Canadian Retailer - Holiday 2013 - 40

2013 KPMG ROUNDTABLE

Doug Campbell: "In-store experience has to be right-sized for
the customer. It isn't simply just about staffing anymore. If
we are looking at children's furniture for example, do we hire
more sales reps in-store or make it more self-serve? Younger
people of this demographic are okay with self-serve, older
generations are less so. In major appliances, it's different;
people demand a more consultative process given the higher
cost of the item and the longevity of the purchase. When I talk
about making focused investments, it's not as simplistic as
investing in one technology, like QR codes. For us, it's about
making the appropriate investment decisions that reflect
what the consumer wants."
Bruce Dinan: "How do we eliminate the manual processes
that take our sales people away from spending time with our
consumers? We want to eliminate the things they have to do
manually. It's amazing how many tasks employees have to do
that have nothing to do with taking care of our customers. We
are now focusing our efforts on eliminating 'non-selling activities' so we can further improve our in-store customer service
and overall experience."

Chris Hodgson: "From a customer experience
perspective, retail is in the detail. You have to ask
yourself, 'Is this new innovation really improving
the customer experience, or are we just doing it so
we can check the "technology box" and move on
to the next innovation? It shouldn't be about incorporating technology for the sake of using technology. You need to consider how this is improving the overall experience for your consumer."

Terry Beauchamp: "We have moved outside of the box to
incorporate an art gallery into the shared retail space we occupy at Beauchamp Tailors, quite by chance. I happen to know
a gentlemen from Quebec who shares the same last name as
me. He runs a gallery there. He was looking for a beautiful
space for a gallery in Toronto, and I just happened to have
4,000 plus square-feet of a beautifully renovated space available in my building for rent. This not only provides us with a
unique branding/marketing opportunity, but it also provides
a highly irreplaceable retail experience for our customers
when they visit us in Toronto."

LEVERAGING BIG DATA, ANALYTICS AND SEO

Willy Kruh: The deluge of big data available to retailers can be simultaneously beneficial and overwhelming. The challenge is not access to information, but rather how best to use it to drive sales. Retailers use big data for
a variety of reasons: to predict customer purchases, micro-segmentation
of their consumers, cross-selling and upselling, location-based marketing,
supply chain and logistics optimization, and to even circumvent fraud. In
our fast-paced world of technology, retail predictions are becoming more
difficult to make, trends are changing faster than ever, and consumers are
unforgiving. How are you leveraging the abundance of information available to you about your consumer and their buying habits to drive strategy?
Michael Medline: "We are drinking from a firehose! We need to be using big data to fulfill customer needs but also to reward our best customers
for 'being our best customers'. We are increasingly
using data to gain access to information about
our customers so we can get to know them better.
Ultimately, it's still all about personalizing their
experience with our brand."

40 |

According to KPMG
Consumer Current's 13
article on Big Data, '90 per
cent of the world's current
data was created between
2010-2012, largely fueled
by social media'.

Bruce Dinan: "Data allows us to determine what is selling in
stores, but you also have to pull information from local stores
based on real-world face-to-face interactions with your associates to really understand what a customer is looking for. Data
helps us understand market by market how well the items
that we stock are selling, but not the items customers are
requesting that we don't carry-it's these nuances you miss
without local store input."

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Canadian Retailer - Holiday 2013

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