Too many major retailers are investing in digital technology solutions that they lack the resources to deploy properly, effectively squandering an opportunity to win competitive advantage, says a 25-year veteran of the technology space.
Murdo Wallace, director of operations, Apac, with Dotdigital, describes the problem as ‘shiny new toy syndrome’ – where executives are racing to embrace the ‘next big thing’ in customer engagement solutions thinking they’ll be a step ahead of their competitors. In reality, he says, the reverse is usually true.
“If you were to audit the top 500 companies in the Asia Pacific, the majority of them will not be doing the basics of a fundamental digital journey for their customer. I bet you they’ve invested heavily in a lot of technology out there, on new platforms and then they try to stick it all together and wonder why it doesn’t work.
“Most companies jump ship from vendor to vendor or from technology to technology without having a grasp of the fundamentals of a digital strategy.
“I love shiny toys, I love new gadgets. However, that shouldn’t drive business decisions,” he concludes
Wallace likens retailers who do not adapt to this reality to the captain of a ship who cannot navigate out of the harbour because they are just going around in circles trying to train themselves on the next shiny toy.
“The risk is that if you keep looking way across the horizon and keep changing boats, you are not going to get anywhere quite frankly.”
The better approach, he explains, is to adopt a CXDP – Customer Experience Data Platform – solution that focuses on customer experiences, led by data. Every retailer has a resource of data and CXDP is all about using that data to drive the customer experience, whether via website content, through personalised messaging, email communications, messaging or social media engagement. A major advantage of it is that companies focus on enabling a digital strategy rather than having to learn multiple types of programs or software.
“CXDP is about laying the core foundation to enable that digital strategy,” explains Wallace.
Dotdigital works with retailers by understanding what their digital strategy is. If a retailer does not have the basic fundamentals of digital strategy in place, Wallace’s team will help them understand how to proceed.
“We tell them: Look, these are the fundamental basics you need. Forget about AI, and all this stuff at the top for now. What are you doing at your base level right now? What are your customers seeing? Then we build the foundation.”
Wallace says it is often evident that customers have a lot of data stored – usually siloed through different platforms and channels – and a lot of legacy data and software solutions that are incompatible. As with any tech, the solution and implementation are only as good as the raw information fed into it.
Some companies have very expensive platforms yet lack the resources or expertise to run them – and they don’t optimise the data on hand.
Deloitte recently published a report concluding that focusing on technologies aligned to digital strategy drives superior market share.
“Having a solid digital strategy and then selecting tech to enable that strategy is key,” says Wallace. “If you don’t, it kills business because it kills the customer experience.
“We don’t want to define your strategy, we want to enable it by having the data layer and enabling a communication or experience layer on top of that data. And that could be SMS, or WhatsApp, an email, content on the site, it could be a plethora of different things. But it needs to be a flexible architecture that allows that scalable customer experience – that aren’t cookie cutter experiences – and that are able to enable your digital strategy, not limit or dictate what that strategy is,” he says.
“So previously, market automation would kind of get you there, but it was very rudimentary. Now we’ve got processing power – the infrastructure if you like – to do these things, but you need the right architecture.”
