By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
November 3, 2009
IBM has officially launched WebSphere Version 7 last week, after previewing it at the company's WebSphere Commerce Leadership Summit in Toronto. It was a great opportunity to see what's top of mind for both a major technology player and its retail customers, right as RSR was in the midst of putting together our own findings on eCommerce.
Here are the big themes that came out of the conference, which you'll also find were major focus points in the new release as well.
1. "Going Mobile" is not a yes/no proposition. The options for going mobile are varied and diverse and getting more so every day. It can be as simple as sending SMS order status messages to customers, or as complex as a stand-alone app that can be downloaded on any one of the big 3 mobile app platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) - let alone all three of them, since each platform has different capabilities and different rules and requirements. And then there are future-oriented issues, around payments, coupons, proximity and more.
On the one hand, this is great - retailers can get their feet wet by turning on some simple SMS functionality. On the other hand, moving on from there is difficult. App or WAP? What goes into the app (or WAP)? What pain points are we trying to solve for the customer and how does it help us make money? This last question is even harder to answer when customers themselves don't know their own pain points or how to solve them.
2. Social participation is the newest dimension of personas. As if the behavioral elements of personas were not hard enough, start thinking now about social behaviors and their relationships to your different personas. For example, if someone from a group of people who rarely post reviews starts posting them, you might want to make them feel special by providing them with some kind of recognition. Doing so might shift them from a low-engagement shopper to high-engagement, with all of the spend that follows.
However, it's not as simple as that. One of the more interesting discussions I had at the event touched on content vs. community. "Social networking" as a term seems to have expanded exponentially in the last few months. It now includes not just consumers talking to each other, whether through blogs or social networks, or through retailer-provided or third-party enabled. Somehow it has come to encompass user-generated content - like product reviews and ratings. Is posting a picture of your favorite product in use on the product page social participation, or content creation? Is it both? My concern is that the idea of "content" might get lost in the flurry to be all things social. Comments that consumers share with each other are indeed content, but they need to be treated differently than the content that people post voluntarily about specific products. Don't let content fall to the wayside as you pursue community.
3. The future is cross-channel. In the early results of RSR's research, we found that a vast majority of retailers - whether online pure-plays or store-based retailers who happen to sell online too - believe that the future of eCommerce lies more with cross-channel opportunities than stand-alone capabilities. In a way, this is defining cross-channel in its loosest meaning of the term: if you have multiple sites, if you have mobile, if you have connections into social networks, then you're running a cross-channel operation, like it or not.
This is where a company like IBM begins to get very interesting. While cross-channel is indeed all of the things I just mentioned above, it is also the point of sale connections, the kiosk connections, employee-facing devices, and on and on and on. The challenge, for tech vendors and for retailers, is that more and more of us are coming to the conclusion that to become cross-channel is not a story of some process change and some integration. It’s a transformational change. A business model change. Buy online, pickup in store is only scratching the surface. Unfortunately, especially when times are tight, CEO's tend to shudder at the term "transformational." However, I'll go out on a limb here: as much as customer centricity has been "transformational" to retail, cross-channel will be even more so. I'll have more to say about this soon.
As a close, I'll say one more thing about IBM. WebSphere Commerce has an impressive amount of functionality. But the more I see of it, the more I wonder about the relevance of some of the other parts of the IBM universe. The hardware is a no-brainer. But POS software? And what runs the fantastic Anyplace Kiosks these days? If WebSphere Commerce can be extended to POS, as CrossView has proven, is there a need for these separate retailing solutions down the road? And what impact will convergence have on the Retail Integration Framework - another part of the IBM universe that addresses cross-channel processes?
Seems like cross-channel might mean business model change for more than just retailers. I look forward to seeing how IBM navigates the disruption.
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