Latest / The Retail Podcast / Intent-Driven Commerce: Solving Retail’s Biggest Frustration

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Intent-Driven Commerce: Solving Retail’s Biggest Frustration · The Retail Podcast

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It's got to be relevant. Relevant to you individually
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specifically right now, or relevant generally enough so you
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can work with this and explore it in a way that's meaningful of
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patches how you want to shop now.
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Can I make that better if I have a bit more personalised
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information? Sometimes no, sometimes yes.
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Hello and welcome to the Retail Podcast.
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Now I remember giving a talk on this subject.
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We were expressing our frustrations in the e-commerce
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world between how difficult can it be to get this right?
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And when I came across who we're going to meet in a minute.
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Found it I thought would be super interesting to at least
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let's let's listen to someone who is solving this problem and
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look at, you know, have we got it wrong?
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Is there things that we should be doing that we're not doing?
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And Warren, before we get into what the problem is, obviously
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your CEO found maybe the the the giveaway is in the title.
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I don't. Say founder sometimes because
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you founder founder, you know it's too much alliteration for
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people to handle sometimes. Yeah, luckily I I should be able
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to go over. So CEO and founder of found it.
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So what? Why don't you tell us how you
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got to found it before we dive into what the problem is and how
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you guys solve it? Yeah, because what do you know?
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It was funny. You said how difficult things
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are. Why are they still so difficult?
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There's problems that I've been seeing for 15 years that
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everyone's been expecting to just disappear and see them
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every day. Yeah.
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If I, if I just sort of give you maybe a potted history, I, I
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spent 20 years running an agency, a digital marketing
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agency. Halfway through that journey, we
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decided I think sites would be a lot better if we built them the
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way we tended to use them rather than just standing them up
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out-of-the-box. So we ended up becoming systems
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integrated and started building e-commerce sites on hybrids and
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Salesforce demand as it was back then and different platforms.
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So we started to get much more into into depth with trading
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operations and what it was like to actually run, manage and
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actually sell online, you know, and, and help the business
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actually trade. And then into sort of the
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background of that, we were developing a lot of technology
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to try and automate things, you know, try to understand what it
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was customers were looking for, you know, how that might feel
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into inside analytics. We were working with, actually
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working with a company called Maplin.
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I'm sure some of your some of your viewers will remember them
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fondly. Absolutely.
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Yeah. This is the earlier generation.
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Maplin disappeared from High Street and resurfaced under a
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new prat. So this is pretty that sort of,
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you know, same thing that might relate to the current team and
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its business. But let's see, see you at the
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time. He, he, he was very close to
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customers and he would get their emails.
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He would read customer emails, customers e-mail him directly to
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how they got his e-mail. But but people would have always
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listened to that and he'd read the exit survey data and the
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thing you would always hear the most other than it's too
3:00
expensive or stop asking me feedback information was always,
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I can't find what I'm looking for on the site.
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And that seems to be like the biggest frustration point.
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And that's kind of was a also like an epiphany.
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I spent a lot of time trying to help people get their websites
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found on Google. So when people were searching on
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Google, they could or whatever it was they were using would
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find the website. And this is a problem on the
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site as well. And it was kind of a sort of a
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milestone, if you like it, growing of awareness that it is
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hard, it is kind of clunky. And and we've been doing this
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for ages. You think you think e-commerce
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would have moved on since the interface of e-commerce?
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It's kind of been the same way since about 2006.
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And you know, we've got the search bar, the grid, it's the
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fastest. It's kind of that, that
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structure, you know, it's a good structure, everyone understands
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it, it's logical, but it's quite difficult to to navigate and
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search and browse. And as customers get, as retails
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get bigger and bigger admin products, it, the site's just
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become harder to navigate, harder to perhaps it becomes
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harder to find what you want. Think somewhere you said that
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shopping has become boring and uninspiring.
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In your experience, what do you think the one reason for that
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is? And what's the trap that
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retailers fall into, maybe? I'll frame it in, in some
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feedback I actually got from an e-commerce director.
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And, and this was their ironically, this was their
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experience of them shopping on their website.
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And, and she said, I spent an hour on the site, came away
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empty handed, only wanted a pot paint.
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And that's if she was talking about her own website.
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And you think, wow, yeah. And there is this common theme
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thread where I think we all know it's hard.
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We all know it's difficult. We all know it's and people seem
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just powerless to do anything about it.
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And I think if you look at what what's happened in terms of the
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evolution of the customer and the evolution of, of, of, of
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e-commerce, they've moved at very different paces and speeds
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in, in different ways. So if you look at the customer
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nowadays, customers want everything to work like Netflix,
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right? You know, I sit down, my telly
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can sort of understand what I want, work out how to, you know,
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give me the things that I want. Facebook, Amazon, these, these
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everyday platforms have almost dictated the way the, you know,
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today shoppers expect to, to, to have their experience today.
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So they've become the time, the time pool.
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They're impatient. They're more likely to be on
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Insta or Google looking for a product and then discover a
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retailer than they are to be on a retailer and then discover a
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product. So all these changes are
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happening. If you look at retail websites
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and what have we been doing in e-commerce for the last 10-15
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years and it's really what we've been, what we've been doing is
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focusing on acquisition and traffic supremacy and increasing
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range size, you know, range expansion, let's go marketplace,
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let's have more products, let's add new categories, let's make
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it bigger and bigger and bigger under the hood.
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But fundamentally, that experience isn't really
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changing. And so you have customers now
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coming into into into retail websites.
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They've landed on Google, they land on the product page and
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they're going kind of interesting.
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And it's like, I kind of want something like that, but I don't
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think I want to try and work out decode your site at the moment,
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work out how it works. I'll go back to Google and it's
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easier to do that. So the the path of this
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resistance for customers being able to find and discover on
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platforms that aren't retailers is is actually far exceeded.
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They're going to do it on retail websites.
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So when they're on sites, it's it's kind of transactional.
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You know, there's the mega, there's your category.
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We've got 2000 sandals. Do you want black ones?
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Do you want gold ones? Do you want strap your own?
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I'm going on holiday and I want something nice to step out.
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Can you help me? And, and that that's not really
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how websites work or unless the, you know, you have merchandisers
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and they kind of perceive these things and they create edits,
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but that that band, it's always really, really limited.
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So consequently, sites just feel a bit sort of transactional,
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bland, functional and overwhelming.
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You know, 1000, a thousand, 1000 pairs of sandals.
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Or sometimes you go onto a website and you're just trying
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to buy a headphone stand or a mic and there's 300 of them.
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There's mic over here. I can't deal with 300 mics to
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choose breakdown and I'm not an expert shop, but maybe in this
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particular category, you've got to help me as well as you want
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to do this. I'm like, I, I don't know, it's
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not an excite, it's not an enjoyable experience.
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So you have these customers that are coming into websites and
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this is like, I it's easier to go somewhere else.
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And, and that's where, and that's where we are now with
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e-commerce and, and, and what retailers are saying is that,
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you know, they've grown their range, but all they've done
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really is just create an overwhelming experience that the
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customers are increasingly bewildered by.
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And it's harder for them to, to navigate.
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Doesn't really differentiate because if you're on selling the
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same stuff everyone's doing next day delivery or whatever, and
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the customers, the customer doesn't really have the, the
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patience to wade through, you know, endless aisles.
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Yeah, I'll call it endless aisle being battered around a lot in,
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in East guys, endless aisle. It can go on forever and you
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know, it's great. You know, it's a really good
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thing. It's endless aisle.
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Customers can spend ages browsing product, but that's
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really, really bad because it's an endless aisle and customers
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can spend ages browsing product. You know, the, the, the weakness
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is in is, is in the strength, ironically.
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So customers are saying that, OK, maybe they're selling more.
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Retailers are saying now they're selling more, but they're
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actually converting fewer and fewer customers because
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customers are less willing to muddle through, less willing to
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deep dive and try to work out and decipher the search.
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What do I type into the search engine to make it work?
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Where did you put that, Phil? What do you call it?
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What should I call it? How should I try and find these
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things? And it's just not my experience.
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And that's what customers are feeding back.
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And that's why this conversion is falling off.
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Yeah, I can imagine that so many businesses have invested so much
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in building categories and more products.
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But what that leads to is having thousands of dark aisles within
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your e-commerce site with invisible products that
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basically get buried in search, right.
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And I can imagine that never get seen say again.
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Never get seen. Yeah.
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Never get seen, which has an impact in the middle of Dark
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Isles, Yeah. How so?
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Do you have any examples where retailers have sort of converted
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that into an opportunity? Yes, the challenge with Dark
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Isles is is that they're dark because there's typically too
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much to consume. Yeah, so I guess this sort of
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falls off page one of search. Right, yes, yeah, exactly.
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I mean, I'll give you an example.
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Working with the retailer at the moment, they sell 14,000
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Wallpapers, right? On the one hand, that's
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brilliant, that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
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But also that's a huge range of Wallpapers.
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Where, where do you start? You know, you've got to, you
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can't, you can't consume that amount of information, you know,
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and you certainly don't want to be browsing, you know, endlessly
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through things you've got to be able to get down.
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And I think this is really where, you know, focusing on
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customer intent, which is really what found it's about, you know,
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it comes to comes to the fore because you don't need to let
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your customer muddle through and work out how they're going to
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find what they want because you can understand those needs of
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customers. You can bring that to the front
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and then go, well, let me create the exploration or experience
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that I think you want to help you navigate and browse, explore
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this category. You know, get, as you know, one
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of our customers would say, get down to the right, find the
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right product in the noise of 10,000.
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You know, that's really, that's really the job.
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That really, that really is the job.
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How do you find that one thing when you literally you're
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standing at the you're at the tip of the iceberg and, and it's
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under there somewhere, but you, what are you going to do?
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You're going to hunt for the right philtre, paginate through
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to page 11 and you still won't have even scratched the surface.
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You'll go to search. You won't quite know what words
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to put. You'll type something like
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cottage core. You think that kind of feels
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like the trend that I think I'm after.
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I got no results. What do I, what do I type now?
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What do I need to call it? And this is cognitive energy,
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right? And this is what is exhausting
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the customer and they go, screw it.
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I'll go to Pinterest and we'll look at room designs or I'll go
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to Google and I'll type it something and Google will
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explore it for me. So that, you know, when you
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think about dark Isles, the people that are turning those
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into an opportunity are the people that are working out.
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How do I get a customer from the top of the tree where it's
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overwhelming and unconsumable, down to a really well honed,
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curated collection of products that engaged and interest them
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without them having to make? Yeah, In physical retail, that's
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one of the major successes behind ALDI and Little, that
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they take decision fatigue out of the equation.
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Where you go to any of the other major supermarkets, you know,
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you're just struck with 15 variants of tomato ketchup and
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you only want tomato ketchup, so you only need two or three
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things. So decision fatigue is a real
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thing. And retailers like ALDI and
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Little use it to global expansion and winning.
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So it's definitely something that that wins.
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And I think there'll be a generation of people who go what
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used to have catalogues. And so, you know, in the early
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days, I remember, you know, anyone Argos.
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Catalogue, the Argos catalogue. So you know what?
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My, my, my, I'd always love going because we have the Argos
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catalogue at home. You know, it's just be it would
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be like a book, yes, like a it was a magazine, really.
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I think that was the. Service a book.
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It was a it was a great magazine and I used to love going over to
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my auntie in Romford because my auntie, they had a Argos
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Superstore out there way. And so she had the Argos
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Superstore catalogue, which was like Argos catalogue on
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steroids. And that was like, I'm just
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going to find the couch and and just go and digest.
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We're going to be. Really nerdy, I used to love
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looking at the hifi equipment. I was just when I was young.
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Looking at the tape recorders. Yeah, yeah, oh, the boom box has
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got 2 graphic equaliser. I'm alienating my audience.
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It was just but. For me, for me, I used to fish
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so I would always remember looking straight to find the
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fishing tackle, which was sort of the golf clubs and just
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before some other sports equipment.
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I said yeah, that was my memory of I've got that section at the
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Argos catalogue memorised. I mean, going going back to this
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talk that I gave so one one of the things that I did on Amazon,
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I looked for a Canon camera and then I put to this talk the
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backdrop. I don't know if you've ever seen
13:40
Interstellar, the movie where they where they land on the
13:44
planet and it's a beautiful piece of music that actually
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sort of encompasses the planet's problem, which I'm probably I'll
13:53
get the maths wrong, but something like every 7 seconds
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on that planet was equivalent to one day on planet Earth or
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something like that, right. So this planet was, you know,
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you spend 7 minutes and maybe 7 minutes equate to 1.
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And what I was telling the e-commerce leaders at that .6
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years ago is people's attention spans is like this.
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The more they are fatigued on your website, the more time that
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they feel. So 7 minutes for them on your
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website is 14 minutes of their real time.
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And you need to sort of think about it in that way.
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And unfortunately if it's. 7 minutes of being engrossed in Oh
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yeah oh this is it. I can spend all day, but that's.
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Inspiration, right? Yeah.
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Or. Is it 7 minutes of no, that
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didn't work? Yeah.
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Oh my God, one more. No wrong philtre.
14:40
Where do I find that? The Philtre.
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Is let you philtre, philtre, Philtre and you know, you've
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still got these massive retailers with that catalogue
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mentality. They've just taken this wedge of
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product and put it online. That's it.
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That's all they've done. So how do you get customers?
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And I know AI is going to change this because they're going to be
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so petrified at being left out, right?
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And just being, you know, well anyway, how do you get retailers
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to embrace customer intent LED e-commerce?
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Well, that's I think they're gradually realising it.
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I think for a long time, you know, the way that you would
15:19
deal with the fact that you've got this diminishing return of
15:22
attention and it's impacting your bottom line was if you'd
15:25
sweat the funnel like that was always how how how it would work
15:29
more, buy more traffic, do more promos.
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Maybe we'd discount if we're really off forecast or something
15:35
like that. But you're getting to the point
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now where there's no more traffic to buy.
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Can't buy another profitable click if I wanted to.
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And well, I think we're a bit promo now, now, but if we
15:43
discount anymore, we're giving the stuff away.
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So it's like, what else is there?
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And so retailers are now coming round to the idea of we need to
15:50
fix the experience. The experience is going to be
15:53
our differentiator. And so they're looking for ways
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that how, how do we make the experience easier for the
16:00
customer? How do we get more customers to
16:02
the right products sooner in the journey with less effort and
16:06
fewer clicks. That's more and more of the
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customers are coming round to that, yeah.
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But where I think a lot of them may be still struggling is that
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their businesses aren't organised around customers.
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They're organised around catalogues.
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Everything's organised around catalogues.
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Like you were just saying, you stand up.
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The catalogue templates generate the thing out-of-the-box.
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The product database feeds the information.
16:28
It's cookie cuts templated. This person manages that
16:31
category. This person manages that part of
16:33
the catalogue. This person manages this part of
16:35
the tech stack that goes into catalogue.
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And I think the, what we're seeing and this is what the
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retailers that are really winning out and driving forward
16:46
in this kind of domain, they're realising it's got to be about
16:50
the customer. And you've got to try and adjust
16:54
or steal thread that idea of what the customer's trying to
16:57
do, that mission, what they're trying to achieve and try and
17:00
steal thread that through all the different processes,
17:03
operations, tech stacks, teams, templates to try and look it up.
17:08
You know, it's got to be about the, about the customer.
17:12
And so some people are still stuck in that.
17:13
You know, I've got a team that manages PLP, someone manages
17:18
database, someone's on PDP, he says she drives trafficking,
17:22
they merge that, they organise this.
17:24
And no one's sitting there going, what does a customer come
17:28
in and want to do? What are they trying to achieve?
17:30
And actually that mission there. So that's going to take them all
17:33
across all these different type of points in lots of different
17:36
directions. And so we actually need to be
17:38
threading all that together around what a customer wants,
17:41
not what we want to push, promote, organise.
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And that's the, that's the, that's the shift in the
17:46
mentality. The people that are winning are
17:48
doing that, doing that very well and are quite far ahead.
17:51
So, so where, where, where do you see intent LED e-commerce
17:55
over the next five years? Because obviously we've got to
17:58
mention AI and, you know, AI is going to take a part in this.
18:03
AI is going to play a part. I mean, on the one hand, I mean,
18:05
you saw Google, Google launched their AI mode when they went all
18:08
in on their AI mode a couple of months ago.
18:11
And you know, they kind of forecast a world, you know, you
18:16
take it to its extreme. It was like this idea of shops
18:20
that's going, you're going to you're going to work with AI
18:23
agents and they're going to put it in the basket.
18:25
It's almost going to be like, I have take it to some dystopian
18:29
extreme. It's going to end up like dark
18:31
kitchens. You know, it's just going to be
18:33
Uber driver, Uber reach driver showing up to pick up the
18:36
delivery orders at the checkout. Just just bring them back and
18:39
this whole merchandised categorised browsing experience,
18:44
that's all gone. Yeah, I don't, I don't think
18:46
that's going to happen. I think AI will help, a lot of
18:49
it. AI will help educate customers
18:52
so they don't have to get frustrated trying to work out
18:55
how to use retail sites. But I think the sites that are
18:58
going to win out are going to be the ones that bring AI in to
19:02
help automate, orchestrate and enrich all of this information
19:07
in in their business. Every I mean, we went to shop
19:09
talk, everyone's talking about AI, the number of people that
19:12
just slapped AI in front of things or just going we need to
19:14
use more AI. And I think a lot of the time,
19:17
yeah, take AI, call it machine that it was that before, you
19:21
know, go back a few years, it was big data.
19:23
Go back a few years, it was analytic it what it's always
19:26
something that's going to come in and and change everything.
19:30
The thing that was always missing a digital
19:31
transformation, that's what was, it was always what are you
19:35
trying to do? What's the operation, what's the
19:37
process, what's the goal that we're trying to achieve?
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How do you bring AI in to do that?
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And I don't think a lot of the retailers that we've looked at
19:47
know exactly what that process is that they are trying to
19:52
augment with AI. Yeah, you've got to try and work
19:55
out what what your, what's the perfect experience?
19:58
You've got to work, you've almost got to work it backwards.
20:00
What's the ideal experience we're trying to put to the
20:02
customer? Have we got the assets and the
20:04
infrastructure, the operations to deliver it?
20:06
Can AI, can AI help us put any of those in place?
20:11
And a lot of people haven't worked that back to what they
20:14
want AI to do for them or for their customers.
20:17
And that's. Really where you know, intent
20:20
again comes into the 4th because and where AI has helped us is
20:23
because AI helps you distil and orchestrate things at scale a
20:29
lot better than you could do before.
20:33
If you're a retailer with a manual merchandising team, you
20:36
do swivel chain typing this over here, typing this into that
20:39
system, moving data, enriching it.
20:42
Yeah, they say details, detail. And at this, it absolutely still
20:47
is. So you've got to do dozens of
20:52
things across a million points to to make it work for all the
20:56
customers. And it's that AI angle that
20:58
really helps a good operation done intelligently done for the
21:02
customer scale. Yeah, I we, we've not got into
21:05
training data and, and how much of your data do you want, you
21:08
know, somebody else to have? Because companies like
21:12
Perplexity are definitely, I think trying to circumvent
21:14
retailers and just provide, you know, they'll be happy with the
21:17
product catalogue and let people do sort of search based
21:22
discovery as opposed to product based discovery.
21:25
But that which leads you into personalisation.
21:28
And you know, personalisation is often cited as sort of being the
21:32
key and the future of e-commerce.
21:36
I'm just wondering how which what sort of leads to the
21:39
customer loyalty. I'm just wondering what's found
21:41
its approach to personalisation to to improve the customer
21:46
loyalty. So I I've got a slightly
21:48
heretical view on personalisation which which
21:52
which I'll share, but I think I don't.
21:54
I don't like to dive into personalisation as much and I
21:58
use one of my customers references for the exhaust about
22:01
what are you doing to personalise the scientists?
22:03
I don't look at it as personalization, I look at it as
22:05
relevance. So I'm parroting it slightly.
22:08
It's got to be relevant, relevant to you individually
22:13
specifically right now, all relevant generally enough so you
22:16
can you can work with this and explore it in a way that's
22:19
meaningful and matches how you want to shop.
22:21
Now. Can I make that better if I have
22:23
a bit more personalised information?
22:26
Sometimes no, sometimes yes. And so personalization kind of
22:30
is one of these things that sort of sits underneath this for me,
22:34
this ambition of trying to create a relevant experience
22:37
customer. And, and this is where I guess
22:39
my heretical view comes in is that I don't think you need
22:42
personalised information to understand the customer intent
22:47
that's moving through a particular category.
22:50
You don't need to get a lot of the time because personalization
22:53
works incredibly well when you've got repeat, committed,
22:58
engaged customers that I had bought, bought from you before.
23:02
They're back for their third, fourth visit.
23:04
Now they're looking at this, They spent 15 minutes on site.
23:08
You've got a wealth of data. The problem is that actually
23:12
that's less than 5% of, of all the people that are on your
23:16
site. You know, 80% of people showing
23:18
up on your site, you've seen for the first time from any given
23:21
day they've been on your page for they've been on your site
23:23
for 30 seconds. It looks at 3 pages.
23:25
What do you know, right? You've got this, you have this
23:28
cold start with, you know, 2% of the customers buy it, but 98%
23:31
don't. And you've got no good
23:34
information to go on on, on any of them.
23:37
And so the necessity for for retails is to be able to deliver
23:41
this almost prescient. We thought we knew what you we
23:44
knew you were coming. And this is kind of, we
23:46
understood what you wanted and we laid the place out for you
23:49
kind of experience without having personalised information.
23:53
That's really what we want retailers to to be able to do.
23:57
Now, if you get useful information that says, well,
24:00
they've looked at these 10 things that now if you've got
24:02
some additional information, then you can start to create a
24:04
more colourful experience on top of that once you've got it.
24:07
But the real challenge you've got is the 98% of people that
24:11
are not providing a good website that you know you can't create a
24:15
perfect predictive experience for.
24:17
And you need to show them that you understand what it is that
24:21
they're looking for, how they want to shop, and you've
24:24
structured the website for that particular purpose, almost like
24:28
a magician. So is that the card you're
24:29
thinking of? What was that?
24:31
They're over here. And when you do that, the user
24:33
feels empowered and you don't have to help the person.
24:37
You don't have to predict the perfect product that they want.
24:40
You just have to help them find the right product, get there and
24:44
let them make their own choice. And when you do that, they've
24:47
become much more loyal, much more empowered to engage
24:49
customer. So I guess, you know, when you
24:51
think about intent versus personalisation, they're not,
24:54
it's not an if or at all. They're just serving different
24:57
ends of, of, of the spectrum of trying to create a more relevant
25:01
experience. So for example, you know, we'll
25:04
do a lot of product enrichment, for example, and we'll look at a
25:07
dress, for example, and you know, they called it a long
25:10
dress, OK, but it's also full length.
25:12
But that's not going to tell you that in the data.
25:14
And no customer data is going to tell you that.
25:17
Some people call that full length, some people call that
25:20
floor length, some people call that a long dress.
25:24
You don't pick up the aggregate or the accumulation of the rich
25:32
customer intent, the way customers relate to products,
25:34
what they call things, until you actually step back and aggregate
25:39
all information from from all users about what what something
25:43
is, how it might be used, what they're trying to do, what
25:46
probably solves for them. You don't get that from personal
25:49
data. You get that from looking at
25:53
sorts the wisdom of the crowd, almost looking at how, how does
25:55
everyone come through here? Call, call it something, go
25:59
somewhere else. It's those sorts of patterns
26:01
that really start to tell you what it is that people are
26:04
trying. To do what would you, what would
26:06
you think is one of the first outcomes your customers get when
26:10
they sort of start working with you?
26:12
What's the one thing that you see them, obviously you expect
26:17
better? What's an outcome?
26:21
What would an outcome be for them?
26:23
I suppose if I look at the impact, I think is that where
26:27
you're leading into the impact? I'm just curious over the years,
26:31
when you've been working with your key customers, you know,
26:34
you go back and say, how you and obviously thank you for your
26:36
business, thanks for taking it. How are you finding it?
26:39
And then they'll say, oh, you know what this curious what
26:43
that, what that, this is, right? What if you were going to sort
26:45
of peel back the layers? What, what is that outcome that,
26:49
that they're getting? And it could be as simple as it
26:52
was chaos. And now we we've got a a bit of
26:55
a handle on something that we had no handle on.
26:59
Yeah. So typically, you know,
27:00
customers are tracking a lot of stuff.
27:02
So, you know, they'll, they'll, they see it in the metrics they
27:05
go, you know, people are adding product to basket a lot more
27:08
often now actually. OK.
27:10
It's taking a lot less time to do this.
27:12
So we were working with a large US retailer, true Retail and
27:16
even markers and they actually were doing this sort of visual
27:20
navigation at the top of their pages, which is one of the the
27:23
products that that found it incorporated to our customer
27:27
sites. But they were building it all
27:28
manually. So they would have their
27:30
merchandising team, they look at data, they sit down, they crunch
27:33
Excel and they speak to the design team.
27:35
They get some images that creates an array of options they
27:38
can put into a content management system.
27:40
So they get this nice kind of hero visual navigational thing
27:44
at the top that should, you know, help the customers
27:46
navigate to what it is, what's popular more easily on what's
27:50
trending. And but it was it was it was
27:53
killing them. It was taking away all of the
27:55
time that they had for anything strategic, anything customer
27:58
focused. And they were almost like 40% of
28:01
their week was going on on keeping up this manual
28:04
navigation and it was only on their top 400 pages.
28:07
So they were really excited about the prospects of can
28:10
something just do this? You know, if you boil it down,
28:14
all I'm talking about really is good merchandising, listening to
28:17
the customer, pre empting the customer, getting ahead of them,
28:19
doing the right thing for them, making it easy, laying it out
28:22
the way they expect. But this is all happening in
28:24
organisations. So one of the biggest impacts
28:26
that they saw, it's just it just I can sleeve this, go back and
28:32
do something and this works. This will be taken care of when
28:35
a new range comes in or a new trend goes off or, or something.
28:38
This is very important or we've got a it will just keep getting
28:41
yeah. And that that that is a it's
28:45
like, wow, we've just got we've just got a week back, guys.
28:47
And that's that's like, you know, that that's that gets felt
28:51
internally very, very quickly. Beyond that, it's metric based.
28:54
So actually there's a lot more customers now adding to car.
28:57
You know, before we had a really low add to car rate and we saw a
29:02
lot of struggle. There was a high bounce rate.
29:04
People left the category after a certain amount of time.
29:06
There's an exit rate that we could tell, although seem to be
29:09
going in different directions. More people running to basket.
29:12
We're seeing the bounce rate come down.
29:13
We're seeing time spent in the category go up.
29:16
We're seeing more of that number of items viewed, people seeing
29:19
more things, more products actually getting seen.
29:24
Coming back to the Dark Isle point that you were talking
29:26
about before, one of the metrics one of our customers was
29:28
tracking was how much more of our product category is being
29:32
seen and exposed than than it was before.
29:36
Actually, suddenly we had, we grew our range and it was no one
29:40
was seeing it, but now they're seeing it.
29:41
And so actually they're getting some security from diversifying
29:46
their audience across more of their range, selling more
29:49
things. And that means that when it
29:51
comes to, you know, as they advance their trading period,
29:55
they're not suddenly finding that loads of stuff didn't sell
29:57
and they've still got loads of of, of stock from things that
30:01
because they never got seen, right.
30:03
So, so there's some of the discounting pressure is coming
30:06
off of them as well. So you can tell that the
30:08
customers are getting a better experience.
30:11
You can tell that the, the merchandising team is, is
30:14
finding that, you know, they've got more time on their hands
30:16
and, and more ability to do other things.
30:18
Or if their job is automated and, and some of that worry or
30:21
pressure that they might have felt a discount is kind of
30:24
diminished a little bit because more things are getting sold in
30:27
more facets of the category. So there's, there's benefits
30:29
all, all, all across the spectrum really from doing this.
30:33
But what sometimes it's interesting is where you hear
30:35
different applications of of what of what you didn't intend
30:39
to have. So for, for example, we would
30:42
create these visual navigations across PLP categories that you
30:46
go into locks, for example. This is a DIY company, sort of a
30:50
homewares company. And they've had their locks page
30:53
and you know, we broke them. They, they had the way they
30:55
broke down locks, but we had the way that customers broke down
30:58
locks and we turned that into quite a mundane category.
31:02
But, but you know, if you, if you need to buy a lock and
31:04
you're not quite sure, you need to have it broken down in the
31:07
way that you want to try and explore the category.
31:09
And so we've created all these navigational arrays and we've
31:12
optimised product data. We enriched everything.
31:14
Of course, the customers were getting better.
31:15
But then what they said was that their call centre execs, the new
31:19
call centre execs, when customers called in and they
31:22
wanted guidance or explanation through a particular category,
31:25
the call centre execs were using the intent based navigation that
31:30
was being essentially fed by customer demands and trends.
31:35
And they were able to sound like product experts all of a sudden,
31:39
even though, you know, they didn't understand, you know,
31:42
I've become, I've been doing this for years.
31:43
I've become such a product expert in so many categories
31:46
that I would know what I can tell you about embellished
31:48
sandals, you know, or, or, or locks or, or perfuse of
31:52
fragrances just by understanding how customers try to relate to
31:56
this stuff. So, so they're, they're call
31:58
centre execs for getting savvier quicker, helping customers off
32:01
the phone better because they were using the prompts from the
32:05
navigation to basically talk to the customer about do you want
32:08
something like this? Do you want something like that?
32:10
This breaks down like this. Do you want a silver one?
32:12
Do you want a 11? And it was almost guiding
32:16
customer service people as well. So we see the benefits across
32:19
the whole org and sometimes in some really novel areas too.
32:24
That's fantastic. Look, Warren, it's been an
32:25
absolute pleasure. Time has flown by.
32:29
So thank you so much for giving up some time to be with us today
32:32
and I look forward to you. You were at shop Talk, you said,
32:35
right? We were at Shop Talk.
32:37
Are you talking about AI? Yeah, are.
32:40
You doing any other conferences for the rest of the year?
32:43
So we're hoping to make an appearance at Shop Talk in
32:45
Chicago for the Ottoman and yeah, full.
32:48
And I'm going to try. Don't need many introduces to go
32:51
to Paris. Yeah.
32:52
So we might want to go to NRFT. So yeah.
32:55
All right. Well, that's going to be a tough
32:56
one, I think, because they're both at the same time, right?
32:59
One day apart. We're definitely going to be tag
33:02
teaming, I think you know. Yeah, 16th to the 18th in in
33:06
Paris and shop talk, 17th to the 19th in Chicago.
33:11
Well, well, I may see you at one of them.
33:14
We'll circle back and share. Perfect.
33:16
Thanks a lot, Warren. Thanks, Alex.
33:18
Take care. Bye.
33:18
Bye.