International Insights - Leading Customer Engagement & Digital Transformation #NZCIO
Paul Kennedy spoke about the retail sector - the place for physical and online retail. Customers don’t really care about channels - they are concerned with getting what they want in the most convenient way. Customers are the centre of the universe for retail CIOs.
Customer expectations on retail have shifted - they want things now. Customers often also have a lot more product knowledge than a sales associate. So why should people go to stores?
Paul says not all things can be googled however - enthusiasm and experience around products and services. In clothing, retailers style is another differentiator.
Social media also give customer a global voice - organisations need to think about both the positive and negative side of social media reach.
To keep people coming back to stores requires giving them an experience, not just selling products.
Digital retail does give organisations incredibly reach data about their customers - enabling a lot of ‘fail fast’ experiment. Paul shared a bunch of experiments they have conducted - some great key earnings about what increases engagement & sales and what doesn’t.
Paul reinforced something that most CIOs are trying to impress on their leaders and peers - digital strategy is the strategy. There is no longer a place for non-digital strategies for business.
Agility is critical - but you need to be agile within the right framework. For example, overlooking security can be catastrophic for the organisation. Having a robust way for understanding and managing risk is also critical to repeatable agility.
Paul also talked about how DevOps overcomes some of the initial challenges Agile experienced.
Insightful talk from someone who is obviously quite passionate about his industry. Will be interesting to see how retail sector continues to evolve in the Amazon era.