BT Fresca & Expedite Blog

Rich Lowe has been promoted to run BT’s global audio and video conferencing business. We’re sad to see him go but delighted that Richard Dodd (our COO) is taking over. For those of you who don’t know Richard, he’s a poacher turned gamekeeper. After many years at Tesco, latterly as International Store Operations and IT Director, he joined us in 2006. Firstly as CTO and latterly as COO, Richard has been the intellectual force behind our multi-channel vision and is always looking out for the latest innovations to bring our clients.

Our customers will get to hear more from Richard at our next client conference but he’s a big fan of social media and you follow him @richard_m_dodd or via LinkedIn.

Richard Dodd, CEO, BT Expedite & Fresca

As the multichannel expert for BT Expedite, I believe passionately that retailers that join up their various customer touchpoints (Store, Web, Mobile, Call-centre, Email, Social etc) and provide great customer service and brand experience across these touchpoints are on to a winning strategy.  Data to back this up in fashion /apparel has been relatively sparse however.  As a result, we have spent some time recently looking at the results our customers are achieving.  For several years, we have been helping retailers such as Aurora Fashions, Thomas Pink, JJB Sports, New Look and, Lyle & Scott to launch cross-channel programmes using our Integrated Store and Integrated mobile /social solutions.  This data pool is now large enough to enabled us to draw some conclusions.  Some of the data and trends we picked out include:

1) Click & collect boosts on-line orders by at least 10% with some retailers achieving >30% uplift.  This is incremental to year-on-year increases in web sales typically in excess of 20%  

2)  Best in class retailers are seeing >60% upsell once a customer is in-store to collect their order

3)  Transactions through Mobile and Social touchpoints, whilst still low, are increasing at an exponential rate.

These are hard benefits, there are many soft benefits of this cross-channel retail approach including improved customer loyalty and increased staff engagement.  You can find out a little bit more directly from our customers Meg Lustman, MD from Warehouse and Jonathan Heilbron, CEO from Thomas Pink in the video below:

    Click on the video at any point during play to submit an enquiry 

Article by Jason Shorrock, Multichannel Consultant, BT Expedite

OK, that’s not strictly true. But when retailers got together at BT Tower recently to discuss the e-commerce journey, they were all in agreement about two things: the term e-commerce just doesn’t do justice to everything that it now incorporates and, although it’s a journey, there’s no final destination to aim for.
 

1. E-commerce doesn’t cover the half of it
It’s not just e-commerce anymore. In a really short space of time, we’ve gone from e-commerce to multichannel to cross-channel to merged channels to… what? Forrester suggests “agile commerce” as a catch-all for the rest of the alphabet (including, e- m- and F- commerce).
In joining up the channels, it seems e-commerce will exist as a separate discipline in a few years. But what does that actually mean for retailers?
Phil Heaton from relative newcomers Getthelabel.com, talked about creating an online business and building it up to a market leader in just three years.

Phillip Heaton, Getthelabel.com, presenting at the Next Generation Event, BT Tower

 
In that short space of time, he’s been astounded by the changes: “Customer expectations around delivery, for example, have changed dramatically since we began. We had what could be considered an appropriate delivery model for our business at the time, but with 90-minute fulfilment and tailored timeslots around now, we know we have to change to meet current expectations.”
 

2. We will never get “there”
The two most-used words at the event were e-commerce and journey.  But a journey suggests a destination, unless you’re in e-commerce. Sarah Hughes joint MD at BT Fresca set the scene for the day:  “We’re on a journey,” she said, “and we’ll never be nearly there.”
 

Sarah Hughes, BT Fresca, speaking at the Next Generation ecommerce event, BT Tower

Sound a bit daunting? Not according to Nadine Sharara, e-commerce director at Thomas Pink. Echoing the views of many in the audience, Nadine spoke enthusiastically and energetically about the never ending e-commerce journey. “I think about it, not so much as a journey,” she explained, “than as a travel experience.”
Nadine introduced the latest Thomas Pink on-site product videos and explained how these were now driving the in-store experience. And the products featured on the videos are flying off the shelves, both real and virtual, proving that a more engaging e-commerce experience is more than just cool eye candy.

Nadine Sharara, Thomas Pink, presenting at the Next Generation ecommerce event, BT Tower

 
The stats show that retailers who grasp this idea of an ongoing journey do better than those who get everything in place and sit back. “Your e-commerce investment needs tending,” says BT Fresca’s multichannel specialist Jason Shorrock, “you have to feed and water it.”

What else did we learn?
Most innovation in e-commerce is focused on channel integration and fulfilment. So ensuring that web orders can be picked up in store (offering an opportunity to up-sell) and integration with social channels, like Facebook, are essential.

Click and collect has been the kiss of life for the High Street. Almost all retailers have a transactional website. But retailers without a store footprint (even just a couple of flagships) look a little old fashioned. And multichannel retailers are faring better than pureplays in general.
This is a huge opportunity for multichannel retailers to fight back against pure e-commerce providers as they can provide better service, instant gratification and increasingly flexible delivery options. One of the best examples of this is Oasis, which offers a 90-minute delivery from store.
So e-commerce is just the beginning. Mix in a little multimedia, in-store wi-fi and social networking, sprinkle in some smart handheld devices and you’re there. Well, nearly there. For the moment…

Find out more about ecommerce & online marketing solutions from BT Expedite

The run up to the busiest time of the retail calendar officially started this weekend with the ten week countdown to Christmas! And here at BT Fresca the manic and mayhem has already started, we’ve been going off piste with Snow + Rock and going global with Aurora Fashions.

We constantly strive to help our customers, help their customers, but this week we’ve been especially hard at work playing Santa’s little helper to make the Christmas rush easier for everyone.  The new mobile optimised Snow+Rock website has just gone live, making it easier for shoppers to place orders and browse on the go – fantastic if your planning to hit the slopes, or for last minute gift shopping and catching those bargains as soon as they hit the sales. 

Around the globe, the Fresca fairies are busy sprinkling their e-commerce magic, already providing websites for Karen Millen, Oasis, Warehouse and Coast for the last five years in the UK and more recently going web optimised.  We’ve now pushed them global launching the Karen Millen website in Germany as well as a joint website for Oasis, Warehouse and Coast where customers can shop across the brands all in one site!

Both sites are in local language that support local fulfilment, promotions, payment and customer service tailored for each specific country, and Aurora plan to roll out our platform across even more countries.  The web sites will support local payment types such as direct bank transfer and invoice on delivery, and the capacity to manage fulfilment from a local distribution centre.

The Frescacommerce Platform is behind many of the world’s fastest growing and most successful e-commerce web sites. It aims to blend creativity with e-commerce best practice and to integrate back office functions like customer ordering, call centre and fulfilment, to maximise sales while giving customers an engaging online experience.

Hash Ladha, Aurora’s group multichannel director, said: “We are very impressed by the current FrescaCommerce Platform and BT’s development plans for the future. These will help underpin our own plans for growth in Europe, Asia-Pacific and beyond.”

We are very excited about these new sites going live and wish our customers all the best for the Christmas trading period.

The Internet Retailing conference (October 4^th, Novotel, Hammersmith) always focusses on the latest on-line developments and this year revealed a growing chasm between the old and the new. What is different this time is that the new “old” is about old-fashioned, nothing to do with number of years trading.

Resting on the old-fashioned cliff-side are some relatively recent retailers, ASOS (founded in 2000),  eBay (1995) together with an analog and digital media pioneer, HMV (1899). Staking claim to the new ground are traditional high street names such as Burberry (1856), Thomas Pink (1984),  Aurora Fashions (Coast, 1996; Oasis, 1991 & Warehouse, 1976) mixed in with the cream of social networking Facebook (2004) and a revolutionary delivery company, Shutl (2008).

What sets them apart? A true appreciation of their customers’ multichannel lives.

For example, yesterday ex-ASOS visionary Hash Ladha, now 18 months in as multichannel director at Aurora Fashions announced the latest tranche of UK cities to be covered by his fashion industry leading 90 minute delivery service. By February 2012, 90% of the UK can order a dress late afternoon and be wearing it the same evening. Why does this make pure-play retailers like ASOS look old? Because ASOS do not have the nationwide store coverage to support this type of ship from store to home service. Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO, has long muted the possibility of a single ASOS store on Oxford Street, but even that’s a long way from the 50 or so stores required for pan-UK coverage.

The retail equivalent of Apple, Burberry’s recent tie-up with Salesforce.com underlines the absolute need to focus on your customer wherever she happens to be. In the same vein, presenting creative innovation yesterday, Nadine Sharara, e-commerce director at Thomas Pink, underscored the need for absolute quality and consistency of brand regardless of channel. The beautifully British Brideshead revisited theme of this years A/W campaign oozes the kind of high end luxury that thrives in the harshest recession. And the execution from store through to on-line is truly multichannel.

Of the keynotes that kicked off the conference yesterday, eBay sounded tired as it talked up its outlet channels and social media heritage. Conversely, head of Facebook commerce partnerships, Gavin Sathianathan, is effortlessly cool and unceasingly innovative as he describes the stories of the 800 million people that make up the Facebook world and the opportunities for retailers to join them.

So if e-commerce sounded old yesterday, true multichannel retailers are fresher than ever, buoyed by their years of trading and customer focus.

Gerald Maidment, Account Director

…at the new store opening at Westfield Stratford City…oh and our EPOS in the foreground …

The big theme du jour in retail technology is the convergence of marketing and IT. It’s no secret that the CMO is the CIO’s new best friend and this was spelled out loud and clear at yesterday’s Retail Technology Summit in London.

Aimed at a senior but technical audience, this conference typically features earnest Powerpoint decks crammed with process flow diagrams and enterprise architectures supplemented with top tips on how to make IT “relevant” to the business. Not in 2011. Today, the technologists are talking marketing.

The presentationswere blessed with a variety of titles but pretty much everyone arrived at the same conclusions; that mobile delivers about 10% of web-traffic and so needs to be taken seriously, that mobile makes stores more, not less, relevant to today’s shoppers and that you don’t have to choose between mobile apps and a mobile-optimised website (phew).

These are all marketing questions and it’s clear why IT Directors are asking them. Websites, m-commerce, kiosks and self-checkouts are all software applications used directly by shoppers without the benefit of a user manual. Getting them right is non-trivial and can’t be safely left to marketers when the CIO gets the blame when the customers complain.

But why so little talk about systems, service orientated architecture and cloud computing? Surely a flexible, scalable, robust and… er… agile IT function an essential pre-condition for success? Well, possibly because for many retailers the technology outlook is as uncertain as the economic one. We simply don’t know how shopping behaviour will change and whether real people will be as excited about location based promotions or the ability to check-out on a mobile phone as that nice chap from Google was.

So much, we knew already. To my mind, the conference was long on talk but short on facts and lacked the case studies you’d expect at this level of event. I felt myself drifting in a sea of rather undifferentiated panel debates in which everyone agreed that mobile really was terribly important. That said, a few speakers did stand out.

Top marks to Kiddicare’s CIO, Simon Harrow, for demolishing received wisdom like a JCB on rocket fuel. Another stand out was Caroline Rolfe from Links of London, the only female on the rosta and a marketer to boot, who delighted us with a tale of gnomes, Facebook and a riot in Glasgow. 

 A final mention for Mike McNamara, CIO of Tesco and the man with the biggest desk in UK retail technology. Reversing its policy, the supermarket giant is now in favour of electronic shelf-edge labels (e-ink swung it, he said) and will be resurrecting its RFID project as the readers have got cheaper. Mike also admitted what I had suspected, that the famous “shopping wall” in Korea was an awesome piece of global PR rather than a serious business initiative. You see, CIO’s really are the new marketers.

We’ve always been a fan of tablet computers and have long thought they could add fantastic value to in-store operations. But when iPads first appeared, we were very sceptical about whether Apple technology was right for our customers.

We have to admit we were wrong. We’ve spent many hours evaluating a range of alternative devices, from HP to Acer. We’re running a pilot at Aurora Fashions and have our clienteling application running on iPads in another major fashion brand. We declare ourselves converted.

Here’s eight reasons why iPads rock in fashion retail!

They help staff serve customers better – staff can photograph customers trying on garments, front and back, so that shoppers can easily see which dress and which colour suits them best, they can look at their own (or a competitor) website and place orders from the fitting room.

They’re great for clienteling – we’ve got a fab iPad clientling application especially designed for fashion but, at a more basic level, we’ve found staff keen to digitise their own “black books.

They help staff and head office communicate better – retailers often email store staff with important information, such as visual merchandising plans. These emails are accessible on the back office PC or at the till. With an iPad, staff can have the right information in their hand, wherever they are in the store. And in colour. We can’t tell you how surprised we are at how many of our customers only have black and white printers in their shops.

Everyone knows how to use one – we don’t underestimate this. People pick up iPads and use them. They don’t ask for the instruction manual or a training course or call the help desk. They just pick them up, turn them on and off they go.

They can double as an EPOS – Store 6, our EPOS software, works great on an iPad and, when the tablet’s not in use, it can dock on top of a cash drawer and double as a fixed till.

They are always on brand – change the wallpaper, add a sleeve and your iPad is immediately reflects your business’s personality.

They don’t run Windows – okay, we all know that there is no Windows device that comes close to the iPad’s usability but we think there’s more than this. Windows = work. Our experience is that people generally only use Windows devices for the purposes they are given them for. In contrast, with iPads people don’t feel constrained by the technology. They experiment, play and come up with use cases nobody had thought of.

They don’t go wrong – it’s early days but we’ve iPad apps deployed at a few retailers and in a number of countries and we’re not getting many service calls. Fingers crossed.

Charleen Benson

Director of Store Consulting

You can find out more about our mobile POS products at: http://www.btexpedite.com/mobilepos

Getting full Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliance remains a headache for many retailers and the cost of non-compliance also seems to be a growing concern.

With many UK retailers struggling to keep their heads above water and others stuck in a seemingly endless sale period, the need to plan and pay for compliance is slipping down the list of priorities.

Now there are also additional pressures as many of the first and some of the second phase Chip and PIN Entry Devices (PEDs) reach end of life.

If PCI DSS is a burden and PED replacement a challenge then combining the two may, on the surface, appear to be a total nonstarter but there may be some merit in taking both challenges head on.

Why, I hear you ask; well not least because not every retail IT team has enough people today to deal with business as usual, so finding two of the team to deal with PCI DSS is a problem before you start.

Then there is the need to continue to keep up to date with the standards and keep on top of the retail estate which is in scope for the PCI DSS.

Defining a cost-effective way to get and retain PCI DSS certification

Over the last couple of years I have been out into the market looking at how to find ways to reduce the PCI DSS burden and over the past six months I have been helping some of our retail customers come to terms with compliance in a number of ways, focussing on cost and ROI as much as ensuring that we find the best solution for their business.

Taking a step back from this process we have some lessons which apply generally to retail and some results which I think will surprise many including:

• Redesigning integration layers to ensure that Point of Sale environments no longer has full Primary Account Number (PAN) stored or used as   a  key to the transaction / customer.

• The same level of information can be derived truncated card data combined with tokenisation or hash values used

• Working with truncated data instead of using full details will satisfy most reporting requirements and analysis

• Moving to a hosted solution may be more cost effective in the short and the long term

And with the anticipated further clarification on emerging technologies (Point to Point Encryption) due in September you may find my new white paper an opener to the ensuing debate that I am sure many retailers are about to reignite within their businesses over the next three to six months.

Kevin Burns is a PCI & Payments Consultant for BT Expedite. For more info on PCI or to download Kevin’s white paper visit our website. You can also contact Kevin online or reach him via 0870 8506880.

Now in its ninth year and sponsored by BT Expedite and BT Fresca for the third year running, Martec International has just published the IT in Retail Survey 2011-12. The study covers 150 of the largest retailers in the UK and represents something like 75% of all retail sales. Data is gathered by interview with CIOs or other executives responsible for IT and two versions of the report are published – the Top 100 Retailers and the Top 125 Non-Food Retailers.

The first key finding is that IT budgets as a percentage of sales have declined yet again. Now at 1% sales overall, they were 1.1% sales for the two previous years and 1.3% of sales for the 4 years before that. By segment, the range is wide with grocers averaging 0.7% sales and non-store retailers averaging 3.4%. Recent years have been tough for CIOs managing shrinking budgets, a problem compounded by the growing spend on e-commerce and mobile commerce applications.

E-Commerce sales were 8.5% of total sales for the non-food group, an increase of 9% on last year. For the top 100 retailers which includes: grocers, e-commerce sales were static at 6.3% sales. However, this is distorted by the fact that new entrants to e-commerce pulled the average down while established retailers grew their online sales. For the first time ever, two retailers said that they expected to do smaller online sales as a percentage of total sales, both companies with a high online share, which might start to indicate that for brick and mortar retailers moving online, somewhere in the range of 30%-40% of total sales is where the online share might top out.

2011 was the year that mobile commerce took off. Amongst the top 100, 16% are using mobile commerce already and 12% plan to in the next year. Amongst the top 125 non-food retailers 14% are using mobile commerce and 18% plan to in the next year. Kiosk usage is also expected to be a lot higher.

Martec asked retailers to identify their top spending priorities and for the first year ever, e-commerce was the front runner in the top 100 retailers and the top 125. Store systems came second in both cases but the percentage of retailers planning store systems improvements is well down on recent years.

Retailers have been forced to invest in e-commerce and mobile commerce and because of shrinking budgets they have had to cut elsewhere. In recent years there has been a rise in outsourcing and off-shoring though this year’s survey shows no growth in that area, probably because those inclined to do it have done so already. However, there are many retailers planning to replace or upgrade applications like merchandise management and supply chain and add applications like CRM and merchandise planning.

Martec believes that this year may be the last in which retailers can manage on reduced budgets and that they will have to start going up again soon. If 2012 is the year of the recovery, it will put greater pressure on retailers and their systems. The wise among us will start investing now to grab market share as the economy improves.

Blog post by Brian Hume, Managing Director – Martec International

For more information or to download a summary of the IT in Retail reports click here