Locol media mikepun wcto2017 v08

Editor's Notes

1. Image a place where everything is from Amazon, including the food in your fridge.
2. Amazon could kill 400 of the 1,200 malls in the United States
3. Everyone know what Alexa is? The Amazon robot speaker. In a store, it might one day direct you to the right aisle and answer product questions. The future of Advertising is AI
4. One might think that the service industry might not be impacted
5. A showroom that is unmanned, now, in Quebec
6. So digital is allowing in-store customers to shop smarter - comparing your products with others right from their phone. It’s a lot easier to browse on the internet, and buy right there. This is great for us as consumers. It gives us more information, more choices. What about the small local store. How do they compete with their smaller budgets? How can they compete with the Amazons and the Walmarts, with their million dollar budget for their eCommerce sites? They could be heading towards extinction. Business need to evolve or die. It’s just a matter of if they know it now.
7. Technology choices are squeezing the local business. Store owners are faced with a multitude of technologies he is supposed to invest in.. All of it requires work. If he doesn’t invest, his competitors do. So how about a different vision. How about if we have technology that is scaled and configured to empower the local business. How about a vision where the guy/girl in the corner store having tools that will free him up to take care of his customers better, in his individual way, creating a culture of individualism and quality How about a vision where those of us in the technology and WP community help them do that.
8. So how can we help the local store? Firstly, his problem is our problem, and there are four basic ways a local store can be that individual can try to stand out. Competing on pricing is a losing proposition against the big guys Better customer service… and this you should be able to do, with being small and personable. You can provide different and interesting incentives Maybe more fun? You can leverage communities Let’s talk about what each of these might mean. Our challenge is that this is a big subject, with a lot of choices, issues, and details… so for today I am just going to pick a few low hanging fruits to talk about
9. Today, Customer Service in many local store still mean a manual, store people to customer kind of thing. They remember who you are, and what you like. Every year around now, I have a ton of clothes to be dry cleaned. Hats, outer coats, scarves, suits and jackets. Because of my allergies, each batch is customized. Even though only happens once a year, my dry cleaner remembers my exact requirements, and every year he remembers exactly what to do with each piece. Last couple of years, he added a bit of technology. It takes a couple of weeks to get all that done, so now he sends me a email when all the stuff is ready. It’s not exactly a CRM implementation, but it’s a good start.
10. With CASL on one side and Amazon squeezing, working a customer database is pretty well necessary, so that you have a base to work on We found a lot of businesses have a mailing list that they might use, but that is separate from their customer base. Let’s take a poll… how many of you, in your business, or your customer’s business.. Do you think you are CASL compliant. Are you tracking permissions.. How many are working a customer database, how many are working a campaign list that may or may not be customers By the way, customer service comes in many different form.. We have members of the medical professional using our tools to help patients understand their specialty better, providing knowledge to patients. Same with physiotherapists. Of course we also have chefs wanting to do the same.
11. For many stores, incentives mean specials, coupons, discounts. These can work to a certain extent, especially if they are structured to keep recurring business. As a longer term strategy though, and against the power of the big guns, we need put some effort here. There is SEO, SEM, etc… Challenge though is sustainable effort against a strategy that make sense. Most activities seem to be ad hoc and based on “gut” rather than data or strategy. We don’t see a lot of focus on measuring, on verifying that ideas worked, and refinement base on data
12. What we need are tools and methodologies that mind the fundamentals, but simple, light and maintainable. Our team has done experimental work with large multi nations on gamification. As a customer engagement tool, it can help provide knowledge to the customer. It can also guild the customer to walk with your workflow. For one client, it was as simple as co locating incentives with a perpetual customer satisfaction survey.. The survey gets more visibility, it gets done, and customers feel that they have worked for the incentive
13. One of the biggest challenge for the local guy is how to bridge digital to physical. He usually have a web site, then what? He is restricted by CASL as to email marketing. Most of his regular customers just come to his store, and they are not likely to see any new stuff that might be on the web site. So what value is that? So this is where stuff like a good digital display in the store may help. Hopefully something that will help the store get their value across to anyone who walks in, new or old customer. If you put up responsive design into the web site, then might as well do things to attract your customers to the web site while they are in your store.
14. An idea that we champion is that of a virtual kiosk. Creating and maintaining a physical kiosk is often beyond the means of a local store owner. However, with a Large screen / Small screen (small screen being the customer’s phone) approach, the store owner has a “virtual kiosk” ready for use! This “thinking” is a good way to create that connection between the digital and the physical. You can use this approach to do light gamification…. Surveys, puzzles, trivial, customer participation type games Example: Sara’s customer satisfaction survey + loyalty program
15. This fight is going to affect a lot of people. The scale of what is happening is large and fast. Normally scale works against the local business owner. There are predators with LARGE scale coming in their neighborhood, going into customers’ home. The challenge here is to flip that around and use scale to help him/her. One way is to leverage communities. The store should be able to find communities that’s right for it. Whether it’s working with the BIA, or the mall, or neighbors. And of course WordPress is a community itself. So here is a direct case of a small company leveraging communities… us, our small company, and WP. We have a rocking tech team. We have extensive experience developing complex systems. Last two years, we developed our own gamification…. It was fun, but it was painfully a large amount of work. Early this year, we developed an integration with WP in our platform, and we started assembling “games” from what’s available on WP. Turnaround of new features became phenomenally quick Communities can also provide scale that things like deep learning need I find a lot of innovation in the WordPress community. You can find tools to help with almost anything.. For your business type, for what you are trying to do. The WordPress community has done one of the best job of scaling down the cost and implementation of technologies so that even a small business can use some of the most complex technologies around. We have to keep doing that. We need plugins that leverage AI or deep learning scaled down to the local store. I would urge all local businesses to continue building ties with their communities.. Most are already doing that. It’s now more urgent than ever. You should look towards your BIA and talk about cross marketing within your community
16. So this is a big subject.. And think I have only covered a bunch of easy stuff. Low hanging fruits. Having a different way to look at digital assets.. We need to be doing a lot more. We are going to be experimenting with more of these in three malls in the Toronto area and Brampton area early next year. Get yourselves and your customers ready… Look at how you can improve their customer service.. With tools inside and outside the store. Bridge between the digital world and the physical world Help your customers build community bridges.. And leverage your WordPress community in this fight.