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Aesop
Digital Transformations for a Retail Brand
Larry Chan
In an interview with Aesop, Larry Chan, Head of Digital, delves into the intricacies of today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, where digital transformation has become a buzzword, often associated solely with technology projects.
Why is digital transformation not just about technology?
A common perception about digital transformation is a technology project. In reality, there are far more than only technological considerations. It requires a clear vision of the company business model for identifying new revenue streams and optimizing existing processes for the digital era. Technology for sure still plays an important role for providing right solutions to the revamped business needs. Employees also have to be equipped with a change/growth mindset for embracing the transformation which relates to the company culture. Inevitably, there will be change in skill sets to operate the new business while it’s essential the company has to build the learning muscle and provide the learning opportunities. As it’s a transformation, it can be a continuous process for many years instead of a once off success. It’s not hard to imagine the challenge of transformation requires lots of re-integration, system redesign, workflow redesign, and data reconciliation. A right KPI/OKR has to be in place to prevent an early call off of the project just because there are no immediate results.
Why is digital transformation so critical for a retail business?
As a retail brand, it’s at the core of catching up the pulse of consumer appetite. With the increasing penetration of smartphones and IoT, consumers’ expectations are changing faster than ever. They are looking for a seamless, personalized and convenient shopping experience.
Digital transformation enables more channel integration, more holistic design on customers’ experience in both online/offline and data driven approaches for making decisions. In the eyes of customers, they don’t see brands from a channel perspective. It’s purely their personal preference to choose between channels based on the product availability and unique channel offering. Sometimes, brands even need to deliver beyond expectations in order to retain customers. With the rising privacy concerns, brands have to rely more on the first party data and so acquiring the data via cross-channel touch points with a centralized depository is essential. Last but not least is also the operation efficiency that digital transformation can help to increase so marketer or frontline can even spend more time to interact with the customers.
How does ‘good’ look like for a successful digital transformation?
It is a common challenge to visualize how much effort has been spent in digital transformation as change just doesn’t happen overnight. It is not hard to get by at the beginning but after months or years, stakeholders will start to question how big of an impact is being generated from the project. Without a proper indicator in place, project leaders will find there is increasing resistance. Some suggestions below can be a quick win but actually can support the continuity of the project until everyone sees a significant shift of business model.
With the rising privacy concerns, brands have to rely more on the first party data and so acquiring the data via cross-channel touch points with a centralized depository is essential
• Define your vision with a milestone, short term and long term goal to allow stakeholders to easily track the transformation progress.
• Shift of business to certain channels / segments / products is a direct indicator.
• Customer experience should be improved with customer feedback, CSAT, Retention Rates, U&A studies as an objective measurement.
• Data availability, accessibility, accuracy should be another way to evaluate digital transformations.
• Employee engagement and satisfaction will result in a positive trend as efficiency is improved.
In conclusion, part of the project is all about communication one shouldn’t be shy to repeat the progress in all internal channels in order to get a wider company to support the transformations.
