Customer experience, the new landscape & walking the tightrope

In retail and marketing the conversation is awash with talk of; innovation, digital transformation the customer experience and step change moments.

Retail technology incubators have sprung and are springing up all around. Those like Seedcamp are catalysts for growing startups with a kernel of an idea and an MVP into multimillion/billion pound businesses.

The new landscape

Retailers are also getting in on the incubation action, John Lewis for instance are fostering the same relationships as Seedcamp through their JLAB vehicle. Why not facilitate home grown talent by crowdsourcing ideas and leveraging their widely respected and well trusted brand?

Others like Argos have invested heavily, taken all digital development in-house, away from expensive agency partners and waterfall delivery. They've developed their own internal 'tech lab' environ above their Victoria store (where they can develop ideas upstairs and rollout/test downstairs). They host hackathons to bake ideas - with teams from Google and Paypal in attendance. Great huh, let's get Google to come and generate some brilliant concepts for our business.

It's exciting, this new landscape. You'll know if you're in the retail/digital/marketing industry that when it comes to conference season all the subject streams are focussed on; innovation, transformation, omnichannel, customer experience. All hugely dynamic terms. This is a massive departure from recent years when 'innovation' was most definitely on the back burner.

Facilitating innovation

The term innovation sometimes fosters certain connotations - often those being 'non-critical' and 'expensive'. Only a few established brands (Amazon etc) are embracing the challenges thrown up by demanding consumers. Those consumers demanding experiences utilising emergent trends like intelligent algorithms, voice and gesture control.

The major drive, and greatest ability to deliver on these consumer wants and needs can be found amongst the ecosystem (swarm?) of startups. They're agile and responsive enough to adapt to consumer demand and market forces - and they're getting the investment (and mentoring) they need to jettison a good idea into a great business.

We have of course seen/been through patterns like this one before where economic growth and competition bring the subject of innovation to the fore once again. When times are good - people feel they can afford to innovate. 2015 has been an interesting year on the whole - as the economy strains under the pressure of austerity measures and another possible recession looms (historically every six or so years we face another), and yet investment and support for startups shows no sign of waning.

The crux is, businesses will still continue to have to adapt and change, innovate - whatever the economic climate. This hasn't always been the case, but innovation and disruption are now the norm, not an anomaly. And the cost of failure is much lower for a lean startup than a bluechip. Unless of course bluechips develop the same capability and culture that enables the startup community to thrive...

The balancing act to survive and thrive

It's become an essential part of commercial survival, that to exist and certainly to thrive you must be able to pivot and adopt a new forward strategy based on changing demand. And demand is a thing that now flexes and changes with more rapidity than ever before. In retail this is in no small part due to the ceaseless advancement of consumer technology enabling 24hr multichannel access to brand.

Inertia will be the death of those that don't adapt - as consumer expectation and uptake continues to be the yardstick against which performance is measured. However, delivering innovation in business does not have to equal the grandiose. Innovation doesn't even have to mean new ideas. Innovation can be, and often simply is - efficiency. Doing things better, doing things smarter.

We do a lot of work with expert, well resourced internal teams. From big box retail, to telcos, to banks - helping clients upskill and deliver our methods internally, therefore increasing our client's capability and project efficiency. Our ability to embed skills and impart knowledge is part of our core offering. So much so that we will very soon be able to unveil a flagship project where we've developed an entire digital capability for a leading high street financial services company.

We've; selected office location, modelled resource needs, recruited the team, are embedding company culture, training, up-skilling and imparting the latest methods and techniques in user centred design, allowing innovation to flourish. We'll be making a big song and dance about this soon (when we can). We fended off much larger agencies to win the project, and we won because the client bought into not only our methods, but our culture.

If you want to flourish in any sector, as well as being able to adapt, you need repeat and referral business. People buy from people - we all know this. Adaptive businesses who engender great relationships with their customers by providing great experiences will naturally succeed.

Keep a keen eye on the market, emerging tech', behaviour and competition. Benchmark the customer experience across every touchpoint, make iterative improvements the business focus, avoid inertia - this is the way forward. This is the capability, capacity and culture we foster in our clients, and what we achieve for ourselves through successful project delivery.