Crabtree & Evelyn has evolved from a small, family-run business – specialising in fine soaps from around the world – to an international organisation with outlets in ten countries, from Australia to the US.

But up until recently, the company’s 37 UK stores were using dial-up connections and an outdated point of sale (POS) solution. In a multichannel world, with sky-high customer expectations, the existing set-up had taken the company as far as it could.

With payment card industry (PCI) compliance putting even more pressure on, the overworked IT team decided it needed a smarter system – one that helped support multichannel trading, meet PCI compliance and free the team to push the business forward.

Because we can provide a one-stop shop for retailers we were able to come up with a complete solution built on:

1. a virtual data centre
2. state-of-the-art POS
3. managed payment service

And that one-stop shop approach extends to support as well – Crabtree & Evelyn have just one number to call if there any problems. You can read the full case study here.

Video: watch IT director Tim Johnson explain why Crabtree & Evelyn chose BT

So how does the cloud help?

Well, by not having to buy and maintain all the hardware, Crabtree & Evelyn benefits from an infrastructure as a service approach. Virtual data centres offer far greater agility and resilience than traditional set-ups, while the total cost of ownership is reduced with charges based on usage.

Added to this is the attraction of an OPEX investment model through a cloud-based system.

The managed payment service aspect of the integrated solution also means Crabtree & Evelyn doesn’t have to worry about keeping up with an ever-changing PCI standard. That’s now our problem. But the real value comes in bringing all of this together in one solution from one supplier – cutting through the complexity.

Article by Steve Thomas, Chief Technology Officer, BT Expedite

In many ways clienteling is a throwback to a time when local shopkeepers knew each and every customer that visited – their likes, dislikes, wants and needs.

Of course we live in a world where retailers have stores in different locations with thousands of customers buying through multiple channels. It’s basically impossible for individual sales associates to retain all that information. But that’s where technology comes in.

By blending in-store wi-fi, tablet devices, real-time customer data and stock information, you can create a tool that will motivate sales associates, delight customers – and boost the bottom line.

Video: Tanya Bowen and Charleen Benson discuss clienteling

Our clienteling tool can run on an iPad (or similar tablet device) or almost any device with a web browser. It pulls in multichannel CRM data and has been built with an intuitive front end for sales associates.

It can be tailored and branded to reflect a retailer’s look and ways of working. Using it will help you create an impressive mobile black book while blueprinting best practice processes.

Which all sounds great; but it’ll only work if customers buy into the idea. Without that buy-in, you’ll have a big hole at the heart of your CRM data and you won’t have the full picture. The key is getting your sales associates to understand the benefits. If they can see the benefits, they’ll capture the data.

In the past, collecting customer data in-store was often an afterthought. Customers at the checkout want to pay and go – not fill in forms and sign up for loyalty schemes.

So you need to make the process quick and painless – and build it into everyday customer service behaviour. Mobile technology, consumer devices, joined up systems and central access make that possible. Then you’re on the way to a better class of clienteling.

Article by Tanya Bowen, Head of CRM & Loyalty, BT Expedite

We worked closely with Oasis to help develop, test and launch its iPad mobile POS. The project really caught the public imagination, with vast amounts of very positive press coverage, and that’s been reflected in the first prize at 2012 Retail Week Awards, the most prestigious awards of the UK Retail Year.

The pilot in the fabulous new Oasis flagship store on Argyll St was a roaring success and we knew we were on to something special. The store itself was designed to make best use of new technologies and, as the design developed, new locations were created to allow for more interaction with the iPad outside of the traditional cash points.

That means iPads can be used either at fixed stations so customers can browse “Look Books” or in mobile mode with a sales associate.
I came, I saw, I shopped

Staff armed with iPads enables customers to request different sizes, colours or styles from the shop floor. And if the clothes fit, the customer can use the iPads in the changing rooms to pay for their purchase there and then, bypassing the till queues. The purchases and are then sent to the customer’s home address – all within 90 minutes!

You can see a video of the iPad in action here>

The iPad mobile POS really merges web, mobile, social and physical retailing channels, enabling everyone in the store, both customers and teams, access to all available information about the brand and review stock which may have sold out in store.

It’s one of the first iPad POS solutions in the world and customers are finding it a fun way to shop. More importantly, it works. iPad transactions accounted for 20 per cent of sales during the store’s opening week and contributed to a record-breaking sales day in the new store.

In winning the Award, Oasis edged in front of competition from Debenhams, New Look and Republic with a project that’s using technology to change shopping habits. By placing digital technology at the heart of the shopping experience, Oasis is providing a fantastic customer service – and one of the best in-store experiences on the high street.

Article by Charleen Benson, Director of Consulting Services, BT Expedite

We’d set up personal tours of the showcase in advance, which was a good move, or we’d have had people queuing for the bus! That’s definitely something we want to avoid, as queuing is the number one gripe among shoppers, according to recent BT research.

Basically, waiting is something you do at the dentist. Shopping’s supposed to be a more pleasurable experience – and with people getting more and more used to instant online ordering, they just don’t want to wait…

That online experience is generating other frustrations in-store. As well as being tired of standing in line at the till, people are also driven up the wall by sales assistants with less knowledge than them. Without doubt the point of sale needs to become a point of service – and bring the best of the web in-store.

Other innovations on show backed this up. We had smart digital signage – including transparent video screens – tons of exciting ways to get more out of mobility and huge innovation in the payments area.

It’s clear that bridging the gap between online and in-store is one of the top priorities for retailers. And achieving that depends very heavily on having the right network infrastructure in place, as this is what’s powering successful multichannel retailing.

You just need to look at the extra IT investment announced by John Lewis to know that, if you want to prosper, you need to nurture the systems that support multichannel retailing. John Lewis is setting the benchmark and others will follow.

The Expo showed that retailers are looking for innovation and the vehicle for change gave everyone a glimpse of the possible.

Here are a couple of recent examples that have kept our supply chain team very busy.

Upgrading enterprise systems is always nerve wracking. You have years of history, active business documents and you can’t do a pilot, meaning that the whole process is inevitably something of a big bang. At Monsoon Accessorise, our team worked a full weekend upgrade to our latest version of Mercatus which was fully working for start of business on Monday morning. Phew.

Since then, Monsoon has installed the first version of our new Merchandise Workbench which enables them to view all product activity, stock, sales orders, price, reservations and fulfilment from a single place. 

Multi-channel can also make running a warehouse fiendishly complicated and our supply chain team have been working hard to help another long term customer, Austin Reed automate some heavily manual processes.

Until recently, Austin Reed Group (which also includes Viyella and Country Casuals) was running four logical warehouses within a single building. All pick, pack and dispatch for e-commerce orders was paper-based but a new business initiative, to fulfil web orders from store stock recycled back through the warehouse, was putting a lot of pressure on the processes.

To release the pressure, we’ve implemented Warehouse Operations, an RF based module of Mercatus, that enabled them to combine the four logical warehouses into a single one over one weekend. Paper has been replaced with hand held terminals and WOP now supports receiving, picking for stores and e-commerce, dispatch processing and label printing, put away processes, replenishment to the pick face from back up stock and task management. All this is fully auditable and warehouse throughput has increased significantly.

Update your address book!

BT Fresca, BT’s specialist e-commerce division and providers of the FrescaCommerce Platform has moved to new offices.

St Johns Court
Easton Street
High Wycombe
Bucks
HP11 1JX

We were bursting at the seams at our old place and we needed a little more space to breathe.

The good news is that our new office isn’t at the top of a hill (hooray!), it’s twice the size and we’ve had it kitted out with absolutely everything we need.

It’s also slap bang in the middle of town – just a short walk from High Wycombe train station. So it is easier to get to, better to work in and gives us room to expand (we’re planning to grow by a third, in terms of people, this year).

We’d love to show you round the new place so give us a call (the number’s still the same – 01494 439700) and we’ll set up a visit.

Hope to see you soon,

Sarah Hughes and Gavin Wilkinson
Joint Managing Directors
BT Fresca

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:

Article by Jason Shorrock, Multichannel Consultant, BT Expedite

Drawing on one of the biggest Research and Development centres in the world (Adastral Park), our showcase will be crammed full of the very latest retail technology, from digital signage and social commerce to clienteling and mobile point of sale.

You often see the “future of retail” at these events and are left scratching your head as to how exactly it will work. That’s why we’ll have real working demos of everything on show.

Because it’s not about some fantasy future – the products and services we’re demoing are based on current trends, things that are bubbling under the surface now. And products and services we’re putting into place right now.

Make no bones about it – technology is changing the way we shop.

Take mobile, for example. With smartphone wielding, product savvy customers setting the agenda, retailers need to arm their sale staff with access to the same info. That means in-store wi-fi and mobile devices.

But sexy in-store iPads won’t produce any results if the infrastructure underpinning all of it isn’t right. That’s why the future of retail is all about the plumbing – or wiring if you prefer.

This might not be as exciting as tablet devices and interactive signage, but it’s the fundamental stuff that will make or break your multichannel approach. Having customer and stock data at your fingertips will help you understand your customers and be able to personalise the shopping experience.

So as well as all the neat gizmos and gadgets to dazzle customers, we can make sure that everything works together – that all the disparate channels come together in one integrated system. As well as removing the complexity – we can host everything remotely so your bandwidth can flex up and down as you need it – this will also help remove cost from your business.

So if you’re not already registered for the Expo, do it now. And if you are coming along, get in touch to request a tailored tour of our technology showcase. It’s definitely worth booking this in advance so that you get the most out of your visit.

My favourite town, my favourite show. New York’s National Retail Federation (NRF) 2012 conference theme was Retail’s New Rules, and it focused on how retailers and innovators are reshaping the conventional rules of the game.

It was bigger, better and busier than ever, with 400 exhibitors and over 25,000 attendees from 78 countries. And Bill Clinton headlining! And, for me, this year’s big ideas were:

Consumer reigns
Epicor’s booth showed that consumer devices reign supreme: Business Intelligence (BI) portals, assisted service, clienteling – all served up on shiny tablet devices. Equally exciting, was acceptance that customer engagement rules are changing and in response to this, our newly launched Clienteling app attracted lots of attention around the show.

‘Omni-commerce’
At the conference, I asked US retailers for their views on the subject of centrally hosted versus distributed POS systems. In previous years, US retailers have shown little interest in this deployment model, in stark contrast to their UK counterparts.
But this year there was a definite shift in attitude; among the IT attendees, the key words were resilience, virtualisation and security. And their Business and Marketing colleague’s phrases like ‘customer experience’ and ‘cross-channel’ – or the new buzz phrase at the show – ‘omni-commerce’.

Maximum security
Overlaid on top of the cloud, security and PCI were also major themes. Network vendors promising the ‘elixir to PCI’ were around every corner; secure networks, secure wi-fi, secure platforms.

Clicks and mortar
A different perspective on Payment was provided by PayPal, whose booth was drawing in the crowds with their cross-channel vision and inexorable push into ‘bricks and mortar’. It’s part of a process that’s moving payment from the wallet to the smartphone, with personalised pricing and promotions, while consumers shop. PayPal’s new strapline ‘Now the Best in Both Worlds’ shows Great vision in a fast moving area. Watch this space!

My summary of this year’s show: Bigger than ever, lots of optimism. Technology is where it’s at. Not just technology to meet the fast moving shopping habits of consumers, but technology that supports global reach, because that’s where the growth is. By the end of the show I was exhausted but more enthused about the future of retail and the systems that underpin it than previous years. Roll on 2012.

Steve Thomas, CTO, BT Expedite

Back in September 2011 we were eagerly awaiting the clarification from the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) on Point to Point Encryption (P2PE). At the time I asked whether it was time to get off the fence and set out a white paper outlining the potential benefits of implementing such a solution. Now that the clarification has been published it’s clear that our assumptions remain valid and the approach, assuming that you use a solution which includes external hosting, will make compliance easier for most. But is there perhaps a sting in the tail?

First we have to wait until the QSA training is completed. Then there is the further wait for solutions to be validated. Combine this with the need for most Chip and PIN retailers to complete a PIN entry device (PED) replacement programme and we might have an issue with timing – and then supply and demand.

QSA training expected to slip
 
Initially there was a belief that QSA training would be completed by March 2012, but this is expected to slip. And the number of QSAs who will be trained and certified to complete the solution validation is likely to be a subset of the total QSA community. If we assume that the validation process takes three months, which may be optimistic, then we could be looking at July or August before any certified solutions are formally available to implement.

If retailers wait for the listing to be published then their selection of a new solution is unlikely to be completed until October 2012 at the earliest, giving no time at all to implement the solution before the end of the year (unless you ignore the traditional Christmas freeze). Some might think that this is a pessimistic view, but even if you take the best case it’s unlikely that you can start a change programme before August.
 
Five key planning steps

So let’s take the optimistic view. In August you sit down to start planning the implementation of a P2PE solution. Here’s what you need to think about:

1. PED replacement – this goes hand in hand with the P2PE solution. Remember you’ll be limited to selecting a terminal which conforms to PCI-PTS version 3.x (this is not a long list in the UK or Eire).
2. Accreditation with your acquirer(s) – not all solutions are pre-accredited and, if you need to go through an accreditation, your plan will have to include this, which could easily add 12 weeks (assuming you don’t have to wait too long for a slot).
3. PED availability – demand will increase as the year progresses, lead times will therefore likely extend.
4. Integration – most P2PE solutions will need to be integrated with your POS. Do not lose sight of the effort that this will take in terms of development, testing and implementation.
5. Deployment – new PEDs will mean engineering visits and P2PE applications will require software upgrades.

Clearly timelines will vary and you’ll likely have a view on the considerations above. But if P2PE is your answer to solving your PCI DSS challenges then, as I said back in September 2011 – PLAN NOW. Get your budget in place and perhaps take a calculated gamble to start sooner rather than later. If you wait you might find that it leads to disappointment, with busy development and deployment teams, and long lead times on PEDs, not to mention stretched resources at the acquirers trying to deal with a host of accreditations in parallel.
 
You might find it useful to look at our Time to get off the fence? whitepaper to help with your planning or get in touch to discuss how BT might help.
 
Kevin Burns
PCI DSS consultant
BT Expedite