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Last week I attended Salesforce’s Connections “World Tour” in New York. As I have attended nearly a dozen such user conferences over the last three months, I feel well-qualified to say that the company’s customers are some of the fiercest networkers I have ever met.
This is part 6 of an on-going series on the history of omni-channel. Part 1 addressed the point when customer centricity and “cross-channel” (the early days of omni-channel) first merged and became the foundation of what most people mean when they say omni-channel today.
Last week at the Internet Retailer Conference, I noticed an awful lot of search vendors on the expo floor. Not just the big players who have been around for a while, but a lot of little startups too. Why this influx of site search capabilities into the market? And how sustainable is it to have this many players long term?
Manhattan Associates’ Momentum 2015 almost closes out the spring user conference season. Of all the conferences I’ve attended so far, I have to say Manhattan had the happiest customers.
Part of the reason for this may well be that Manhattan’s team seems intensely focused on seeing the world through their customers’ eyes. The breakout sessions that I attended, especially the ones focused on product enhancement plans, reflected the kind of intimate, detailed process knowledge that comes from literally walking miles in customers’ shoes – learning these processes by living them.
This is part 5 of an on-going series on the history of omni-channel. Part 1 addressed the point when customer centricity and “cross-channel” (the early days of omni-channel) first merged and became the foundation of what most people mean when they say omni-channel today. Part 2 talked about the tipping point of executive awareness, when online sales become big enough that they become more than just the online equivalent of a large or flagship store – and the implications this had on executives looking after the store business. Part 3 looked at the point when retailers realized the store was in trouble.
Last week I attended Demandware’s XChange Conference in Las Vegas. Two themes struck me coming out of the event: one, the convergence of content and commerce is happening fast, and two, the convergence of eCommerce and point of sale is not happening quite as fast, but it easily promises to be the bigger deal of the two.
Let’s take them one at a time…
When you ask industry leaders about when mobile came to retail, a lot of them point to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. When that thing rolled onto the scene, I think everyone knew that it was going to change shopping forever. But I don’t think it really had an impact on retail leadership’s thought processes right then, primarily because they didn’t see it impact their main business – their store business – until 2011. What happened then?
As a technology vendor or solution provider, it’s easy to say that you want to have the relationship with your client at the highest level internally that you can get – like the CEO, ideally. A relationship with the CEO means if she says so, then it’s gonna happen. Of course, there are some solutions […]
I decided to take a break from the history of omni-channel to discuss a concept I encountered last week. The concept I want to explore this week is about the economics of the store – the individual store’s ability to grow and make money. The theory I heard went like this: retailers can no longer depend on opening new stores in mature markets as a method of growth, and so their efforts in those mature markets must turn to maximizing the potential of the existing store base.