Sinead Hammond (00:00):

Hello, hello and welcome to episode four of Shoppernomics our e-commerce podcast. I’m your host, Sinead Hammond, and we’re joined today by the wonderful Tanya Child. Hi Tanya, are you on?

Tanya Child (00:12):

Hi, I am here. Nice to see you.

Sinead Hammond (00:14):

Fantastic. It’s so nice to have you here. Thank you so much. So today we are covering, is your C-suite ready for Gen Z, creating a mixed-basket experiences to meet B2B on B2C buyer expectations. A little bit of a mouthful of a title. I think we’ve decided to cover quite a lot of different things in here, and Tanya is formally of the V&A and Pantone, and now works for as the e-commerce transformation delivery lead at Kew Gardens. So really excited to have you here. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk to us. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your career in e-commerce, and also before moving into your current role, and also a little bit about the role that you’ve got now?

Tanya Child (01:00):

Sure, and I apologize ahead if I have to go on mute to cough, I’ve suffering from this lurgy that everybody seems to be having.

Sinead Hammond (01:07):

[inaudible 00:01:08].

Tanya Child (01:08):

Yeah. So yeah, my career spans more than 20 years. I hear a lot of people say that. So yeah, started well over 20 years ago, working agency side on account management roles for direct marketing and brand agencies. I became really interested in strategy and planning very early on, and that stayed with me throughout all of my career really. Moved into the digital marketing and e-commerce space in 2004. That was really spending some time working freelancing, managing some PPC campaigns for some high profile brands. Then I focused on project management of website development and began working on e-commerce projects. Started to make a bit of a leaning towards client services roles, was interested in how things are working operationally and really helping people move through projects as well.

(02:01):

So I’m less of a… I’m not really a technical delivery person. I’m an all in, looking after people through the journey kind of person as well. But I did spend some time in an agency working in traffic management, so understanding how to move work around between designers and developers. 2017, I made the jump to client side and worked for Pantone and started off in an e-commerce manager role for the AMER region. That was mostly working on a e-commerce platform migration, moving onto the Magento platform for Europe, Middle East and Africa, and working on some interesting challenges against how we were selling color standard products through Amazon and dealer network versus how we were trying to do our own direct e-commerce business as well. That was an interesting challenge. And then I got into a bit of a global e-commerce leads role with them as well and was looking at strategy for e-commerce expansion. We were looking at how to break out and migrate onto the Magento platform in new global markets, evaluating what that looked like for the business, that kind of thing.

(03:11):

Then after Pantone, I took my re-platform experience to the V&A and led an e-commerce transformation project, where this was my first introduction into building mixed-basket e-commerce and worked on the delivery for that. And then towards the end of that project focused on business and operations handover into BAU. So that gave me a really good understanding of the difference between what’s an IT tech project versus actually getting your finished technology product into BAU ready for true transformation. That’s where the transformation really happens.

(03:45):

So now I’m at Kew, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, part of the program team where we’re delivering visitor experience, technology enabled transformation. There’s a bit of a theme coming here, which is bringing together seamless customer experience in a single customer view, and my focus is, for obvious reasons based on my experience, on building, again, the e-commerce single basket delivery and transition into BAU for Kew. So all of that really rolled my current what I do, really into delivery roles that focus on improving customer experience and putting technology in place, and helping and enabling businesses to then take that into BAU and really transform their e-commerce to meet their business goals.

Sinead Hammond (04:31):

Incredible.

Tanya Child (04:32):

That’s where I’m at.

Sinead Hammond (04:33):

Incredible. Yeah, no, there’s a huge amount of experience there across lots of different e-commerce platforms, businesses that you might not necessarily expect any [inaudible 00:04:46] piece. So I really value your experience and your expertise on how these multi-basket e-commerce experiences come to life and how you can use digital transformation to be able to change businesses in that way. So it’s really exciting to be able to have you here.

Tanya Child (05:08):

[inaudible 00:05:09].

Sinead Hammond (05:09):

Before we dive in, just as a reminder for any Shoppernomics regulars, this is an interactive event, which means that as a listener you get to be involved with the conversation. So simply ask to speak at any point or we’ll welcome you at the end on stage. We invite questions and comments throughout or at the end and I’ll give you some little reminders throughout just to write down any questions you have. And then you can also make comments on the LinkedIn event itself as well if you’d like to. But we do encourage you to join us on stage if you like. And then don’t forget to use the emojis as well. There’s a little react button down there, I don’t know for anyone who’s listening if they want to test it out just to show that they can be used. And yeah, let us know how you feel. Thanks very much, James. Let us know how you’re feeling about the chat as it’s going on.

(06:02):

So, okay, let’s get started with the first question. So today’s talk is all about creating mixed-basket experiences to keep up with buyer expectations. Increasingly, we’re seeing a growing number of millennial and Gen Z buyers in the B2B space and B2C buyers continue to look for predominantly online, or at least hybrid, shopping journeys. I wanted to start by asking you about what you might expect from a mixed-basket experience and why enterprise retailers might need these.

Tanya Child (06:34):

Yeah, it’s a really interesting… It’s a challenging space to be in actually, because we know that, what I call, traditional retail e-commerce, if there is such a thing already, the out-of-the-box functionality is very much focused on retail products online, on a shop, Amazon style shopping, go through a checkout. That’s all good. When it comes to wanting to try and cross-sell retail products with other products. In the work that I’ve been doing that could look like tickets to come to an exhibition, or an event, or something, or you want to cross-sell and turn your retail shoppers into members, or sign them up to subscriptions. There’s no true out-of-the-box functionality for that mixed-basket concept. So it means that those journeys have got to be heavy customized, and that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work technically, but it’s also a lot of work for a business to get to grips with as well.

(07:25):

If you have different business areas, you have a retail team or a fundraising team, for example in the not-for-profit space, then you’ve got different factors that you need to accommodate for. And then ultimately what you’re trying to do is build a seamless end-to-end purchase journey in customer experience for people as you move them around on their journey. Where some of the projects that I’ve been working on with the cultural sector, it’s the starting point is perhaps a customer experience where you buy something from the online shop, but if you wanted to become a member, you’d have to go to a different website and complete a separate transaction with a separate checkout. And that’s not a very nice customer experience. And then from a business point of view, you can’t easily do your cross sells because they’re on different platforms and they’re in different journeys. So that’s what we mean by mixed basket. I haven’t really thought about it beyond nonprofit organizations and the world that I’m in at the moment, but I’m sure there are other examples of how you might want to sign someone up to something and make regular payments, for example-

Sinead Hammond (08:31):

[inaudible 00:08:33].

Tanya Child (08:32):

… rather than just buying something from an online shop. So, yeah, it’s all about building the nice seamless customer experience and enabling true cross-sell capabilities that drive conversion revenue, and also that give you a more accurate picture of what your customers are buying. So if you’ve got customers who are on these end-to-end purchase journeys that you’re steering… Maybe not steering, let’s say guiding them through, that gives you a whole different set of data that you might not have had before because you would’ve had data on different platforms and different systems. Now you can piece it all together, feed it into your CRM and get a nice complete single view of customer. Yeah, I’d be interested to know if anyone is out there working on mixed-basket scenarios outside of our visitor attractions sector, because I think the principles can be applied to anything.

Sinead Hammond (09:26):

[inaudible 00:09:27].

Tanya Child (09:27):

So yeah, it’s about thinking about tackling out-of-the-box functionality and functionality that you want that doesn’t exist, and how do you build that, make that happen.

Sinead Hammond (09:37):

Yeah, absolutely. I think definitely in the B2B space, particularly in B2B commerce where traditionally there might have been a different way of creating revenue, perhaps different channels used, there’s definitely a big thing to be said about mixed-basket functionality and the way you’ve been talking about it. I know we’ve had a few discussions off this particular audio event about the different parts of channel revenue, different web places you could get that from, in terms of customers, and bringing that all together. So there’s that one seamless experience and I can think of a lot [inaudible 00:10:16] applications for that both across B2B and B2C space. And I do think this is the direction in which e-commerce is actually going, which is super exciting. Yes, so I guess in terms of technology, how can brands adopt this out-of-box functionality to fit their needs?

Tanya Child (10:35):

Well, the first thing, as I say, you can’t adopt it easily. You have to be brave and you have to be all in with this kind of thing, from what I can see. If there is a solution out there that delivers this, we’d love to know what that is. But yeah, you’re really trying to take your platform and try and do the minimum amount of customization, for obvious reasons, so that you’re not dependent too much on customized code and things like that. But yeah, helping everyone around you to understand what that means as well of customized e-commerce versus out-of-the-box functionality, because sometimes people will approach it and say, “Well, we just built some additional purchase journeys, and that’s all fine. It’s easy to do.” It’s not easy to do, but the rewards are really, really high.

(11:26):

So you’ve just got to be prepared to rethink all of your customer journeys end to end, think about prioritizing… You have business priorities, don’t you, that are driving the order, which you might do your cross sells in. So it might be like a member first strategy, in which case everybody must be converted to become a member. But the retail team, the e-commerce team, they have their own goals and targets and they’re going to want to have their functionality enhanced. And you’ve really got to think carefully about what are the priorities aligned to your goals for your transformation project, but mostly, what’s right for the customer. I know everyone always thinks customer first, customer-centric. That’s really about doing the right thing for the customer. So these kinds of projects, these big transformation products, they’re an opportunity for a business to look at this and have a neutral voice come in, and help them to work out all the different priorities, and do it in a fair way that meets business goals and objectives and also delivers what the customer needs.

(12:33):

The kind of things that you need to think about when you’re thinking about technology, payment integration is a big thing. The two projects that I’ve been working on with here in the V&A, we’ve done integrated new payment service provider. So that needs to be factored into the purchase journeys, but that means that not only can you start building a mixed basket where you can have different products and take people on cross-sell and upsell journeys to get them to the right basket combination that they want. You could offer them different payment options as well. So you might want to do a split payment or something. So with a membership, you would, in the same purchase journey, enable someone to sign up to pay for their membership by direct debit and then pay for the rest of their basket with a card and PayPal. And that takes a lot of thinking through, in terms of journey planning and things like that.

(13:27):

But with that comes integrations, which can be quite complex, don’t underestimate those. And also thinking about data flow as well, about how your data’s coming in from different places and ultimately you want it to go into your CRM and to have it spit out nice customer insights at the end, so you can prove your conversion. That also needs to be considered, these all new things that don’t necessarily come out of the box. And then marketing consent as you’re going through. So there are different points and opportunities in the journey where you would want to capture consent and enable people to select preferences and things. And they all have to be thought through in the right way, the right times in the journey. So it’s not something to be scared of, it’s just don’t underestimate the effort to do it. But as I said before, it’s hugely, it’s like the holy grail if you can achieve this.

Sinead Hammond (14:20):

Definitely, and even the points that you’ve mentioned just there, obviously that does sound like there’s a lot of different steps to think about. Before [inaudible 00:14:28] to you, before, I’d never really thought about all these processes that go into this kind of e-commerce journey, but you just assume a lot with e-commerce.

Tanya Child (14:39):

Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (14:39):

Oh, well, you just set up a basket and go, right?

Tanya Child (14:43):

Yeah, yeah.

Sinead Hammond (14:43):

And it’s just not how [inaudible 00:14:44]-

Tanya Child (14:45):

Or sometimes people will look at it and say, “Well, it’s just another set of products.” It is another set of products, but with a membership for example, you might have five products, static products, that are membership products that don’t change very often, in which case they have got to be set up on your e-commerce platform and they do need to work in that way, but you don’t have a product catalog. So then you’ve got to build a separate e-commerce purchase journey and an e-commerce landing page. And also the big thing is thinking about the journeys and thinking about… Because you have two places when you’re building these journeys, take membership for an example, all of your pre-sales, selling the proposition of membership, would all happen on your main website. And then when you are ready to buy and ready to click through to the purchase journey, then you would be taken to the e-commerce platform.

(15:36):

As far as a user’s concerned, it’s the same website, shouldn’t be any different, but then you start on your purchase journey. And that’s complicated because with things like membership, you need to capture additional information from users, you need to capture their address because you’re going to send them a membership welcome pack, you need to capture direct debit details and things like that. And then at the end of the journey as well, you want to be able to hand them off smoothly, once you get past the order confirmation page, where you’re going to take them next on their journey. So yeah, it’s not just add some products to your e-commerce product catalog. There’s all the journey piece to think about as well around that.

Sinead Hammond (16:16):

Yeah, absolutely. And actually speaking about that kind of post-purchase process, once you have [inaudible 00:16:24] off, can you then use that information to then inform other parts of the business? What’s the next step [inaudible 00:16:34]?

Tanya Child (16:34):

Yeah. Yeah, so the ultimate is to have everything flowing nicely into a CRM system. That’s what we’re working on with Kew at the moment, is to get data coming in from online and offline, commercial engagement with users and visitors and donors and… Yeah, so you’ve got customer data coming in through back-office processes because, think about physical retail or thinking about if you’re visiting somewhere to go for an experience, you may have bought your ticket online, and then you go to an exhibition, and you have your ticket scanned when you go into a museum or something, and then that feeds into the CRM, and then after the visit you get a post-visit email campaign to maybe convert to become a member, and then you go back onto the website. And all that journey where the user is going online, offline, you want to be able to capture all those touch points, and more importantly, you want to be able to hand users off to the next place in their journey.

(17:40):

Sometimes there can be dead ends for users, you think, “Okay, well…” And what I find as well a lot in these organizations that are doing this mixed-basket thing, it does help to bring the business areas out of silos. So if you think that you may have a team that’s working on a membership journey and then a separate team that’s working on a ticketing purchase journey, these transformation projects really bring those teams together and say, “Okay, yes, we’re responsible for that part of the journey, but what happens? Where do we hand the user over to next? How do we make that a seamless handover as well?” So it really needs to bring… The whole business needs to come together and think, “Customer first.” It really forces you to think, “Customer first, what’s right for their journey?”

Sinead Hammond (18:26):

[inaudible 00:18:27]. Absolutely, yeah.

Tanya Child (18:29):

It’s fascinating stuff actually.

Sinead Hammond (18:30):

Yeah, I can imagine. And I can imagine there’s all sorts of data that comes out, in terms of customer behavior, that you can then use to identify, okay, well, what other creative experiences can we then make for our customers in order to improve it even more? I think because you’re talking about this start to finish and then post checkout, you’re covering the whole journey there. It’s really [inaudible 00:18:58].

Tanya Child (18:58):

Yeah. Yeah, and then in an ideal world, you’ve got all of your… Because you have analytics for purchase behavior on the site, right? We have Google Analytics, we have Enterprise Platform have their own analytics. What’s the nice thing about doing this all together in a single basket or feeding into the CRM is that you can analyze behavior and trends beyond just onsite behavior, so that you can really get to that golden nugget of what are people likely to do next? And you can start profiling and segmenting in a really well-informed, insightful way that you couldn’t do before.

Sinead Hammond (19:37):

Yeah. Every time I talk to you, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this [inaudible 00:19:40] so much fun. I would love to get under the hood of what you guys do.” Can you tell me any case studies, any specific… You’ve touched on some specific experiences from Kew at the moment with you implementing the CRM for example, but do you have any case studies about maybe what a previous basket or a previous experience with a site had looked like, and maybe the transformation you’ve got to now?

Tanya Child (20:07):

Yeah, so the three examples that really, in the mixed-basket world that I’ve been in, it started off with Tates. Tates were the first, I think, I don’t want to misquote here, but Tate built the mixed-basket customer experience, which enabled people to, in a single transaction, buy something from the online shop, buy a ticket, also add a membership to their basket, make a donation, opt in to gift aid and check out all of that in a single transaction, paying for their membership by direct debit and then paying for the rest of their order on a card. That is the ultimate mixed basket, and it’s not going to be… That might be a bit edge case because, well, for various reasons, there are so many different rabbit holes you can go down with this one.

Sinead Hammond (20:54):

[inaudible 00:20:54].

Tanya Child (20:54):

But in the true cents of a mixed basket, that’s what it looked like. So then we did the same, replicated that for V&A. The nice thing about this sector is that for everyone’s very collaborative and happy to share ideas and share learnings with each other. So it’s a very open sector to be in, in that respect. So then we did the same thing with the V&A.

(21:19):

The other things that we do in building this is the my account area. So building in the ability to, obviously the standard at what I would call out-the-box functionality where you can see your personal details, and your payment details, and your purchase history. And then what we built in, what Tate V&A built in, and what we’re doing with Kew as well, is then building in recognizing or validating yourself as a member and then pulling that data from the CRM, checks that you’re a member and then shows your member information in my account area. And then six weeks before your membership is due to expire, a banner pops up and prompts you to renew your membership. So there are opportunities for improving renewal conversion within my account area.

Sinead Hammond (22:07):

[inaudible 00:22:09].

Tanya Child (22:09):

The other thing that you can start building it out as well is you’re opting into gift aid. Quite a common thing in this sector, but we’re building functionality so that you could opt in and out to gift aid. So you can opt into gift aid through your purchase journey, but also you can manage that within my account area as well. So if you wanted to opt out at any point, you can do that as well. Marketing preferences and consent, and then there is scope for the future to build in… I know a lot of brands talk about having gated content and how do you house that, where do you put that? That could be what the expansion of the my account area could be. You then start having content that’s available to members that if you’re not a member you can’t see it kind of thing. So I think those my account areas solve the problem of having a single place to sign into-

Sinead Hammond (22:59):

[inaudible 00:23:00].

Tanya Child (23:00):

… where [inaudible 00:23:01] everything associated with your account and your experience. And then obviously you can continue to cross-sell in there as well.

Sinead Hammond (23:08):

And we’re so used to that as well now. Part of the main changing by our expectations at the moment is we’re so used to doing everything from one single place. We get our phone or our laptop and we want to do it all in one. We don’t have the patience or time, we’re [inaudible 00:23:30] privileged to be able to say we want it all in one thing. So I am thinking about this, obviously your experience here comes from those visitor attractions and that sort of side of things, but also I’m thinking about subscription memberships from e-commerce brands, [inaudible 00:23:45] that and being able to access exclusive offers, exclusive content, all of those sort of things. Because e-commerce has long gone just to purchase a basket, a payment process, and you’re through. There’s so much more to it and there’s so much more that you can do as a brand with that, with your [inaudible 00:24:02] to be able to encourage long-term brand loyalty. So this is really valuable for-

Tanya Child (24:09):

Yeah, it is.

Sinead Hammond (24:10):

… e-commerce brands listening or traditional e-commerce brands listening about how you can expand that relationship that you’ve got with those customers to keep that loyalty going longer term.

Tanya Child (24:20):

[inaudible 00:24:21].

Sinead Hammond (24:21):

So, really valuable.

Tanya Child (24:23):

Yeah, and personally as a user as well, I think knowing what’s possible, why can’t we have a place to do everything? I know budget has a lot to do with it, but it’s possible. It’s doable and a lot of people are doing it. So, yeah.

Sinead Hammond (24:39):

Yeah, definitely. So we’ve talked a little bit about just we’re touching on changes here, we’re touching on slight [inaudible 00:24:46] a few people I’ve spoken to in e-commerce in the past have said, “We want the innovation, we want to be new, we want to try all these new things, but we just can’t get the sign off.”

Tanya Child (24:58):

Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (24:58):

And I think one of the [inaudible 00:25:00] of your role as well, in terms of transformation delivery lead, is actually helping the business to change, I guess, it’s way of approaching things in order to then enable these experiences to happen for customers. But obviously as you’ve said, it’s not just a simple basket process. There’s lots and lots of things to think about. So how do you think you can prepare your C-suite to then move forward with digital changes, such as the ones you’ve been talking about so far?

Tanya Child (25:30):

Yeah. Yeah, there’s quite a lot that you can do actually. First of all, think of it as technology-enabled business transformation. So don’t think of it as a, well, we’ll build this, and it’s an IT project, and we’ll swoop in, and build you a shiny new e-commerce site and off you go. Sometimes you’ve got to take the business along with you and it’s got to be a business-owned solution as well. I see that successful… And I’m still learning this, I’m learning a lot from the current program team I’m with at Kew, about how to do these well and how you can de-risk things as well.

(26:11):

Businesses feel more comfortable and are more successful, I think, if you bring them along and they’re part of the team. That means involving stakeholders and SMEs from the beginning. First off, these projects will start with a business case and it will start very high level. Ultimately, you want to be able to deliver the optimum product for the business. So it really needs to be designed and owned by the business. They know, more than anyone, about your users, your products, the pain points, get them along right at the beginning. As I said, the business teams become part of the delivery team. So one project team, and I think delivery teams that come in from the outside are not part of BAU teams, should really be there to facilitate and guide the business through the changing, through the project. It makes for a much smoother delivery as well, and it [inaudible 00:27:04] you go live as well if everybody’s prepared. And be clear on your goals and scope.

(27:09):

Involve the business in validation early on. I know sometimes I’ve seen requirements be captured with light touch consultation with SMEs and stakeholders. You can save yourself a whole load of trouble if you involve them heavily in the beginning of setting the requirements. That removes the chatter that you get when you’re trying to get into delivery, and you’ve got scope questions that are coming, in and scope creep, and requirements that have been missed. That’s the most important thing in delivery, is getting a handle on that, and getting a clear scope, and stick to that scope, and make sure everyone’s comfortable as you go into delivery.

(27:48):

Think about your platform. So are you on the right platform to support a mixed basket? Ask yourself that. So you need to be on an enterprise platform to do this because of the customization. Do you have AI capabilities that can jive cross-sells? So once you’ve built these nice mixed baskets and you have the ability to cross-sell between journeys, have you got machine learning capabilities to be able to take over that once you’ve gone live, and serve those cross-sells, and really get that working hard? Have you got a CRO strategy ready to put in place? I think, build your foundation first would be my advice. Have a CRO strategy in mind, but start by measuring before you build your mixed basket or do your transfer. It doesn’t even have to be a mixed basket, but your significant e-commerce project, don’t get carried away with wanting to measure, and improve, and optimize… Or, sorry, optimize too quickly.

(28:47):

Measure before you relaunch something. Make sure you capture your jumping off data. Let some time settle for whatever it is that you’re relaunching to capture that data so you can measure the uplift of the project and the return on investment of the project. Then start chipping away at your CRO and start improving all of your metrics and your KPIs, but make sure that you have a CRO foundation in place. Make sure that you… And this can be connected with all of your business analysts and process mapping that you do at the beginning of the project, mapping customer journeys and user journeys. Then you can take all that work that’s been done, as a result of the project, and overly conversion KPIs throughout those different parts of the journeys. That helps you to get a good start on that. And then what’s the business case?

(29:37):

What does your business case look like? I think you’ll always need more money than you think and you’ll need more time than you think, if you’re doing something this complex, and it’s a good idea to have a benefits realization case model built against your business case. It helps you to get it signed off because once you get these things right, the return is brilliant. You can switch it on and off, can’t you, because it’s the digital world? But a benefits realization model will really help with your business case to show what return you think you’re going to be able to get by this investment, because you want to be asking for support across the business, and I’ll touch on that.

(30:20):

We spoke very briefly about end-to-end journeys. So be clear on where your pre-sale journey starts and the handover points into the purchase journey onto the e-commerce platform. Make sure that it’s seamless, make sure it makes sense to the user and then make sure that you know where you’re going to take them afterwards at the end of the journey so that they don’t end up at a dead end. And then operationally, what does it mean for your BAU teams? With these projects of this size, you can’t expect the BAU team to manage and deliver a project alongside BAU. And what I was saying about getting SME and stakeholder ownership and involvement, you really need to have some of your BAU team seconded to the project if your budget will stretch to it, backfill those resources for a little while, but have them owning the product. It’s great for their own personal development and professional development. It’s great to be involved in these transformation projects, but it also means that you have a fighting chance of being able to keep up with the pace that project delivery demands.

(31:25):

Yeah, critical to the success. And then think about what handover to BAU looks like, what business processes need to change, which teams now need access to the platform? And there are some big business questions to answer as well and business decisions to be made ahead of going live when you’re doing something like this. When you have different product areas, different business areas, who owns the customer experience? Who owns the data? Who’s responsible for the platform? Who’s representing the customer themselves versus what the business goals are for each of those business departments? So you might want to think about having a customer experience team, or if you can’t stretch your budget for a team, then have a dedicated working group. That’s a really quick and easy way to get to it, to make sure that someone is representing the customer across these end-to-end journeys, and can work through the noise of prioritation from different business areas, and actually build what’s right for the customer, I think. But yeah, there’s lots of new processes, and roles, and responsibilities that need to be defined when you’re doing something like this.

Sinead Hammond (32:33):

Absolutely. Just in that time [inaudible 00:32:37] there’s a lot to do. And I thought-

Tanya Child (32:38):

[inaudible 00:32:39].

Sinead Hammond (32:39):

… before we were saying not to be intimidated by the idea of doing this because the returns are so massive [inaudible 00:32:47].

Tanya Child (32:47):

Yeah. Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (32:48):

And I think you were saying before about the V&A adopting a mixed-basket experience, and having this, and [inaudible 00:32:54] other businesses that are in this particular field doing similar things now. So it is something that’s worth investing time into, but it’s not a side project, like you said there at the beginning.

Tanya Child (33:08):

No.

Sinead Hammond (33:08):

[inaudible 00:33:09] some IT projects and I think sometimes projects do get lost, and you get scope creep, and you end up five years down the line still with the out-of-the-box solution, in some cases, because you’ve not necessarily had this dedication. So I think there are really important points to separate from BAU and then how to bring it back into BAU is really useful there.

Tanya Child (33:31):

Yeah, and I’m thinking as well about how this is all big. This is big stuff and not everybody can get to this big stuff easily. There are other ways you could get to it incrementally. You could do smaller projects, you could be a bit more creative about thinking about how to eliminate one system at a time or something, and just incrementally move these journeys into your single basket. It doesn’t have to be all big bang stuff.

Sinead Hammond (34:00):

Mm-hmm, definitely. Yeah, I think we talk about that a lot actually, just on agency side because [inaudible 00:34:07] huge projects and it’s also easier to kind of convince the budget [inaudible 00:34:14]-

Tanya Child (34:16):

Yeah. Yeah, put something out there, prove that it works and go and ask for more money.

Sinead Hammond (34:20):

[inaudible 00:34:20]. Absolutely. I like that idea, that way of doing it. So just as a reminder for everybody as well, we will be taking questions at the end for anybody who wants to ask anything. I know Tanya has covered a lot here and it’s something quite unique, I think, and different from some of the other Shoppernomics events we’ve had, just in the sense that it involves, yeah, a wide range of… It would help a wide range of companies and businesses to think slightly differently, I think. So if you do have any questions, do let us know. Don’t be shy, get on stage or you can send something in the chat on the event as well if you don’t want to. So just one or two more questions here for you Tanya. So can you just talk a little bit about some of the best practice recommendations that you would have if a company wanted to start thinking about multi-basket [inaudible 00:35:14] brand.

Tanya Child (35:15):

Yeah. Yeah, sure. It’s kind of summing up really everything that I’ve covered. So making sure your business case is aligned to a benefits realization model, makes it easier for your business case to be signed off. Not that that’s ever easy, I know. And it gives you a, I always call it, a north star to focus on during the project to stay within scope. So if you end up having conversations with stakeholders or the business where an idea for a new feature has come up, you have a laser focus on what your scope is. You’re building your foundation and then there’s room for optimization and feature enhancements when you get into your BAU backlog. Yeah, do make sure that you give your BAU teams the time and space to work alongside this, because otherwise it’s going to be a rush delivery, it’s going to be a project that, to quote, is done to the business because there’s a team that’s come in and they’ve just put this technology in place, and built some nice journeys, and there you go, now work out what you need to do it.

(36:19):

Don’t underestimate the time and the effort that it takes. Customization. Again, I don’t want to scare everybody, but these are difficult projects to do, but you can get through it. You just have to methodically go through the processes, but don’t underestimate time, effort, cost and think about your integrations, and your third parties, and how much you’re going to need from them. And also one thing that’s come up with this mixed-basket build is a thing called middleware, and that’s, it sits between your e-commerce platform and your CRM system, or your ERP systems, because actually in the world of museums, and galleries, and people like that, with buying different products on the front end for different business areas that will need to then go through to your ERP system and go to different fulfillment houses. So your e-comm retail products will go out to your shipping warehouse, membership fulfillment will go out to your membership team who then send a welcome pack. If you’ve got tickets in the mix there, then the tickets might be sent electronically by email.

(37:35):

So your fulfillment has to go out that, so you need this middle layer to process all of that data and send it off to the right place. And ultimately, all the data’s then got to come back into the CRM. The other thing I think, don’t neglect, is finance reconciliation. So again, if you might have different business entities that are involved here, and you’ve got income coming in through one system, and you’ve got to then reconcile that and recognize it against the different entities. Yeah, and finance often gets neglected and they should be involved in discovery right at the beginning because you need to be able to follow money through, put it in the right bank account and so on. And get your end-to-end customer journeys and business processes mapped early, and if you can do some of that before you go into discovery, that will be really great because it really helps with requirements.

(38:31):

It also becomes your linchpin for your requirements, as I say, your design, it informs your build, and your testing, and your test scripts. Those are really important things and if you can get those done early on, then you can hang everything else off your business processes, which is great. And prepare for BAU, I think, where the V&A and Kew have been successful is they’re investing in business change, they’re investing in the teams to make sure that everyone is ready to receive it, they’re investing in making sure everyone’s trained. That is what makes for a successful project, I would say. And then the business is ready to transform the business, improve conversion, and generate more income.

Sinead Hammond (39:16):

Wonderful. Thank you. Listening through to you talking through it sounds… There’s a lot of advice that you can give that you’ve gained over, I think, implementing systems like this. Bit of out there question or [inaudible 00:39:35], but can you tell us any kind of mistakes that have maybe been made? We love the real stories here, so [inaudible 00:39:41] been made along these journeys that you say, “Oh my goodness, I would never do that again, I’d never advise. If I was in this role again, we would not go down this road.” Is there anything that you can think of?

Tanya Child (39:54):

Yeah, I do have one that comes to mind and it’s relating to SEO. Make sure that you have your SEO all in line before you go live so you don’t see an overnight drop-off in traffic.

Sinead Hammond (40:04):

[inaudible 00:40:06].

Tanya Child (40:06):

That is a big one, a big one. It’s fixable, but you’ve got to rebuild your SEO collateral and that is painful, and unnecessary as well. So yeah, make sure that that is included in any work you’re doing here.

Sinead Hammond (40:24):

Yeah.

Tanya Child (40:26):

Yeah, and I think the biggest, I keep repeating myself, I think because the biggest learning for me going through this is the involvement of the business, is having them as part of the team. Have them design it, make it their product so that actually, when you get to the end of project, you’re not necessarily handing over, you’re more stepping away because the business is already embedded in the system, and the transformation, and they know how to run with it. So you’re just rolling off basically.

Sinead Hammond (40:57):

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that seems to be the same with a lot of digital projects generally, because it’s what we were talking about before, having these little, I guess, IT projects or having things. If you’ve not got the whole business involved, because it is a huge change, especially if it’s an-

Tanya Child (41:12):

Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (41:13):

… [inaudible 00:41:13] company, you’re looking at your entire revenue shift, it is [inaudible 00:41:18] different. So it’s really key to have that there. And I think that the thing you said there about SEO, I think there’s a probably few marketing people on this call-

Tanya Child (41:25):

Oh, yeah.

Sinead Hammond (41:28):

… who’ve experienced that where you have this brand new shiny platform-

Tanya Child (41:32):

I know.

Sinead Hammond (41:34):

… [inaudible 00:41:34] and you think, “Great,” and then you’re like, “Oh my god, no one’s able to see it.”

Tanya Child (41:38):

Where has everyone gone? Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (41:41):

[inaudible 00:41:41]. What have we done? Yeah, so-

Tanya Child (41:43):

[inaudible 00:41:43].

Sinead Hammond (41:44):

… [inaudible 00:41:43] are things to consider. Would you recommend any specific sort of team members that you may want if you were going through a digital transformation project like this?

Tanya Child (41:57):

Yeah, that’s what you need. At a minimum, you need a business analyst, depending on if you’re doing a big CRM project, that is where you have more backend process to define a map, then you might want more than one business analyst, but you definitely need a business analyst from the off. You need a project manager or a delivery lead. You need a solution architect because you’re doing lots of system changes and integration changes. It’s a good idea as well that within your business you have some kind of enterprise architecture capabilities to know the direction that you’re wanting to go in. That can sometimes stall projects a little bit from a solution architecture point of view, if you haven’t got the big picture and you can’t brief and make the right business and system decisions based on what direction you’re going in. So be very clear on that.

(42:51):

Sometimes if you’re doing a big CRM transformation, you’ll want a data migration lead in there as well, to help with migration of customer data. The e-commerce projects, not so much, the only real big data to migrate might be product data for a product catalog, but that’s a bit more straightforward. You’re not moving customer data across. What else? Test leads, test managers, you need a lot of people to test. Try and get your business SMEs to own some of the testing as well, and this is another reason why you would want your BAU users to be involved, ideally full-time in a project like that, in a big CRM change transformation, because they’ll need to be supporting writing user stories and acceptance criteria, and test scripts, and scenarios for UAT. And they are the ones that you really want them to try and break the system as well. But you need someone to lead and drive that because tracking thousands and thousands of different test scripts, or hundreds of test scripts, needs some monitoring and you need to keep on top of that to hit your deadline.

(44:00):

You might want to consider having a training lead come in, but again, for… I think with the e-commerce platforms, most of it is out of the box. Well, no, I say that. You’ve got your out-of-the-box training that comes from your enterprise platform providers. There are less people using an e-commerce system in the business than there would be a CRM system. So a CRM project might look heavier on the training resource side than an e-commerce project might. Who else have we got in there? Business change, if you need someone to help move business change through preparing the business. If you’re a large organization or a large business, and you’ve got lots of change to business process, you would have your core delivery team who’ve been defining and reshaping those processes. But in preparation for go live to BAU, you’d need to spread that training and that knowledge to your wider teams, who may not have had access to, or visibility of, the project up until now.

(45:01):

So maybe think about trying to get a business change community going, where you keep them updated on the progress of the project or the program across the complete life cycle to start to warm them up, and then they become champions for the project, and they spread the word. And the more people you can give visibility to, the better for when it comes to BAU.

Sinead Hammond (45:23):

It’s a big team. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:45:26]-

Tanya Child (45:27):

Yeah. Yeah, and I don’t want to frighten people who have smaller companies and smaller budgets, but I just think of every scenario you can think of and-

Sinead Hammond (45:36):

[inaudible 00:45:36].

Tanya Child (45:36):

… just make sure you’re prepared for it.

Sinead Hammond (45:38):

Yeah, I think that seems to be the biggest takeaway from this. We’re talking about doing things in little bits and being prepared. It’s an amazing thing to have in the end, but just thinking about it step [inaudible 00:45:51], really cool.

Tanya Child (45:51):

[inaudible 00:45:52].

Sinead Hammond (45:52):

So we’re going to the questions portion. So whilst the people listening are thinking of any questions they may have, we did get a pre-submitted question from somebody who was on the call earlier, but unfortunately had to drop off. So the question was, there’s a lot of email communication, pre, post-sale from transaction and delivery notifications to abandoned cart scenarios, et cetera. How have you seen these implemented when products could be fulfilled from different sources in a mixed-basket situation?

Tanya Child (46:28):

I haven’t seen it, but I haven’t seen it be done because that’s, in the delivery world that I’m in, I get to the point of handing it off. But I think that the most efficient and seamless way to do it is if you’ve got all your data coming into your CRM and you’ve got your automated marketing and triggered marketing connected up to those purchase journeys in the best way that you possibly can.

Sinead Hammond (46:55):

Yeah.

Tanya Child (46:55):

That’s got to be… So bringing it out of those silos, out of those individuals. Here’s a campaign in isolation on this side, and then on the other side, someone’s running a similar campaign for the same people. Yeah, so on a small scale, it’s really thinking clearly about map out your core purchase journeys and the different variables, and then make sure that you’re not overloaded, that you are then sending communications at the right time to the right people. It’s really basic stuff, isn’t it? It’s really obvious stuff, but maybe just do a bit of an audit on your campaign schedule and mapped against your journeys, rather than looking at, okay, this is a retail shopper, this is a ticket purchaser. They’re probably the same person. So yeah, try and map your journeys, and streamline your comms a little bit, and experiment.

Sinead Hammond (47:46):

Yeah, having everything in that single source of truth database as well.

Tanya Child (47:50):

Yeah.

Sinead Hammond (47:52):

So key for all experiences, for all brands, for all [inaudible 00:47:55].

Tanya Child (47:55):

Yeah. [inaudible 00:47:56].

Sinead Hammond (47:55):

It’s so important [inaudible 00:47:58] especially as we were talking about before, there is such a wide range of places where a person can be in touch with your brand now. So really understanding those things and being able to have a central data point is usually step one.

Tanya Child (48:12):

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Sinead Hammond (48:14):

[inaudible 00:48:15].

Tanya Child (48:15):

Well, I’d almost say step one is understanding your user journeys and customer journeys, and then, yeah, yeah, all this stuff.

Sinead Hammond (48:21):

[inaudible 00:48:21]. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s why we bring you on because you’re the [inaudible 00:48:28]. No, it’s great. It’s really great to hear from you and obviously, especially with your experience in these huge brands that everybody in the UK knows of, and abroad actually as well. So it’s brilliant [inaudible 00:48:40] had you here. Does anyone in the audience have any questions? This is usually the bit where everyone… Hi [inaudible 00:48:47]-

Tanya Child (48:48):

I’m used to silence. [inaudible 00:48:50] to be honest. Everyone’s just completely perplexed as like [inaudible 00:48:54].

Sinead Hammond (48:55):

No, Tanya, I think you’ve just answered everyone’s questions so beautifully. [inaudible 00:49:00] go away with tons of information.

Tanya Child (49:01):

Mm-hmm.

Sinead Hammond (49:02):

No, this has been really, really helpful. Thank you so, so much for spending the time to come on and talk.

Tanya Child (49:06):

No problem.

Sinead Hammond (49:08):

It’s a really important piece, I think, to the e-commerce transformation. As e-commerce goes forward, we know we are looking at very different ways of putting together lots of parts of the business and lots of revenue streams to be able to make seamless experiences. So it’s been really nice to have you here talking through it.

Tanya Child (49:30):

No problem. Thank you for inviting me.

Sinead Hammond (49:34):

No problem. So I just want to say thank you very much to the audience for tuning in and, whether you came in at the beginning, or whether you’ve dropped in and out throughout the audio event, then it’s great to have you here. Thank you very much for tuning in. Just a reminder, the next Shoppernomics event will be with Deann Evans, who is the MD of Shopify, and she’ll be discussing the Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers from 2023 and what we can learn from this for future peak and holiday seasons. So make sure you’re there, tune in for that on the 29th of November. I believe this is the first time these figures are being discussed in a e-commerce community, which is super exciting. So we got the exclusive there, which is great. So make sure you’re on there to find out more about the Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers that have just passed and how you can apply these to your business going forward.

(50:23):

As always, the transcript for this particular audio event and the audio will be available in the coming days, at shoppernomics.co.uk. So just another massive thank you to you, Tanya, for getting on and talking to us about this. Thanks to our listeners and we will see you again in a couple of weeks.

Tanya Child (50:41):

Thank you.

Sinead Hammond (50:42):

Thanks, bye.

Tanya Child (50:42):

Bye.