A voice interface in retail customer journeys can bring new insights and a better customer experience. Bots are now very easy to integrate to applications and the support for voice and text recognition inputs backed by machine learning continues to improve exponentially in capability, supporting more general use cases. As a consequence, the transition from bot interaction to speaking with a service representative can be made more seamlessly with better contextual data available from the start.

Another driver for further integration and digital transformation in the call center has been the COVID pandemic, which forced many call center representatives to work from home away from their existing call center infrastructure. The solutions for them are also the basis for further cloud-based integration.

Due to these, as is the case for other traditional sales channels, the call center is much further integrated into the operations and metrics of execution of retail customer journeys, which are by definition channel-agnostic.

In response, the market for call center as a service(CCaaS) solutions is rapidly evolving. The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021 shows that there are still many relative niche players providing specialized solutions with the notable exception of the behemoth cloud provider AWS.

A combination of AWS tools, including Alexa and AWS Connect can provide a complete cloud-based end-to-end solution for seamless integration of voice into existing customer journeys.

As well as channel-agnostic and self-service customer interactions, solutions in the CCaaS solution space include process orchestration, resource management, employee engagement and reporting metrics for operations and customer insights.

As enablers of Modern Commerce, in SkillNet we have found that the opportunities for integration with established eCommerce and mobile channels can bring immediate value, both to adding capabilities to the execution of core customer journeys and to the insights on conversion and real-time sentiment analysis.

The progress of these solutions has made setting up integrated demos and proofs of concept a straightforward activity, allowing for experimentation and incremental iterations in short timeframes.

This is the preferred approach to ensure that retail customer journeys evolve based on the data from the interactions with the consumers.

Today, however, many customer journeys still end with the promise of a call from a call center agent, that might or might not happen and which the customer might or might not pick up. Or with an attempt from the customer to call a number that takes them out of the application context in which they are in, so they can join a dreaded queue on the phone, for the privilege of repeating all of the information they already provided after a few minutes.

Over the next few years, voice integration will become a mandatory feature of modern commerce. At SkillNet we can help with that voice integration today and ensure that customer experience is improved right away rather than in the future.

This Blog first appeared on Medium.

The retail industry was one of the first and most disrupted industries by the emergence of the internet. What years later would be referred to as Web 1.0 drove exponential growth in remote selling with the eCommerce revolution. The arrival of Web 2.0 with social, mobile and SaaS was also very impactful, so much so that all of these innovations are now taken for granted and mainstream in the retail industry.

Impact of the Blockchain on the Retail Industry

Some technologist now believe that Web 3.0 is the adoption of crypto for delivery of existing and new services which will disrupt the retail industry. However, this is not yet widely accepted as the next step for the Internet. The wild swings on the prices of coins largely impact the discussion on the potential utility of the technology. There are plenty passionate proponents and detractors. Add to that the leading industry in application is not retail but finance and the picture specific for retail is even less clear.

Will Cryptocurrency Accepted By Retailers?

When most people think of blockchain in retail, they think of the ability to accept Bitcoin as a tender. News of Tesla accepting Bitcoin for then stopping the acceptance of Bitcoin made headlines recently. With the price of Bitcoin moving up and down and being considered by many as an investment hedge against USD inflation it is unclear why would anyone use it to buy a car.

There are other use cases in retail which are more interesting. Arguably with far more potential to disrupt the retail industry:

• Payments: with the introduction of blockchain in retail, this is indeed a wide potential area for disruption. Crypto should be able to provide anonymity and decentralization at scale for payments. Some services from DeFi (decentralised finance) will be made available to retail. While there are multiple approaches for feasibility, solutions around stablecoins are the most common. As of this writing there are already hundreds of different stablecoins in the market. Big retailers like Wallmart or El Corte Ingles might seek to create their own stablecoins while there are platforms available in which to develop solutions like Celo. Another utility is for consumers in developing countries. SkillNet worked in the last decade with retailers in Africa to introduce M-Pesa, which allowed for digital payments for people without access to a debit card. This new generation of solutions, over the next decade, will be able to extend the portfolio of financial services for those without or with limited access to traditional banking to include things like credit and insurance.
• Personal identifiable information and loyalty systems: out of the Dapps (decentralised applications) being built at the moment, those that deal with customer information might prove most disruptive for retail. A key driver for retailers to unlock value is to provide a personalised experience. The main barrier of adoption, other than technology, is the initial disclosure and subsequent management of personal information with relation to privacy and security. Crypto can potentially provide the intermediate tier which enables personalization features without customer disclosing personal information or retailers storing such information. Combined with systems of reward which can also be blind to PII , this is an area for potential large changes. The business model for these applications in which selling customer data is not an option, remains to be seen. Loyalty systems based on blockchain are starting to emerge for other industries but are much less ambitious in leveraging a decentralised model.
• Trusted supply chains: traceability in the supply chain through blockchain was perhaps the first enterprise use case widely in pursuit for Crypto. There have also been barriers to these solutions over the last five years. Schemes not being truly decentralised and open but being managed by large tech companies has been one. Another issue has been the link between proofs in the physical world and on chain proofs given the limitations of storage and the security considerations of the blockchain. Innovation to overcome these barriers is ongoing. The prevalent approach for implementation is to introduce smart contracts which have access to physical proofs through APIs that trigger on chain events. One example of these is Chainlink, which allows smart contracts on Ethereum to securely connect to external data sources, APIs, and payment systems .The scale of investment in these initiatives is already in the billions of dollars.
• Receipts and return management: one way to easily classify blockchain initiatives in retail is to think of them as before or after customer purchase. For the latter, the creation of receipts and management of transactions is another potential area of disruption in retail. In a crypto solution, a receipt can be a token and a return policy a smart contract. Another potential approach is use of NFTs. Non-fungible tokens have raised in popularity due to outlandish purchases recently. These unique tokens can map to what today are serialised items in retail. In hospitality they could map to event tickets
• Marketplaces: currently for a marketplace the authenticity and reputation of buyer and seller are critical for a particular transaction to take place. These are mainly driven by the previous activities of both users on the marketplace and the amount of data they are willing to share between them. Crypto can anonymise their identity and yet increase the security. It can also through smart contracts place proofs on the goods sold and hence change completely the technology and process that underpins these digital exchanges.

There are still technical barriers for blockchain in the broad adoption of crypto in the retail industry. Still, the investment in the sector and the amount of continuous innovation is impressive. The current performance limitations, high energy consumption and high transaction fees are barriers to this solution. Still, the use cases in which crypto has value could drive the innovation required to overcome them.

Some of the current limitations in crypto might need to be resolved before really going mainstream or the utility for some use cases just might win regardless at the end.

These are exciting times and we will soon find out how retailers will accept cryptocurrency and the disruptions to the retail industry.

This Blog first appeared on Medium.

Photo by Stanislaw Zarychta on Unsplash

In his yearly letter to shareholders published 15th of April 2021, Jeff Bezos shared some fascinating back of the envelope calculations on the value that Amazon creates to its customers.

28% of purchases at Amazon are completed in three minutes or less and 50% in less than 15 minutes. He concludes than on average a shop in Amazon takes 15 minutes. In contrast, he mentions that a visit to a store would take on average an hour and each customer would save two visits to the store per week (this latter part lacks mention of how that data was arrived to) If a time saving is value as 10$ per hour and multiplied by the 200 million of Amazon Prime members, the value creation in 2020 alone is $126 billion (after discounting the cost of Prime member fees)

As Amazon prime member myself, I have completed many of these quick purchases and find the value proposition compelling. However comparing time of purchase in store, which includes time to travel, with time for a digital sale is not a fair comparison. The lockdowns and pandemic have accelerated the transition to digital sales but should have also reminded us of the importance of the in store sales experience.

The challenge to compete with Amazon for retailers is huge. The logistics and commercial advantage that Amazon has through its scale are unparalleled. However if the main value to customers as stated by Jeff Bezos in this letter, is a frictionless digital sale, this is something that retailers can improve on today, on their own digital experiences.

A frictionless digital experience is only part of the value proposition for a store sale. If it is a convenience shop in a store, customer is not travelling to the store, the location is nearby and needs to have the ability to be in and out quickly, it is indeed the main value. Solutions around scan and go should be available so there is no need to interact with staff, if the customer doesn’t want to. This is not a sale that takes an hour. However if customer is travelling to a shop, in order to be motivated to do so, having a different rich experience is what would differentiate from buying online.

Metrics to differentiate between time spent in friction in the sales process and the value add provided by an in person experience are useful to explain why people still go to shops. Investing in both frictionless digital experiences and rich interactions delivers on critical metrics to generate value and compete against Amazon. The value add can translate into entertainment, education, loyalty rewards, gamification, social interaction, or others based on the specific retail brand. This value add is part of the digital solution.

At SkillNet a lot of our focus over the last 12 months has been to help retailers to design and implement the right retail customer journeys with the metrics built-in to track and reduce friction and enrich customer experience. Starting with the retail customer journey allows asking the right questions about how to best use technology to serve customers and better measure the real value creation. Knowing the technology and the retail domain operation is still critically important but not sufficient.

As Jeff Bezos reminds us in most of its public communications, Amazon’s vision for being Earth’s most customer-centric company has paid off well.

Store Digital twins

Satya Nadella mentioned them in his opening keynote of NRF and were a topic of conversation with many partners. A digital store twin in the cloud that can monitor and predict behavior is a proposition full of potential applications across customer, product and inventory.

The increase on the number of sensors and general data gathering end points at the store augments the fidelity of the digital replicas. At SkillNet, the virtualization and devops automation of the registers and devices of the retail POS state is a solution we have been providing to customers for testing and monitoring purposes at scale.

Vendors continue to define value around Customer Journeys

Consistent with previous events and current trends across industries, a lot of the conversations on how to best define the requirements for modern retail centered on customer journeys. From a technology perspective there were more general purpose Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in show than the more narrow solutions for retail customer relationship management (CRMs) or in the spaces of loyalty or gift cards.

From our experience working on customer journeys definition, one definite risk is in aligning too much with methodologies associated with business process reengineering. The aim of frictionless execution of business processes, particularly on omnichannel flows, is only part of the objective. Retailers look for differentiation in the customer experience, not just efficiency. While the CDP platforms revolve around customer, the customer experience is a relationship between two: the customer and the brand. It will be interesting to see if these CDP solutions evolve their focus on that relationship. This should manifest first between customer and product, bringing better capabilities on interactions between the two by the extended use of Artificial Intelligence.

AI is everywhere but not all AI is created equal

Since mentioning AI. AI was everywhere at the event. Across the buy,move,sell,return retail process landscape and in most booths. AI was mentioned as part of most services and products. However very little detail on implementation or capability. The general impression is that most vendors are using now machine learning for predictive analytics. It was difficult not to be a bit cynical about some of the claims. Not necessarily expecting that vendors will include all details of their algorithms or techniques. But at least provide some signal of what is there under the covers as a minimum standard. Some of the claims were so broad that you could think general intelligence had been achieved. May be there is already a good capability classification somewhere suitable for events like this. Going beyond powered by AI but not explicitly talking about things like naive Baynes, logarithmic regression or random forests. If exists it was nowhere to be found in NRF

AR and 3D modeling are finding more practical use cases

Practical use cases for Virtual Reality have not always been easy to find in retail. It is more exciting to be placed inside a virtual alien world than inside a virtual shopping center. However there were plenty of great uses cases for augmented reality and 3d models at the show this year.

Beyond experiences at the retail store with smart mirrors and other dedicated devices, AR should be looking to grow as part of the mobile experience with the increase of coverage for 5G in 2020. Many tools available and vendors after this market.

For 3D models, the solutions were more matured and can be used at scale on large catalogs with certain degree of automation. Multiple options were available for 3D model capabilities on media generation in content management. Beyond content management, solutions for product customization were also available, executing the configuration with 3D printing or with a traditional manufacturing process.

Robotics for store inventory management

While robots are commonplace in warehouses for inventory management, a number of solutions at the show this year were showing robot based solutions for inventory management at the store. It would be interesting to see how these solutions evolve and mature. The methods and parameters of inventory data that could be captured into the system will significantly change and expand.

A version of this article is also published at www.Medium.com

Written by Antonio Alvaro, Antonio is Senior Vice President Solutions and General Manager International

Looking back

Most traditional retailers in the 90’s increased their number of sales channels separating entities for both business and technical reasons. The thinking was about e-commerce vs stores, direct vs indirect and so on, and that permeated the way operations grew, as well as the design of the systems that underpinned them. Customers outgrew this way of thinking, if indeed it ever existed in the mind of the consumer. Now they look to engage with brands in whichever way is most effective leaving retailers to focus on providing a consistent experience across all points of interaction.

Today capabilities such as click and collect, location aware customer mobile apps, and integrated social media clienteling are almost expected, and brands need to race to not fall behind.

Tough choices

No #1 – When looking at omni-channel strategies it is very hard to not be tempted to scrap your old systems and start new all over again. At the core of your foundation is product, stock, promotion, and customer. Bringing new omni-designed systems to each of those entities takes a substantial investment of capital and man power. In the meantime, you have to continue trading on the old systems and run the business. Among your old systems there are also many lessons learned and unique experiences carved out of running your operations. Some of these are clear differentiators of your unique brand or business model which you will still need to migrate to any new systems. A change of this magnitude, even if conceptually very attractive, is hard to execute.

No #2 – The other option, perhaps even more tempting, is looking for the quick win—that one capability that can be delivered this quarter or next and can be reported back as introduction or proof of omni-channel. This is additional functionality that can be developed by creating another layer of complexity without introducing change in the existing systems. It can also be identified as one that requires no or minimal integration with legacy systems.

This option has a real problem of expectations. Once your customer interacts with the new service its limitations quickly become obvious. Success can be worse than failure for this option, as new capabilities are requested to be built on top of what is there. What starts out simple will prove to be very difficult to maintain with a solution that is not designed to scale.

Between those two options is the real risk of analysis paralysis and not to start anything out of fear of complexity and ultimately failure.

Instead, light the path.

The final option for achieving omni-channel, the one that I typically find myself discussing with retailers, is actually the most difficult one. Omni-channel doesn’t have to be about doing “everything” on one large project or achieving a quick win for a pet initiative. Instead it should be about the setup of a strategy for execution: the creation of a roadmap with incremental achievable steps aligned to a business case.

Discussions on transition architectures and capability milestones might not be the most exciting approach to omni-channel, even if some quick wins are thrown into the plans for good measure. However, this is the best way to avoid any omni-shambles.