Whilst many of today's sessions had multichannel in their title all but one actually had actual multichannel content. Even that session only skimmed the surface. In any case, here's a rundown of the sessions I attended.
First up, "Customer-generated content goes multichannel" with Bazaarvoice and Screwfix. This was moderately interesting, but given that I'd spoken to Bazaarvoice recently nothing particularly new surfaced. It was interesting to hear about the Screwfix experience. They are beginning to use online review content in their offline channels, though didn't indicate whether this was having a positive affect on their trade desk or catalogue sales. More interestingly, their email campaign to incentivize reviews threw up a surprise. Where the subject did not include their win £100 promo they saw 2% more reviews! In terms of uplift, Screwfix have seen a 34% uplift in sales of products with a 2 star or above rating and an overall lift of 32% in sales for products with ratings versus those with no rating. This backs up a statement in a later session featuring Bazaarvoice, "with the proliferation of advertising, reviews are a key differentiator in driving sales".
The next session, "Multichannel: the road to true retail success", didn't start off too confidently. The presenter, Chris Barling of Actinic, telling us he was the John McCain of eCommerce and that many in the room probably knew more about multichannel than he did! It was tempting to walk at that moment, but didn't want to dent his confidence further. Chris' opening slides presented a few top-level facts from recent IBM and MORI surveys on multichannel behaviours and it would have been nice to dig a bit deeper here, but as I know there's only so much you can get from a web trawl before you have to pay good money or let the consultants in to get hold of the detail! Sorry Chris, but it was obvious. The rest of the session was a Chris taking us through a selection of Actinic's SME retailers and how their only using 1 or 2 channels to do business... not a great advert I'm afraid.
The final seminar I attended was the BT Expedite/Mosaic/Wickes presentation on Multichannel integration strategies. As always, John Bovill of Mosaic spoke confidently and heaped praise on the BT Fresca platform. A few good points were how Mosaic recognised that the customer interacts with the brand, not recognising channel. The key was to ensure consistency at every touchpoint. Mosaic's biggest challenge was the cultural move to become customer centric.
The rest of the session was a quick talk from Bazaarvoice (again!) and the customer experience manager from Wickes telling us how they're doing more or less the same as Screwfix. Hat off to Justin Crandall of Bazaarvoice for getting so much airtime for his company!
Again though this was hardly multichannel or the issues we face implementing multi or cross channel retailing.
Before leaving I did get a chance to chat with the guys from Mercado, who indicated they're currently being acquired by Omniture. This could be interesting to see how they compliment each other to improve upon their closed loop analytics and merchandising. I also wonder what will happen with the relationships between Mercado and the other Web Analytics vendors such as Coremetrics?
All in all a disappointing day, I was hoping to see wider coverage of multichannel topics and advice, to name a few
- multichannel fulfilment and inventory mgmt
- how single view of customer enables multichannel
- organizational barriers to cross channel retailing
Whilst I appreciated it was an eCommerce Expo, why tempt the audience with titles if the content isn't there!
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