Expert views on the social purchase journey

Transcript

Expert Views on the social purchase journey

Esther Soto, Dixons
There is no single customer journey, or set of customer journeys that we can take our customers through. Our customers are very wise and very savvy and they know what they want when they want it. They choose to interact with us the number of times they want, through the channels they want, in the opportunities they want and, as a consequence, our duty and our goal as a retailer is to offer them all those touch points and the information they need in those touch points at the right time.

Sean Emmett, Jessops
We've seen the customer journey at Jessops change quite dramatically over the last couple of years. People always used to use Jessops to research the product, but unfortunately what they perhaps didn't do was then go on to buy it from us. We've really tried to increase the amount of advice, reviews and content on our site so when customers do their research at Jessops they then go on to actually purchase from us - either online, or through our stores.

How are you responding to the social purchase journey?

Sean Emmett, Jessops
At Jessops we feel it is really important that all the different channels are linked together. A really good example would be a person who does their research and then orders online. They then receive a text message (so again we are linking the online platform with mobile devices) and then when they come and collect the item from store the next day, we will have the product ready for them. So in that one journey we've linked online, mobile and the store environment, in a seamless journey.

Chris Scott, Toshiba
To respond to this change in the customer journey, Toshiba is developing all of our applications and putting all of our focus into developing product pages. What we’ve also done recently is develop mobile-specific pages for those products so if a user is in store, for example, they can search on a QR tag, find the product that they’re looking for on our website, and then search the customer reviews directly from Reevoo and also look at what other customers and other users are doing with their machines.

Are retailers ready for the social purchase journey?

Esther Soto, Dixons
We can absolutely hope to keep up with the changes, and we will not take our foot off the floor. We cannot not acknowledge that the trends are in the making and are constantly changing, and we need to be constantly adjusting what we do to those changes in trends. However we are conscious of the importance of online and multi-channel in our overall operating model and our business strategy and we are striving to make it an excellent proposition.

Sean Emmett, Jessops
We think we can keep up with the changes at Jessops and we would like to think that we are helping lead those changes as well. We do a lot of market research both with our customers and informal research by spending time in stores and chatting to people using the website. We are finding out constantly what their needs are and we are investing in new technology across all the different platforms to make sure that we can deliver the best customer experience.

Esther Soto, Dixons
We have already made quite a lot of headway in terms of adjusting our proposition to the changing market trends. For example, we have already delivered quite a number of changes this year on our websites, such as a completely new look and feel, product recommendations available to our customers and a completely new delivery and service proposition. We know we are heading in the right direction because in the last nine months customer satisfaction on our Currys website has increased by 6% and has improved in every single lever of growth which is very rare and great news for us.

Seizing the opportunity with Reevoo

Sean Emmett, Jessops
We have been able to track the effect of Reevoo. We can actually see in the customer journey who's read reviews. We find that those customers have a conversion rate which is 10% to 15% higher than those who haven't actually read the Reevoo reviews.

Esther Soto, Dixons
Reevoo has been, and will continue to be, instrumental in our online proposition and will continue to do so as we move through the multi-channel journey. They have added incredible value to our customers, helping them make decisions in terms of the products they purchase and why they purchase them.

Chris Scott, Toshiba
The tools available from Reevoo help us tackle the social commerce world. It enables us to engage with consumers, enables us to give the consumers pre-purchase that little bit of information that they will need and to engage with the brand.

Esther Soto, Dixons
Furthermore Reevoo is helping us with the Ask an Owner functionality, which is essentially providing a forum for our customers to ask questions about the product they are considering purchasing. That proposition is being really really well accepted by our customers. Last month around 20,000 questions were asked and answered on our websites which I think is a fantastic engagement.

The future

Sean Emmett, Jessops
In the next 12 to 36 months I wouldn't really see it as an online strategy. I would see it as a multi channel strategy. We are going to be thinking about the ways that we can actually create greater integration of the different channels and also add new channels for shopping with Jessops.

Esther Soto, Dixons
We see our strategy developing in the next two years dramatically, not only because we have already identified a lot of improvements that we need to make to get to where our strategic vision is but also because the market is changing so fast that we cannot be fixated in a single direction. We need to be agile and nimble enough to adjust to what the market is demanding from us at any given time.