Posted by: LCP Consulting Monday 14 March 2016 16.57

Brand, customer insight, data and technology, and personalisation are crucial to achieving a seamless customer experience. The key is to adapt, be flexible, and understand every touchpoint that customers have with your brand. These and other pressing issues were tackled by an expert panel as part of our Future of Retail Series.

In partnership with Retail Week, LCP was delighted to host an exclusive think tank discussion at The Groucho Club in London. Representatives from Harvey Nichols, Karen Millen, New Look, Shop Direct Home Shopping, Homebase, and Arcadia met to discuss the benefits of a seamless channel experience for shoppers, and the challenges of achieving one.

Laura Heywood, Commercial Editor at Retail Week set some themes to consider. How can you avoid making customer promises you can’t live up to? Could partnerships and cross functional working be key to a competitive advantage? Why is it critical retailers adjust to demands of omni-channel commerce in 2016 and beyond?

The challenge is about more than just meeting the changing retail requirements of customers but deeply understanding your customer and what they want.

Conserving your brand in a multi-channel environment
How do you ensure your brand fits together and everyone is following? There is emotion around every purchase so consistency is key, even during peak times. “It’s about setting ourselves apart by providing a seamless brand and customer experience. The key is to get a balance as to what you can offer, and how you deliver.”

Brand was seen as intrinsically linked to consistency and the need for a totally seamless customer experience. From returns, to international click and collect, to concessions, it was clear from the discussion that trying to deliver a consistent customer experience without compromise was tough. “Although we’re consistently striving to do better for our customers, if it doesn’t work in peak, we’re not going to do it – it needs to be sustainable.”

When it comes to technology, the group was asked to consider the question of prioritising investments, and how the needs and wants of the purchaser are moving so fast it was sometimes hard to keep up. The technical experience is just expected by the consumer – what is more important is the brand promise – what hooks me into your destination of choice?

In general it was felt that legacy systems are another hurdle when it comes to technology. Even when a business knows it needs to adapt, moving from a legacy to an adaptive model is hard. Getting the business to understand, and know what they want is difficult as you run the risk of creating a new system with the old “legacy-system challenges”. Most agreed that “we’re always going to be replacing systems and it needs to be assumed there needs to be a constant renewal programme requiring continuous investment”.

Giving customers what they want
Personalisation was seen as intrinsically connected to brand. But how do you personalise it when the consumer expects the experience be an individual one? The challenge we see for retailers is how to personalise – how do you understand real shopping habits? Some solutions are about “heavy engineering” and others are simply about “menu changing” – the trick is not to get the two mixed up and inadvertently impact the customer. “This is where data comes in handy – what sort of customers do we have and how can we give the right sort of experience?” Some in the group felt there was too much data while others felt it was more about people not knowing how to correctly interpret the masses of data that exist.

Rapidly changing customer expectations mean that personalisation must be placed at the heart of retail. Customers expect brand consistency no matter where or when they shop and this is going to be an ongoing challenge for retailers. Finally, it is clear that success lies in full cross-functional integration – as one retailer said: “Nobody owns the customer experience and nobody owns-multi-channel – we all do”.