OMNI-CHANNEL PART 2: A Frictionless Customer Experience

By Kaylyn Bredon, Sr Mgr, Interactive Creative/UX

In Part 1 of this series, we focused on how the marketing realm has evolved and the importance of creating a seamless customer experience. Continuing this discussion, we’ll now focus on how consumers expect retailers to provide more contextually relevant, personalized information that is carefully tuned to a frequency that suits each individual's liking.

Amazing opportunities present themselves when retailers thoroughly align consumer data with an approach that has context, personalization and a manageable frequency. In doing so, they can provide customers with solutions that make everyday tasks easier while making the shopping experience more enjoyable.

Multiple tactics and some example technologies are listed below serving as areas of opportunity. In no way is it a one-size-fits-all prescription — retailers should identify consumer needs and implement accordingly.

OMNI-CHANNEL PART 1: Considering the Customer Experience

  

By Kaylyn Bredon, Sr Mgr, Interactive Creative/UX

One consistent theme throughout every session I attended at SXSW 2013 was the need to create and maintain an “omni-channel” experience. This is a new challenge being introduced to many retailers- often times leaving them with unclear direction on just where to start due to the siloed structure that many businesses and marketing teams have grown to be.

As an interactive designer/ux specialist at a full-service advertising agency, the idea of overcoming the obstacles of working with siloed teams is not foreign to me. After all, that’s why many companies hire agencies like SBC Advertising to help them. We have the advantage of being separated from their business, often avoiding the internal and political bureaucracies, while at the same time having direct access to the decision makers that have the ability to make decisions and get the job done.

In the past, working in silos has allowed us to react quickly and create standalone efforts that were supported by isolated databases and provided separate analytics (i.e. microsites). However, these standalone workarounds no longer serve as viable options.

Today, it is imperative that all channels work together, and in return they provide valuable insight into the numbers, showing what’s working and what’s not. With that being said, data is, and will continue to be, at the very base of creating a successful omni-channel experience, making the relationship between Marketing and IT more important than ever.

Mobile as the Status Quo and Responsive Web Design

By Jerrold Smith, Senior Front End Developer

Imagine you’re waiting for a bus and you remember a website that interested you from a recent radio ad. Taking advantage of your temporary free time, you pull out your trusty smartphone and diligently enter the web address into your favorite mobile browser and...disappointment. The website isn’t optimized for mobile and is difficult to navigate via the constant zooming and panning necessary to find the content you’re looking for.

The situation above can be repeated by changing a few elements but always arriving at an all too familiar outcome. Maybe you are watching TV while casually using your smartphone, as 86% of us do, say stats. A commercial directs you to a mobile website that helpfully states “This content is not available on our mobile site. Please visit the desktop website on your computer.” Or maybe the website was built solely in Adobe Flash, which isn’t available on mobile devices, or inexplicably the website simply does not load at all, leaving the mobile consumer with a seemingly empty page. Is this what you want your brand experience to be on mobile?

Playing to Where the Puck is Going to Be – Staying Ahead of Changing Consumers

By Adam Deardurff, Senior Interactive Strategist

When I signed up to go to SXSW, I knew I was walking into something bigger, more forward thinking than I ever had participated in before. My expectations were high – to have my mind blown with new ways of thinking, new devices, meeting people that thought like me, eating great food and even catching a little live music.

After wading through the thousands of people, thinking past the Korean BBQ, blues and beer, I knew that one question would be asked when I return home.

“What is the one thing that you would take away from the experience?”

A mind-numbing question but inevitable.

To me, it is simply this: Brands are moving too slow and consumers aren’t slowing down.

Creating A Valuable User Experience

By Kaylyn Bredon, Senior Interactive Designer/UX Specialist

The UX shift

It used to say a lot about your brand if you had any sort of web presence. But now, the world is changing. Today’s web content is infinite—everyone has a website, a subsequent mobile version and there are more apps than we will ever know what to do with. With all these choices, people are flocking to places that provide the best user experience, whether it's to places that make them feel good or to brands that provide them value.

At the South by Southwest festival this year, conversation around the user experience was at the forefront of many discussions. That's because, in the ad world, the campaigns and tools that are resonating the most, are all about the user. They meet the most basic needs, such as functionality working all the way up to delightfully surprising the user with unpretentious amusement.

For retailers, embracing the shift to making the user experience central (or the UX Shift) will result in: increased brand loyalty, repeat transactions, and deeper consumer insight that feeds future brand strategies.

Geo-targeting Consumers: The Potential And The Pitfalls

By Joe Sano, Director, Interactive Services
Marketers and retailers have been grappling with how to best capitalize on “organic” foot traffic near their stores for decades. “The heavy lifting is done! All I need to do is get them in the door!”

Enter geo-targeting (and its other contextually-aware brethren).

The term “geo-targeting” has been around a while, and it’s been used fairly primitively for a number of years. And, by primitive, I mean clunky and/or irrelevant.

But, recent advances in mobile tech have presented some pretty compelling, sophisticated and (surprisingly) user-friendly options that marketers should take notice of. Coincidentally, this is also the reason they were the focus of a LOT of conversation at this year’s South by Southwest.

The importance of adaptation: Evolving agencies

By Steve Agganis, VP Interactive

SXSW is a great place to learn about the existing and upcoming opportunities in the technology/interactive space.  In that regard, the conference is an absolute must and I believe continues to be highly relevant for all marketers. Technology will present itself, apps will emerge and Austin will continue to be weird.

You may have read or heard that this was the year that SXSW “jumped the shark” and was no longer “cool.”

I heard this myself while I was there. And, after a few days, I started to believe that the reason many vets likely felt it wasn’t as “cool” was because marketers have changed the questions they’re asking when presented with new technology.

Re-thinking the in-store experience

By David Smith, Senior Interactive Strategist

In recent months there has been a lot of chatter about the future of brick and mortar retailers. Price-slashing and cost-cutting by online-only retailers, primarily Amazon, has created a shopping environment that encourages consumers to “shop” in store, but buy online.

At SXSW this year, an extensive discussion revolved around this very topic. Here’s our take on the discussion.

Make shopping an experience again

Will most traditional retailers ever be able to compete with the low-overhead, high-volume model of the Amazons of the world? Probably not. But, should they even try?

Four different perspectives from the 2012 SXSW festival

For a week each year, Austin, Texas becomes the center of the tech universe as it plays host to an industry festival that has become unrivaled in terms of size and scope – South by Southwest.

This year’s SXSW was about ‘why.’ Why would a user engage with my product? Why would this experience I’m building inspire someone to make a purchase? Why would a user come back and continue to engage with my brand?

SBC Advertising sent four team members from our interactive team to this year’s festival: Steve Agganis, VP, Interactive Services; Kaylyn Bredon, Senior Interactive Designer, UX Specialist; Joe Sano, Director, Interactive Services; and David Smith, Senior Interactive Strategist.