Insights from eCommerce Expo 2023
Last week members of Enfuse Group attended the eCommerceExpo #ECE23 at the ExCel London.
A fantastic array of expert speakers delivered concurrent presentations across 12 different stages over 2 days. The presentations covered a huge range of highly relevant topics including AI, innovation, omnichannel, and improving the customer experience. Global retail e-commerce sales hit $5.2 trillion in 2021 and are expected to rise to $6.9 trillion by 2024.
These are topics we discuss with our clients on a regular basis – so it was great to see these topics being talked about in detail. Some of the highlights of the conference and key takeaways from our teams are shared below.
Photo from eCommerce Expo
Focus on Customer Loyalty
The Vitamin Shoppe talking about the 49% uplift in shopping that had taken place through their customer loyalty schemes. These loyalty programmes are also enabling retailers to gather greater customer data to support hyper-personalisation of the customer experience to ensure their interactions with the brand are extremely relevant.
Christopher Thomas-Moore, The Chief Digital Officer of Dominoes also talked about the investment in, and changes to, their customer loyalty programme that has provided more flexibility and lowered barriers to entry.
It was noted in a HBR article earlier this year that customer loyalty has increased in the past decade and Millennials (the most buying power of any generation) are amongst the most loyal customers across generational cohorts.
Photo from eCommerce Expo
Fit Seamlessly into your Customers’ Lives
The best examples of where companies are getting eCommerce right is where they are providing timely, relevant, and actionable information to their customers. For example, Sephora was cited for their great customer touch points at key times, such as noting when product refills are likely to be needed to be ordered. The message is helpful and acts as a reminder for customers during their busy daily lives.
Customers are leading increasingly busy lives and are consuming more information than ever before. The battle for their attention requires an omnichannel approach that enables faster time to action, embeds automated triggers, and is tailored to the customer’s specific needs at that exact moment in time.
The other key element is usability. The Starbucks app was also held up as an exemplar of something that was so easy to access and use that it played a key role in determining where people would go for their refreshments. This is all about creating frictionless experiences across both physical and digital interactions.
AI is Being Unleashed
An excellent session on the future of AI was presented by GrahamCooke who talked about the next frontier following major breakthroughs in NLP, Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning and Generative Designs and how all these advances are fundamentally changing the way people shop with totally different forms of discovery, recommendation and comparison now taking place in an instant – “the catalogue style of ecommerce we’ve had for 20 years finally goes out the window”. We’ve now gone through the Personalization Revolution where Machine Learning (ML) enabled the consumer to much more quickly find the products that suited them through demand-side personalisation. Going forward, customers will be able to train and deploy AI that knows every single detail and interest of theirs, enabling the customer to either filter or largely outsource their buying decisions.
In an insightful and candid panel discussion, Aidan Connor (Asprey), James Kearns (TM Lewin), and Sarah Wilkinson (Jimmy Choo), discussed the many use cases of AI from the automation of mundane tasks to free-up the human brain for more creative / emotive inputs, through to enhancing omnichannel customer experiences, and driving new and experimental content on experimental platforms. It is clear that organisations are going to need to think about the change management and adoption aspect of AI. Employees are going to need to be upskilled and re-trained and the ways of working are going to fundamentally shift. This isn’t simply about technology – this is about a fundamental change to working practices and cultures.
We all know Board rooms around the world are pushing business leaders to use AI but without much forethought to what business challenge/opportunity they are trying to solve/realise. AI is going to be incredibly powerful but organisations need to think through its use cases and the challenges they wish for it to solve prior to embarking on any changes. Indeed, the example given of Jimmy Choo around setting up an AI task force across the business to think through the best use cases for AI, is exactly the approach we take when it comes to innovation with many of our clients.
All Roads Lead to Data
A key theme from the conference that underpinned each of the trends – whether it be enhanced customer experience, the adoption of AI, a targeted loyalty programme, or providing omnichannel platforms – is that it all relies on organisations getting their data right. The inherent danger with more data than ever before being captured is that firms get data busy and are unable to see the woods from the trees. Most companies simply don’t know what to do this it all. It is therefore critical they get to grips with their data and become data driven so they can get insights and value from the data to drive their business forward. This is also the key unlock to the adoption of AI – companies have the proprietary data sets that allow them to take the leap forward but are they being correctly leveraged?
Nestle talked about how critical data was behind their brand expansion – from mining online rating and reviews from customers to get key customer sentiment, through to combining these along with retail and product data to get improved insights. Getting this right has a massive impact in this multi-trillion dollar market.
Summary
The ecommerce market is moving faster than ever before, further accelerated by Generative AI. Continuous innovation is required within a retailer’s culture to enable experimentation and foster creativity to stay ahead of the curve and not to get left behind. Whether that be running A/B split tests on messaging and promotions, testing blue ocean ad platforms outside of Meta and Google, looking at setting up on TikTok Shop – companies need to be constantly innovating to ensure their brands are well-positioned in this highly competitive environment.
Enfuse Group is a leading digital transformation consultancy who helps many of the world’s largest eCommerce businesses solve their biggest challenges and improve their capability maturity. We’re here to help. To find out more about these insights or how we could help support you, please get in touch.
