Tom Allason, founder of Shutl

1. What is the greatest opportunity for your business?
Becoming the delivery standard. I would like to see Shutl influencing consumer buying behavior globally with shoppers gravitating towards retailers that offer ‘shutl’ and away from those that don’t.

2. What is the biggest challenge to your business?
Integration with retailers because while the ROI for Shutl makes offering it a no-brainer commercially (increased customers, conversion and profits) the implementation is not simple. It involves integration with the web front-end, stock management systems, changes to store processes and particularly in the case of a large retailer it will cross many different areas of responsibility. Our challenge is getting through to the right person within a retailer who has the vision to understand the impact of the proposition on their customers and who also values the commercial benefits of this impact over the work that is required to implement Shutl properly. We usually find ourselves competing for space in a retailer’s development roadmap with a number of other projects which while not having the same impact on a retailer’s business are much simpler to implement.

3. With the benefit of hindsight what would you have done differently so far?
I’d have taken Shutl live much sooner - albeit with a far less refined product. In some ways we spent too much time ensuring that we went live with the best possible service. But had we come to market six months earlier - albeit with a far more basic product - we would have given ourselves another Christmas and we would be six months closer to world domination.

4. What is the future of the physical store?
As this market becomes even more competitive retailers are going to work even harder at satisfying shoppers’ needs as well as their shareholders demands. In my mind this means giving customers what they want when and where they want it, which will necessitate changes across all of a retailer’s business and not just their stores.  This means having all channels (web, store, phone, mobile, social etcetera) equally good at helping customers discover/buy/return products. For me this means physical stores will need to be much smarter (at knowing who customers are and where stock is) and also much leaner (selling more goods without buying more by being more efficient with distribution of stock). This will mean smaller stock positions in each store. Stores will also need to be more flexible at being able to fulfill a lot of the back office functions like fulfillment.

5. What will the high street look like in a decade?
Although the stores themselves will evolve rapidly in response to customers’ expectations increasing as a result of what the retail innovators are doing (expectations only go 1 way), the high-street will probably not change too much.  There will always be the experiential and social part of shopping that cannot be satisfied digitally.

6. Will mobile devices be the primary sales channel in the future?
I don’t think there will be a primary sales channel in the future. There will just be customers and retailers and different means of satisfying customer needs.

7. What other retail business do you admire?
Apple for transforming what people thought was possible through retail. John Lewis for establishing a culture and values that are meaningful and evident in everything they do. And also Amazon: for not being afraid of anything, putting retailers and manufacturers onto the back foot, and for forcing innovation.

8. If you hadn't been a retailer what would you have liked to do? [rather silly question for a non-retailer – ed]
Found a company that could enable immediate delivery of online purchases.

9. What marks out of 10 do you give yourself so far for achievement?
A 6. By most measures 2011 was a good year as we took our service live across multiple (very different) major retailers and established that our value proposition makes sense to shoppers, retailers, couriers and our shareholders. We have also demonstrated that our service can operate beyond London. However, we would have liked to have done all of the above much quicker. I think there is room for a 50+% improvement this year and so I’m aiming for 9+.

Following the news that Waitrose will start to despatch orders from its first online groceries fulfilment centre, and that Amazon is looking to make deliveries through drop boxes, there is clearly a general trend to making sure customers get what they want quickly.

Response has been patchy; while some retailers can deliver within 24 hours of an order being placed, many still fall back on the old 28 day promise, and still often fail to meet even that. Whilst different demographics have different expectations, most retailers want to get better and recognise that fulfilment is now part of their customer commitment, not peripheral to it.

Making it happen is not necessarily so easy, particularly for retailers that have multiple systems, with few if any of them joined up. Order management is not simply about the moment of truth when a customers orders and pays, but about the entire process before and after that short moment in time. Being able to predict, or at least drive the visit that may lead to a purchase and then ensuring making sure it happens again by making the whole experience (delivery and presentation) a positive one, depends on integrated systems. Whilst an army of well-meaning people may be able to do a lot of this manually, speed and accuracy are and quite likely to be compromised. And once retailers are trading across multiple channels, manual management is impossible.

In short, cross-channel retailing demands cross-channel systems.

What is great about this second addition is again the diversity of individuals and their roles and in some ways shows the continuation of how dynamic and fluid Multi channel retailing is in the UK and Globally.

We would like to thank all 100 named individuals and the businesses they represent for all the fantastic ‘entrepreneurial’ work they have done in the space and also somehow managing to stay ahead of the curve in this ever changing retail environment in which we work.

I trust you will find this second survey as thought provoking as the first and hope it will stimulate some debate, as always we welcome your feedback.

Download your FREE copy of the report here

As Retail cautiously moves into the 2nd year of this decade, Retailers of all sizes increasingly understand that Multi Channel retailing is the optimum strategy for surviving and growing in a market driven by changing customer needs. Simply put, retailers need to be open for business whenever and wherever customers want to shop.

Despite this widely acknowledged perception, 55 percent of retailers still do not have an integrated Multi Channel operation. Those retailers without an integrated strategy are putting its business at risk and will lose out on the market share battlefront. Indeed, late entrants to the Multi Channel game may never regain that share. So with this backdrop K3 Retail and the Retail Insider have researched some of the Multi Channel problems both retailers and consumers are experiencing today.

Last Mile Delivery

One thing is clear there isn’t a great panacea for home delivery. There are instead a myriad of alternatives from ASOS offering same-day delivery, to Argos working with Shutl to provide 90-minute delivery windows, and single man deliveries, two-man deliveries, and even three-man delivery methods.

This last mile is complicated by the fact many retailers also offer specific services at customers’ homes as part of the delivery – including the fitting/plumbing-in of white goods, and the construction of items of furniture. These are often outsourced to third-party providers, which leads to the issue of how a retailers’ brand image is conveyed to the customer.

In-store Transactions

It is fair to say that customer transactions made in-store have increasingly played second fiddle to those received online. The hierarchy when picking from the warehouse gives priority to internet-based orders over those derived from the stores.

This has resulted in many customers being disappointed from stock not being available at their high street store – even if they have seen the goods available and in-stock online. To overcome this frequent frustration consumers should be able to order online and collect in-store through a ‘Click and Collect’ type service.

Such is the demand for Click and Collect that it is now a must-have and those retailers that fail to provide this option to their customers are undoubtedly committing a Multi Channel sin.

Impact on Personnel

Businesses have historically grown their Multi Channel propositions by simply having a transactional website and in many cases they have committed the sin of underestimating the impact that growing non-store sales will have on their overall organisations.

This problem has grown as the revenues from these non-store channels have climbed inexorably to become a meaningful slice of total turnover. One major impact has been on personnel, with the need for new department heads to be created.

We now have e-commerce bosses, Multi Channel directors, logistics and fulfilment executives with responsibility across complex multiple channels. There has also been the emergence of buyers who purchase for more than one channel.

Single View of Stock

As Multi Channel has grown in importance for retailers the issue of stock not being visible across all selling channels and throughout the supply chain has moved up the agenda.

It is no exaggeration to describe inventory as the lifeblood of retailers’ businesses and that without it being visible in all parts of their organisations it is likely to lead to lost sales.

An individual channel that is not fully integrated into the rest of the business, and therefore has limited stock visibility, can do untold damage to a retailer’s brand. The big sin is not to have a single view of the stock across the whole business.

Operating a Multi Channel business leads to different ways of managing the stock pool and replenishing the individual channels. In today’s world retailers should no longer replenish their stores-based business on in-store sales, and entirely separately fulfil against a web order. They should instead consider the customers’ journey where within a single day they could have used all four selling channels – web, call centre, stores, and mobile.

Over-complicating the Customer Journey

The two biggest properties on the web are indisputably Google and Facebook and they have both from day one been obsessed with having uncluttered, clean landing pages.

In contrast, retailers have traditionally failed badly in this respect as they have piled on the complexity of information on their front pages. To be fair, they have done this for a good reason, to get the whole of their catalogue online. And to date this has proved successful as they have enjoyed serious online sales growth over recent years.

The majority of retailers have attempted to reduce the amount of clicks it takes for consumers to reach the desired product, however, this has been offset with the introduction of video content, up-selling and cross-selling techniques, pricing and promotions opportunities, and product reviews.

The result is that it adds confusion before the actual transaction is made and is proving to be a major contributor to the significant issue of abandoned baskets. The IMRG has suggested that retailers lose about £1.7 billion a year through ‘delivery related’ cart abandonment and that at least £240 million a year is also lost from customers who choose not to return as a result of this poor experience.

Stores in the Multi Channel Model

Not many people know this but if the percentage of sales derived from the online channel were translated into physical square footage it would mean that over the past 10 years UK retailers have added 56 million sq ft of trading space, according to calculations from Deloitte.

This is a seriously high figure and one that puts great pressure on the existing physical store space as well as the planned expansion of trading space on the high street and in shopping centres. There is no doubt that the growth in online, call centres and mobile commerce will change the way that physical stores fit into the Multi Channel model and a failure to understand this is a sin.

Don’t Underestimate the Change Involved

A prediction is that in the future retailers will employ less people and that these employees will have more complex roles. This will be driven by a combination of the growth in Multi Channel, technology advances, and changes in the overall market.

Visit a retail store on a Saturday afternoon and ask a sales advisor a question and the likelihood of receiving the correct answer is small. This is a problem for the operability of stores in a Multi Channel model and suggests that the employees in-store need to have much greater information to hand – which goes well beyond that currently available to the average part-time 9-to-5 sales person.

There is no doubt that the way Multi Channel impacts on a retail business will make a major difference to the roles of many in-store employees. If, for instance, stores become hybrid distribution hubs then the sales advisors might become more involved with logistics and fulfilment activities.

In addition, when all the channels are joined up then the buying and merchandising functions will become roles that encompass different space allocations. This gives rise to numerous questions that will have to be answered by retailers including - how will the stores be merchandised, how will they be catalogued, how will stock availability across all channels be dealt with, and how will they merchandise locally and personally to customers?

There is no doubt that retailers have invested in the skills of their employees - especially among those focused on e-commerce - but the industry has quickly moved on from a transactional website being the sum-total of a retailers’ Multi Channel proposition.

Increasingly, consumers expect to be able to browse through one channel, then choose, purchase, collect or even return goods via another.  In other words, they want to ‘channel-hop.’ They see each channel as just a different facet of the retailer’s business, which is, of course, exactly what it is.  It is critical for any retailer to take a single-minded view of its multichannel operation, to regard each channel as being interdependent upon – rather than independent of – the others.

This ‘lite’ guide will explain the five key steps that K3 Retail has identified as essential to creating an infrastructure that meets and enables the consumer’s growing predilection for true multichannel shopping, to optimise the retailer’s ability to capitalise upon the multichannel opportunity with a focused, single-minded solution.

Step 1: Take a single-minded view of your multichannel operation

So, customers can go into the store, read through the catalogue, explore the website from wherever they have web access; be that at home, work or on their mobile.  This means that the way in which retailers communicate with customers has to be seamless, because the consumer perception is – and should be –

that, however they access a retailer, it’s always the same company they’re dealing with. Store, catalogue, website – and yes, that could and should include social media – home, work, out and about or even on holiday on a wireless network using their laptop or mobile. Multiple choice access for the consumer, one voice response from the retailer.  And at the heart of your multichannel operation – in fact, its very lifeblood – is the need for a system that facilitates efficient and continuous data sharing across all your channels.

And yet so few retailers have actually understood this essential truth.  Channel dissonance deprives them of so many opportunities.

Step 2: Introduce multichannel thinking throughout your company

Exploring the multichannel landscape is one thing, providing a company with the means to control it is another – and obviously, the latter is the preferable route.  Achieving this is a matter of adopting a rigorous policy of joined up thinking, the fundamental need to ensure that a multichannel mindset is encouraged to permeate every aspect of your business.

Throughout the retail sector, more and more merchants are beginning to venture into multichannel and falling foul of the need to lay this critical foundation as the first step they take, not equipping themselves to cope with the complex new demands that multichannel makes on their company’s infrastructure.

Step 3: Develop a multichannel approach to stock purchase and management

Multichannel stock management has to flow around, and from your customers’ multichannel shopping habits. Go multichannel and your pool of stock will obviously need to serve a wider demand.

So, your stock pool may become biased towards the web and catalogues, usually because these channels are often required to offer your entire range, whereas the stores will carry an edited range, not the least of which for the reason that a store customer can more easily browse to find an alternative to an out of stock product.

But beware.  Service levels need to be consistent, and complementary, across all touch-points – stores, web, catalogue, call centre.  If customers encounter a fluctuating quality of service as they move from one channel to another, their dissatisfaction will be compounded.

Only with a single-minded, one-view policy in place, can tracking and managing of cross-channel stock flows be optimised.

Step 4:  Understand your customers’ multichannel journey patterns

Although, when first presented with a transactional website as an option, the customer may favour the online route, as research shows that around or shortly after that six-month point, habits will then ‘mature’ into a situation where customers gradually migrate back to the shops and subsequently begin to use both channels concurrently.

Catering to this trend demands that your merchandising team develops the ability to monitor and respond to demand as it rises and falls in each channel.  The ultimate need is for a single fulfillment house and just one buying team working across all your channels, using the cross-channel data flow to inform and guide their activities.

Step 5: Create different promotions for your different channels

A carefully managed, multichannel structure will afford you many more sales and promotion opportunities than conventional, solely store-based activity.  Monitoring and analysing customer behaviour across closely integrated channels will reveal a raft of new options that will even further confirm the value of multichannel marketing.

Different channels suit different types of activity, and embracing this concept will enable retailers to maximise the effectiveness of sales and promotions in ways that one channel never could.  But once again, this only becomes feasible through a single-view system designed to ensure a constant flow of information between the channels.

Conclusion

These simple five key steps to multichannel harmony have been defined as a result of K3 Retail’s extensive experience in helping retailers optimise their multichannel ventures.

To tap into K3 Retail’s unrivalled understanding of Microsoft and their applications and to benefit from its advanced multichannel expertise, please contact: tony.bryant@k3btg.com : www.theretailpeople.com - www.theretailblogger.com

Tony Bryant, Business Development Director at K3 Retail, said, “Last year’s report featured 70 people in the retail industry and after such positive feedback we decided to compile a list of the top 100 Movers & Shakers in multi channel retail.”

Glynn Davis of Retailinsider.com, said, “When we first launched the Movers & Shakers report last year we wanted to highlight both those people who are well known and those who are below the radar and not necessarily running their company’s e-commerce and multi-channel areas.  Following overwhelming feedback, this year we will spice things up even more by ranking the Top 30 constituents, using an Advisory Panel of industry specialists.”

Davis continued, “We’re looking for people who really exploit the opportunities of multi-channel retailing, enhancing the customer shopping experiences, and taking their businesses successfully into the future.”

Included in last year’s report were Aamir Ahmad founder of Dwell, Sally Bailey CEO at White Stuff, Ben Gordon CEO at Mothercare, Guy Hipwell managing director of online at Liberty and Tony Prescott e-commerce director at Focus DIY.

Nominations are now closed for this year and K3 Retail and Retailinsider.com will be exclusively revealing the results of their 100 Multi-Channel Movers & Shakers survey at the Retail Systems Multi Channel Summit on 13^th September 2011 at The IOD Hub in London. This event is free to retailers, Book your place now

In an environment that is seeing well-known retailers go out of business, The White Company recently posted a 37% rise in profits with more growth promised, a result it puts down to operational efficiencies and stock control.

The company is perhaps best known for its catalogue but now has 36 stores, and added nine shops over the year 2010-2011 as well as its first 'lifestyle' store in London's Sloane Square, which is trading ahead of expectations.

Successful trading still depends on getting the fundamentals right, but in the multi channel world, there are new challenges to address, due principally to complexity, requiring systems that can manage all aspects of the business and integrate the data to enable financial and supply chain control, visibility of data for service and marketing, and critically, systems that can manage many different transaction types – multiple payments, delayed fulfilment, returns, promotions, vouchers, all within a single order.

In multi channel retail, complexity is now the norm and systems must be able to embrace that, helping retailers continue to do what they do well – buy and sell.

Q. Where do you see the greatest potential for growth in your business?
A.Through a combination of opening a number of stores which we have just recently started, international growth and expanding on our womens wear business.

Q. What’s the secret to doing business successfully on line?
A. For us, it’s all about getting the right balance of brand, usability, product and service for the end user. We also have to ensure we keep an open mind and push for new design and function, continually evolving the site to exceed expectations rather than sticking to familiar ground. Our customers come back to gio-goi.com a couple of times each month and we aim to serve up an improved experience each time.

Q. What is your biggest-seller on line?
A. Our famous logo tees continue to be the bestsellers season in and season out. However, new Gio-focus categories such as Denim are coming up through the ranks alongside seasonal essentials. Shorts have done really well for us so far in SS11.

Q. What’s the first thing you say to any potential IT suppliers?
A. Show me examples of your success.

Read more about Gio Goi and K3.

The suite has been designed to replicate a retail store environment, and contains a checkout, tills, and a self service kiosk, where visitors can look items up, read reviews and reserve items for collection. This replication allows prospective clients the ability to see the range of K3 Retail hardware and software 'in action'; moving beyond current demonstration standards within the industry.

“The Customer Experience Centre is an area we are extremely proud of and gives us the ability to demonstrate a real store scenario to our visitors. Here they can witness first-hand the benefits our technology can offer to their businesses", said K3 Retail Managing Director, Colin Bain.

Contact K3 Retail to talk to the team or arrange a visit to the Customer Experience Suite.

Q. What is the secret to BAYV’s success?
A. Our success is based upon giving our customers the service they need at a price they can afford.

Q. What is the secret to good customer service?
A. As a business we are constantly focused on our customers and their requirements. Our people visit our customers regularly face-to-face so that helps to build and develop strong relationships.

Q. What is BAYV’s attitude to IT?
A. BAYV has invested heavily in its IT infrastructure in recent years. We’re always looking at technology that can help improve service and reduce our cost base.

Q. How do you convince your board to invest in IT?
A. The process is very straightforward we must have sound economic reasons to support any investment.

Q. How do you get the best out of your suppliers?
A. We have worked with our suppliers for a very long time. These relationships enable us to call in favours at a short notice so we can meet the expectations of our customers.