Tag Archive for: company development

[Intern Insight] Imagining the Future: How Retail Industry Customization Might Evolve

The retail industry is by no means ‘new’ in the general economic landscape. Ever since humans became conscious, developed opposable thumbs and learned that they could use them to create tradable objects, retail started to ‘boom’. It evolved from the Neanderthal trading venison with Homo Sapiens for sturdier clubs, to the beautiful ball gowns tailored specifically for each lady in the glamourous court of France’s Louis XIV. What was the competitive advantage? Easy answer: customization.
Jumping a few centuries forward, the Industrial Revolution enabled us to create more, better and faster. Amidst all these benefits we celebrated the ‘death’ of customization. With the birth of mass production facilitated by assembly lines, we witnessed a levelling of social classes economically as well as socially. After all, we still define ourselves by the objects we own.

Now, customization is back with a vengeance. As we say in Romania – bear with me, the translation isn’t all that easy –  ‘the wheel could even be square but it would still turn at least once more’! We tried so hard to revive this practice of personalization when yet another revolution came to the rescue. This time The Technological one! Digitalization, mobile development, 3D printing… These things have radically changed the retail environment, and have gone a far way in helping to deliver customized products and services.
Will we repeat our previous mistakes?
The Industrial Revolution gave us two alternatives: ‘more and faster’ or ‘customized and slower’. The Technological Revolution transforms these alternatives into one cohesive package: ‘more, faster and customized’. After all, today’s Homo Sapiens is far more complex, and, some might argue, a lot greedier… So, say in 100 years, how will this package evolve?
To answer this question, let’s take a look at three major trends affecting the retail landscape:

  • The rise of the online shopping and its supremacy over brick-and-mortar stores, that gave birth to the omnichannel practice (Lunka, 2015).
  • The shift in the general mindset of the customer towards ‘caring’ for the environment (Nielsen, 2014).
  • The appetite for the luxurious and exclusivist experience (Deloitte, 2015).

So, on top of it being ‘more, faster and customized’, we now also want it to be ‘online, sustainable and luxurious’. We’re not picky at all!

Well, do not fear! I have a solution!

Let’s do an imagination exercise together. It’s December 2116. We wake up, we wash our face, we check the news – which, of course, is displayed on our ‘smart’ mirror (Internet of Things, and all that). We want to dress for work. Maybe a Louis Vuitton skirt, a Chanel blouse, some Gucci shoes, a Burberry scarf…top of my head! Oh, and I forgot, we belong to the middle class.

Most importantly, all these items must be customized for us! I mean, maybe we don’t like our neck so we need to have a specific collar shape for the blouse. We are neither too tall or too short, so the skirt length cannot be universal. The soles of our feet are quite flat so we need orthopaedic features integrated into our Gucci’s.
Now, imagine that we have this robot assistant and all we need to do is to click on the preferred clothing brand and model. This robot measures our body in that specific moment – I don’t know, maybe you gained some weight from one day to another. Then it sends this information to the 3D printer, which uses recycling textile material to print out the clothes, in the desired shape, pattern and colour. Then we go to work, look fabulous and when we come back we can recycle our clothes in order to create new ones the next morning. It’s like shopping every day!

Also read this article: Retail Customer Service: Reality of Retail Industry

So, what are we going to pay for, you might be wondering? For the specific design for that specific brand. After all everything is shifting towards intellectual property! Why not retail? It won’t be long and we will see the ‘Spring/Summer Ready-to-wear Collection’ package on Amazon-like platforms. And if we want the real, live experience? We can go to the flagship store. It would be like visiting the Louvre. Glamorous, educational and spectacular in the sense – ‘Was it really this way clothes were made in the day?”

This is just a picture of the future.

Turning back to the present, the truth is, we are witnessing the rebirth of customization. It has a new shape, a new feel, but it’s there and it will always be waiting for us.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure. 

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Using Mystery Shopping to Keep Up with Technology

As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, in the business world, keeping up with technology can be challenging. It is also vital. There’s no escaping the future, and apparently the future is all about technology. The question now is: how can businesses stay up to date with the ever-changing landscape technology creates for the customer service experience? One suggestion? By using mystery shopping.

Between 2012 and 2015, I owned and ran a small cafe in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne, Australia. Quaint little town, homey little cafe. The majority of customers were members of the community. It was all about foot-traffic and locals, not so much about tourist travel or city-folk visiting the Hills. That sort of clientele was reserved for the more ‘touristy’ towns further into the mountains, like Belgrave or Kallista.

In the first year, I had a pretty good handle on our customers. We knew what they liked, what they didn’t like, and how best to deliver it to them. By the middle of year two, however, the demographic was changing, the older generation that had made up my customer-base was moving away and being replaced by young families buying their first home. I was lucky, I caught on pretty quick, but two other cafes in my street didn’t, and they were gone by 2013. Tragic, because they were great little hideaways. Our survival had been simple, and I still put it down to one thing: the introduction of free wifi.

Nowadays, it seems like such an obvious thing: don’t all cafes have wifi? But we were the first in our community. While the original demographic didn’t see the need for it, the new one did. They appreciated that we understood – and answered – their need to be connected. This was our survival tactic, a simple adaptation to the change in our customers’ technological needs.

We were lucky, having only a tiny staff and not much of a set-in-stone strategy; the cafe wasn’t a big enough business to be difficult to change. Other businesses – hospitality or otherwise! – don’t have that luxury. Staying ahead of the times, or at the very least keeping up with them, isn’t as easy for everyone as it might be for a small family-owned cafe.

Which brings me back to the question: how can businesses keep up with the constant technological development?

Customers do it. Especially the Millennial customer with his/her latest smartphone and/or tablet. For the most part, customers are keeping abreast of technological changes quite easily, but that makes sense, they’re only one person. A business can’t just upgrade its systems at the drop of a hat, that sort of stuff costs money. Any business worth its salt will likely look at these changes and go ‘fine, we respect that we need to make some changes, but we can’t change everything, what are the priorities?’. This is a practical approach to a very complicated problem.

For businesses, using mystery shopping to keep regular tabs on their customer demographics is an option to stay on top of this. Mystery shoppers are ‘real’ people, so to speak, and they can judge our customer service and experience on a variety of things, including whether or not we are meeting their technological requirements. By using mystery shopping, businesses gain insights into what the ever-changing customer demographic expects to find in terms of technological ‘upkeep’.

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[Intern Insights] Digitolution: The impact of digitalization on the future

That the Internet, digitisation and digitalisation have changed the way people live and do business is old news. Those changes won’t stop.

To clarify, the differences between digitalisation and digitisation: digitisation is the process of converting information into a digital format, whilst digitalisation is the way many areas of social life are restructured around digital communication and media.

The big question mark giving business leaders headaches and sleepless nights is how these changes will evolve. As things progress, the impact on businesses and society and the implications for the planet change too.

We know that the future is uncertain. This is why businesses always need to stay on the edge. Walking the path between stasis and forward momentum allows businesses to avoid complacency.

Digitalisation makes sticking to a business strategy much harder. In the blink of an eye, all success can vanish because of a new digital innovation that seems to have miraculously popped up overnight. Digitalisation innovates entire systems, not only a product or service.

In an article for Forbes, Rich Karlgaard compares digital technology to a Death Star. At first, it pulls a company into its orbit and wipes out the old and well-established business model. Its next step is to force the business to adapt to the new digital environment laws of the game. Not just once, but over and over again. These “orbits” are unpredictable and can change societies in ways we can’t even imagine. Digitalisation and technology affect all aspects of our daily lives and are not only related to one area. They range from nanotechnology to 3D printing and all the interplay between. The combination of all these makes digitalisation an unstoppable force.

Most businesses are aware of the constant need to adapt to digitalisation and its changes but few realise how little time they have to do so.

The pace of digitalization is increasing exponentially. However, due to the – mostly useful, but in this case, not so much – inherent survival instinct, people think in linear growth.

To highlight the exponential growth and speed of those changes, just think back 10 years and see how much the world has changed.

10 years ago, I bought my first very low-resolution, colour mobile phone with a side-kick alphabetic keyboard. I was sad that I could no longer play the game Snake, which I had had on my previous phone. The media predicted what the first iPhone would look like. I imagined a kind of an iPod phone with a big round wheel to navigate; it took me a while to understand the concept of an application.

To buy this phone, I had to travel pretty far. I also entered several different stores to get different advice on which phone is the best and where to get it for the best price. Today, comparing and ordering can be done conveniently online – with a phone.

Terms such as Social Media, Facebook, YouTube and so on – the list is endless – were fairly new back then. Nobody could have imagined how those inventions changed the way people today interact, socialise, communicate, and work with another.

Every part of our lives today is digitalised. Business operations, products, and even customers are digital. Nevertheless, business leaders often still don’t think in “digital terms”. They struggle with the loss of customer relationships and the need to engage with their stakeholders on a digital level.

What Charles Darwin said in the 19th Century about evolution is also what businesses need to keep it mind today.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Today, the size of a business doesn’t matter, it’s agility and the capability to re-invent themselves that gives companies a sustainable advantage to compete in a digitalised world.Digitolution: Digital evolution is such a strong force, constantly reshaping the world with an incredible speed – affecting everybody’s daily life – that it deserves to be a word on its own.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Alexa V. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Alexa’s primary focus is in digital marketing.

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[Intern Insight] eLearning with Videos: It’s really happening

You know, I am quite new to this term called ‘blog’. I’ve heard of it sure, but never actually wrote one. When I Googled: “how to write a blog” several things popped up, like ‘start with a topic and working title’. Ha, I already forgot that step. This is going well. I’ll be honest with you, I have no clue exactly what I’m doing right now. I studied hospitality management, and here I am, creating videos for an eLearning app for the frontline employees in the retail industry! Yeah, I hear you think: ‘How did she end up doing that?” Yes, good question. I often ask it myself actually.

The funny thing is: it’s super interesting.

It’s like I turned from a hospitality student into a screenwriter and director without any experience. Yeah, ‘just do it’ (as Nike says). It doesn’t matter if you like or if you’ve done it before; no, it’s more diving into the deep end and knowing you can swim. And hey, that is okay! I mean, this is still an internship and it comes with the opportunity to learn new things.

And let me tell you:  I am learning new things.

Not sure if there is a future for me as the next ‘Steven Spielberg’ but I guess you never know where life takes you.

That’s the funny thing about life, it can go either way. But what do I know about life? I am only 21, this is hopefully not even on a quarter yet of what is still to come.

But let’s get serious here.

 

What’s the big deal about learning with videos?

There are many benefits in using videos in educational activities. There even have been multiple studies about this. This is not a big shocker, since there are basically studies about everything, but still. Here are some highlights:

Shepard and Cooper (1982) and Mayer and Gallini (1990) connected visual clues, memory processes, and knowledge retention. Later, Allam (2006) noticed that combining sound and imagery together to discuss a certain topic generating deeper engagement and insights. [Source]

Fascinating right? Over 20 years ago, people recognized the connection between video and learning and yet it still took years for eLearning to actually become a trend, and then a norm. Why did it take so long? But that’s a topic for another time perhaps.

The thing is, this ‘learning with videos’ thing really is happening. There are more than 1 billion active users on YouTube, every minute nearly 400 hours worth of video content is being uploaded to this platform alone. Statistics even show that per mobile session the average time spent on YouTube is 40 minutes. The learning industry has no choice but to adapt to this method of learning via videos. Enter eLearning!

So what are the benefits of using videos for learning?

First of all, videos help keep people engaged with the subject. I mean, speaking as a student, it is much more fun to watch a video than to simply turn a page in a book. Also, videos are visual, and so very demonstration-friendly. For example, explaining a tricky subject is easier with a video than with a written explanation. Try writing down the instructions to how to tie your shoelaces and tell me it’s not easier to watch a video about it instead! It also helps that videos capture attention quickly. Overall they improve the whole learning experience by inviting learners to think and analyze what they just saw, making knowledge easier to absorb and retain.

Here some more benefits:

Improved Comprehension

When you explain something in a classroom, people will nod to indicate their understanding. That means they’ve understood you completely right? Not necessarily! They may not retain the information when they leave the room, and maybe they just couldn’t be bothered to raise their hand to ask for clarification. Chances are when they get home, they may realize a gap between their retained knowledge and the homework they’ve got to do.

Increased Retention

Do you remember sitting in class with the teacher just going on and on about the same subject? And then when class finished you just went out and thought: “What did he just say?” That is an information overload. Our brains can only handle so much at a time. During such a long informative class, you do not have the time to process all the information and are likely to forget most of it.

Enter videos and eLearning. People can watch videos at their own pace, for starters. They can also choose when and where to watch them – at home for example. They can pause it and return to it later if they missed the key points. This way, they not only gain a better understanding but are better able to retain the information being thrown at them. Essentially, videos empower the learner to actually learn.

Concluding thoughts?

Well, if you really want to obtain a more meaningful, immersive and better learning experience for anything. You should definitely consider using videos to get there.

 

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Paula van Staalduinen. As part of our internship programs undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Paula’s primary project focuses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure.

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Change in Business: Resistance is Futile

Change. It’s a part of nature, allowing for life to evolve. In essence, change is responsible for our survival. Change is what allows us to adapt to new scenarios, overcome obstacles, and grow as individuals and as societies. And as companies. In the same way that nature forces us to change as a species, change is business is not only inevitable, it’s vital to the survival of the business.

Last week, I talked about the risks involved with company pillarization, a symptom of growth without change. The article discussed how a mature company runs the risk of doing what it’s always done, because that’s the way it’s always done it. Think about those businesses who refused to embrace the Internet because they believed it was a passing fad and would never take off.

This week’s topic is specifically about the concept of change in business, and we’re starting with a favorite source, Vusi Thembekwayo.

“Change is nothing new.”

Change in business is a direct result of the changes happening in the world. Society changes depending on the development of technology.

“Technology is any time you are able to introduce a new variable to the same set of circumstances and create an exponential different result.”

The direct result from society’s technological development is change: change of needs, change of circumstances. And, as society’s needs change, businesses have to change along with it in order to keep up. Building a business to weather the future requires that business to understand the changes being made in the world around it – technological and social. This is especially important for larger and more mature businesses who have ‘settled into’ a way of life.

 

What Thembekwayo is suggesting – and indeed saying outright – is that change is disruptive, but it isn’t anything we haven’t faced before. The difference being, of course, that the more humanity advances our knowledge, the faster changes are forced upon us. Take social media, for example, businesses strive to stay ahead of the growing technology – marketing departments are told that they ‘should really look into that new platform that’s coming out’. Apparently, it’s no longer good enough to just be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram – oh and Twitter, but that’s been ‘dying’ for a while now, according the experts.

A business isn’t an individual, who can take up Snapchat or Hyper (set to ‘explode’ in 2016 according to Forbes) on a whim and in the blink of an eye. The very nature of a business is that it makes choices a lot slower than a single person, no matter how motivated and enthusiastic the individuals powering that company. Change in business, like change in technology, is never perfect and often faces resistance.

And yet, change is inevitable because humanity is changing rapidly.

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