“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”

The memorable opening of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities came to mind today as I reflected on the wide variation in customer service we all experience day-to-day.  First a couple of contrasting examples:

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So what does Web 2.0 mean to Retailers?

Well the term ‘Web 2.0’ means very little.  But what Web 2.0 enables is having significant bearing on retail in 2009 and beyond.   Inventory management, store systems, logistics and CRM will all be affected in one way or another. And in eCommerce, it is already having an impact.

So following on from this post, why do I think what has been achieved on Halfords.com is a vast improvement on the Halfords customer experience?

Bearing in mind that the following innovations were borne out of customer research and insight, here are 11 reasons:

1. Brand New Visual Design – supporting key customer journeys more effectively – namely research, search, browse & navigation and guided sales
2. Better Search – Customers can now search on car registration or make, model and year of their car for such items as oil, batteries, car bulbs and blades.
3. Guided Navigation – For customers who may not know which product to purchase but have a list of requirements and intended uses, a new guided sales offering is now available.  The customer can complete a series of questions which filter a list of product options relevant to the requirements identified
4. Multi Channel Support – Introduction of a call-centre support site to assist the customer through advice, ordering, payment and store reservation
5. Introduction of social commerce features – enabling consumers to read/write product reviews and contribute user-generated content, helping customers benefit from authentic customer opinions ( Bazaarvoice technology integrated)
6. Complimentary editorial – added to provide better product attribution for browsers.  DirectNews is the leading provider of tailored news feeds for websites and their solution has been seamlessly integrated
7. Provision of Dynamic Imagery – Allowing customers to quickly and interactively view high-resolution product details providing an engaging, informative shopping experience.  Scene7 technology has, again, been seamlessly integrated
8. Better demonstration of Product Expertise – website now enables customers to buy vehicle specific parts (e.g. oil, bulbs, blades, batteries) based on the make, model, year of their exact car.  Integration ITIM Zygon Product Information Management seamlessly integrated.
9. Customer Friendly urls – Integration of IBM Omnifind to give customers a better search engine experience as a result of the development of SEO friendly URLs
10. Quicker access to relevant ‘help’ – Introduction of a better online ‘Advice Centre’ which now dynamically displays relevant content based on search results.  In addition better integration with call centre, which now allows CSRs to support customer inquiries and facilitate purchases more effectively
11. Better support for channel hopping shoppers – the provision of “Quick order forms” that allow shoppers to input Catalogue Numbers for fast online product selection

The result is an eCommerce website where the  customer experience is optimised as a direct result of the seamless integration of  data, systems and third party solutions.

I have to admit it, despite being a marketer, I am becoming increasingly anxious with the mass-overuse of the term ‘Customer Experience.’

Don’t get me wrong, it is right that our  ‘thinking‘ and ‘orientation‘ should be fully aligned to the ‘customer’, but I do see familiarities with phrases like ‘CRM’ and ‘SOA’ which, despite being critical for business success even today, were tainted by a myriad of opportunistic suppliers that over-egged the pudding and stretched the truth to satify their revenue streams.   The result of bandwagons like these?  CRM and SOA became loaded terms and everyone started to avoid using them.

It would be tragic if ‘Customer Experience’  and those in the Customer Experience solutions business were to suffer a similar fate.  Maybe its too late?  In fact ‘Customer Experience Management’ failure has been discussed already in some circles.

And yet low and behold, this morning I add fuel to the fire by distributing a press release entitled Salmon seamlessly integrates data, systems and solutions for Halfords Limited – Improving the overall customer experience of shopping at Halfords.com and meeting the needs of customers across Halfords’ multiple shopping channels.

My colleagues and I (and Halfords of course) distributed this with a great deal of thought.  We are obviously conscious of the overuse of the keyword, BUT know what has been achieved IS an improvement of the experience for Halfords’ customers.

And in the context of the complex nature of enterprise eCommerce – that fact shouldn’t be confused with cosmetic surgery at a CSS level, simple web re-design or other web projects that increasingly fall under the category ‘Customer Experience’.

I was just reading through this article “CRM and eCommerce Integration Means More Sales, Less Costs” posted by Richly Chhuey, and thinking that he is spot on in his article. Many companies throughout the 90′s and 00′s that were able to implement a successful CRM strategy saw an increase (sizable in some instances) in sales.

The same is true on the online space, those that can implement a successful strategy can realise the same benefits. There is a richness of data that is captured through many common eCommerce platforms that provides a solid understanding of customers at the point of sale and post sale.

However, there is one element that wasn’t considered – what about before they place the order? Or even before they register?

This information is extremely useful in understanding why a customer is coming to your site, what they are looking for and more importantly why the visitor didn’t register and didn’t buy. A low visitor:sales conversion ratio may indicate that the visitor can get the product cheaper elsewhere (fairly easy to establish through shop aggregators) in which case you may wish to use your CRM to define a segment that you can run a targeted campaign towards. Unfortunately it can’t help with more fundamental issues such as a sub-standard customer experience resulting in the visitor getting fed up, but I guess you need to invest some effort to make money online!

To capture this information, you need to consider an additional component as part of your eCommerce strategy: web analytics. It is this application or service that is able to interpret how many visitors you receive, what their journey is, what elements are effective. Without it, you may never know who is NOT buying on your site.

On this blog we have discussed online purchases and online transaction handling before – usually in the context of usability or path to purchase. More often than not, we’ve ended up drawing comparisons to, or extolling the virtues of a sophisticated offline business process and asking the question, “Physical stores don’t work in this manner, so why are you making your online store work this way?” Ever heard the phrase ‘technology for technologies sake?’ We have, and it’s not pretty.

And yet, every so often the opposite happens. The online paradigm shifts an offline business process profoundly and sharply.

One such occurrence is related to purchasing. To me it seems that as eCommerce has become more mainstream, ‘ease in purchasing’ has become a pre-requisite for shopping generally.

One approach to defuse poor ease in purchasing offline is off course to invest in customer service representatives to smooth away any ill feeling. But another way is to invest in technology and its integration.

And so it transpires that earlier this month more than 1,000 London retail outlets including those at ‘Threshers’ and food chains ‘Yo Sushi!’ and ‘Eat’ have all signed up for a “contactless” payment facility. If ‘ease’ and ‘trust’ could be encapsulated “contactless” payment is it.

The so-called “tap and pay” system (like Transport for London’s Oyster payment network), is being launched in the autumn and other retailers are already on board too – ‘Krispy Kreme’, ‘Coffee Republic’, ‘Books Etc’ and the ‘Science Museum’.

Adding to the momentum, payment providers Mastercard and Visa have announced plans to offer contactless cards, which allow transactions of up to £10 without the need to sign or enter a pin number via their member banks. (The system, which is already popular in the US through outlets including fast food chain McDonald’s, aims to speed up payments and reduce queues.)

It is certain is that we can expect a great amount of marketing noise (good and bad) to emerge through 2008 as cashless payments start to become a reality.  ‘Ease’ and ‘Trust’ are key – and these are tricky subjects. But what price contactless cards will become a de-facto standard payment method offline?  My bet this is not a trend. This is going to grow like wildfire. First stop £10, next stop £25.  Soon.

Suddenly strategic plays involving loyalty cards and their underlying information seem very interesting indeed. And how will the mobile operators respond? They have also long been touted as the payment mechanism de-rigour.

Who can tell which way payment will shift? The only certainty is that as retailers use technology to make even more money – they’ll end up handling less of the dirty cash itself.

When speaking to friends who work in different sectors recently, it became apparent that their view of eCommerce and the on-line world is pretty shallow.

They see web sites as basically nothing more than a bunch of pretty pictures, designed, developed and operated by a troupe of digital interactive artists, shuffling about in un-ironed clothes with hair pointing in all directions and an iPod blocking any attempt at conversation.

Frankly I was a bit offended.

Design skills are necessary for sure, but if I were looking for a partner to help design, build and support an eCommerce site, I’d want someone with experience of running large-scale sites taking over £1M each day, an understanding of enterprise systems integration issues (SOA), solid commercial skills and a good grasp of the sector I’m operating in.

Where your average accounting, payroll or CRM system is concerned, change is often considered a bad thing. In strategic terms these are ‘operational’ systems where change is minimised wherever possible to reduce risk and keep a lid on costs. The life expectancy of such a system is often around the 8 to 12 year mark – although we know that some will become entrenched and live for 20 years or more as successive IT managers on 4 year job-change cycles duck the issue of replacing them for fear they’ll lose their job, reputation and future if it all goes a bit pear shaped on their watch.

But web sites are a bit different. To remain competitive they acquire new features on a frequent basis and are more akin to living breathing things in that they evolve in response to market developments. For websites, change is constant and there isn’t the luxury of a fixed quarterly or even biannual release cycle favoured by centralised IT departments. The outcome is that large scale eCommerce sites have a complex code base with multiple code streams requiring outstanding configuration management skills.

The systems infrastructure is intricate too. Managing peak load intra day and shifting demand throughout the year isn’t a trivial task. Frequently a dozen or more application servers will be required. And web servers, database servers, firewalls, routers, load balancers, etc. And they all need configuring and monitoring to make sure the site is up and stays up because – in financial terms – a site outage may be equivalent to shutting the doors on ten or more physical outlets. Now that’s the kind of thing that gets the CEO’s attention!

Integration wise, whether an eCommerce site is small or large there is a significant amount of ‘plumbing’ required to integrate with back-end systems and third parties. Data about products, pricing, offers, discounts and stock positions has to be sourced from somewhere. Orders need to be sent to fulfilment systems. Then we have to consider fraud detection, payment gateway integration (not forgetting 3D secure), image hosting, address verification, and mapping services too. We shouldn’t forget the bunch of data feeds required for affiliates and price comparison sites either. Or email and SMS communications.

I could go on with Web 2.0, social shopping, product reviews, RSS feeds, blogs, Google checkout, etc. but you’ve got the idea now, right? All of this integration work requires traditional Systems Analysis skills as well a detailed understanding of contemporary IT architectures and approaches such as Service Orientation. Experience suggests the more third party integration is required on a project, the more risky it is because of the dependencies involved. I’d want people that have done this before, lots of times and in the large.

In addition to the technical, there is also much to be gained from a partner that understands the business sector too. Any hard-fought for trust engendered by your website will either be reinforced or smashed to bits when the delivery promise made on the website is kept or not by the fulfilment operation that follows, so an understanding of the reality of the distribution centre and store environments is key to providing realistic information to on-line customers. A second site with separate branding probably means different packaging to be used in the DC. Is there physically room for another bench? How will the packers know which brand the order relates to? And let’s face it, Retail is a seasonal business and if you’re not ready for the Xmas peak, January is a lousy time to be looking for alternative employment as nobody has budget until April.

So sure, design and designers are important; an understanding of the psychology of the purchasing process and translation of that into slick browse and checkout processes will undoubtedly do wonderful things to conversion rates. But all in all eCommerce is a whole lot more complicated than pretty pictures.

I just wish my friends could see the big picture.