its execution) claim their company achieves a significant value contribution from customer analytics. This compares with around 20 percent for low users of the function, and some 30 percent of moderate users—suggesting that companies start to reap substantial benefit from customer analytics only when they achieve excellence, i.e., when their function can be considered state of the art. Just moving from a low to a medium level of maturity will merely generate limited success

This has particularly important implications for managers and their decisions on what needs to be invested in their organisation’s customer analytics to be competitive in the future. They need to determine the performance gap between their current customer analytics and state-of-the-art customer analytics in their industry, and to ensure that their additional spending on customer analytics stands a fair chance of bridging this gap. Otherwise the additional spending will—despite the best of intentions—turn out to have been a sunk investment right from the outset (because it will not pay off eventually).

2. Establish a culture that values fact-based decision making and analytics.

It’s vital that the culture that is not focused purely on IT and analytics topics, but approaches customer analytics holistically. Although investments in IT and skilled employees are important, these investments alone will not deliver value. Leadership that expects fact-based decisions and an organization that can quickly translate those decisions into action are qualities more likely to lead to success than companies focused exclusively on IT.

a) the execution and organizational aspects of customer analytics (such as a culture of fact-based decision making, analytics valued by the front line, management attitude and expectations) correlate most with the value contribution of customer analytics . This suggests that it is the culture and organizational setup that moves the needle even though IT and analytics expertise are obviously necessary to create value from customer analytics.

b) Having pragmatic and actionable foundations with the right cultural mind-set in place within the organization is more important than the perfect solution. Within execution and organization, for instance, fact-based decision making and management expectations are more important than the speed at which these insights are put into action. Within analytics, the focus is on delivering the right actionable insights, and less on the fast development of new models. Looking at IT, a similar pattern emerges: a pragmatic 360° data mart that builds the foundation for customer analytics is more important than the complete (automated) linkage of all IT systems.

A key success factor is therefore to examine customer analytics holistically, including IT, analytics, and execution/organizational setup, and to pragmatically improve on all dimensions.

3 Secure senior management involvement in customer analytics. High-performing companies are led by data-savvy C-level executives who understand the importance of and involve themselves in customer analytics. Companies where senior management is not involved extensively, only 28 percent report a significant value contribution of customer analytics, versus 69 percent of companies with senior management involvement in customer analytics that say that customer analytics drives value

Specifically, looking at the level of management that should be involved, it becomes clear that what drives the value contribution is top management/board involvement. If the company has established a role within the top management team (TMT), such as via a chief commercial officer, more than half of the respondents (53 percent) stated that customer analytics contributes significantly to value creation. If only senior management is involved but not the TMT, this drops to just 29 percent, close to the value of no senior management involvement at all (20 percent).

In summary: three factors to drive Analytical Success:

Strive for excellence in customer analytics matters (vs merely good average).
Establish a culture that values fact-based decision making and analytics
Secure senior management involvement in customer analytics.

Dunkin Donuts Data Perks

dunkin donuts coffee and donut

Dunkin Donuts are just beginning to establish themselves in UK but in USA are the largest coffee retailer, and have applied data driven analytics and technology effectively to improve the customer journey.

A coffee and a Donut is one of the most popular calls, and is the mainstay of this convenience foodservice retailer.

Dunkin Donuts recognised the key to convenience retailing lay in the palm of their customers hands and build a customer journey revolving around the smart phone. They created an app based journey where customers could pre-order, collect and pay for their Dunkin Donut. It started with a minimum credible product, simple sign-up and sign-in and has developed into one of the most recognised programmes in USA.

. They understood the customer journey not in part but fully and recognised they were a convenience foodservice retailer and making a coffee and a donut easy for customers would drive more customers to make more visits.

Dunkin Donuts wanted to reward loyal guests in a fast and convenient manner, and provide an overall superior customer experience. Very similar to the goals that Whole Foods had in mind when launching its own loyalty program.

Understanding the Commercial Goals: Dunkin Donuts used advanced analytics to understand the commercial imperatives, and what would best drive them. They recognised that there was a bigger upside from increasing visits and number of visits that slightly increasing the average basket. ( There are only so many coffees and donuts you can eat in one sitting , but it’s important to be the coffee house of choice when there is a choice of 2-3 on the street.

Design a Customer experience that delivers the commercial imperative: They were clearly focusing on driving additional visits from additional customers because they designed a DD Perks programme that rewarded frequency vs average basket.

The Points based reward Rewarded Frequency: Assuming people ordered a coffee and a donut they earned points which became a free coffee every 10-20 visits. High value to the consumer and relatively low cost to Dunkin Donut.

They also made it easy and intuitive to sign up, and in addition to the basic points structure, Dunkin’ also included features to drive more sign-ups. Sign up on an app downloaded onto their phone,

Make it easy to get to the first reward Customers get a free reward when they join and on their birthday,. That emotional feeling of drinking a free coffee prompts more usage of Dunkin Donut

Make it more rewarding: once the first reward has been claimed targeted offers for incentives and bonus points based on consumer behaviour enable fast rewards accumulation

Make it Easy to Use / Pay Customers must pay with a registered DD payment card at participating locations, or more importantly customers can connect their DD cards to their phone, which enables mobile payments and gets more customers (hopefully) to download the Dunkin’ mobile app.

One last benefit of the program is that customers can share rewards with friends, which is high on many customers’ lists as a desirable loyalty program feature.

Technology developments to make it Easier : with the onset of Apple Pay, Dunkin Donuts enable mobile ordering through its app. Customers on their way to Dunkin’ Donuts can get their order in quicker, and Dunkin’ can speed up its line. In addition, Dunkin’ also announced interest in Apple Pay as a way to make payments easier for consumers

Three key outtakes for success:

Be Clear on the commercial imperative: frequency or average spend
Make it simple, rewarding to use
Integrate across the whole customer experience to make it easy for the customer

Dunkin-Donuts shop

5 Steps to Digital Mastery

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Digital mastery in an ever increasingly digital world is one of the key priorities of an organisation. The road to travel on the journey to making your organisation more customer focused in a digital world is challenging and one that requires alignment and commitment from the CEO, the Board and Shareholders down.

There are 5 priorities for a chief customer officer / chief digital officer

5) Steer the course through strong Governance. Digital Transformation should be governed through the EXEC as well as relevant touchpoints to ensure continual alignment.

These 5 priorities along won’t drive the transformation but applying them is a start that many organisations who are now Digital Masters followed.

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The Story behind your metrics

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What Friction Points Next?

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Data & Digital is transforming customer expectations

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