Going for growth: Instantprint and SharkNinja head for IRX 2020
Stuart Barker, Portfolio Director at IRX, shares insight from UK retailers on how they are managing their digital expansion.
The UK's e-commerce market is expected to continue to expand, with a forecast growth rate from 2019 to 2023 of 5.9%. As a result businesses are rapidly building their offering and expanding distribution in order to meet demand. Many of these are set to share their stories at the conference within IRX (InternetRetailing Expo).
Customer and employee engagement
Growth has to be carefully handled within the business as Alice Tomkinson, Head of Customer Experience at Instantprint, will explain in her IRX conference session ‘Culture, change and agility: providing excellent customer experience in a fast growing digital business’.
She has been driving the brand’s high focus on customer experience since October 2018, when the company undertook a massive transformation to a digital customer service operation. The team grew to 30 people in just 12 months so change management – helping the team to adapt and remain engaged – was top of Tomkinson’s to-do list.
Tomkinson warns: “If businesses grow quickly, the customer experience can crumble, and we worked hard to ensure that this wasn’t the case.”
One of the ways in which the business changed was that the artwork team became customer-facing. This was in direct response to customer feedback – they wanted a direct line to the team working on their order. The increase in customer-focused staff resulted in the introduction of ‘customer experience champions’ across the business, to ensure everyone had an awareness of customer requirements.
The business growth was managed carefully to ensure staff remained engaged and motivated. A recent employee satisfaction survey shows an increase, with staff feeling confident that their opinions are heard and directly inform the business.
Tomkinson says: “It may be no surprise to learn that we’ve seen a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. We have developed our customer satisfaction monitoring and now measure customer effort too. Both the customer and our team rate how much effort a customer has had to put in in order to place an order, find further info or achieve a resolution. Broadly speaking, the less effort the customer puts in, the more happy they are.”
Blending local with global
Growth is about offering the consumer choice. That’s according to Philip Knight, VP E-commerce, at SharkNinja, who manufacture and sell cleaning and kitchen appliances. Knight, who will discuss ‘Preparing for growth - a 360, global and local view of digital expansion’ at his IRX conference session, explains: “Our growth plans serve to give the customer even more product choice – it’s here than innovation is key so we can keep designing products to meet consumers’ evolving needs.”
SharkNinja has big plans for global growth. It is launching into Germany this year as well as France, Italy and Spain. The company is also expanding its distributor model to enable expansion into the Nordics. This necessitates a fine balance between the global with the local –achieving global standards through local deployment. Local outreach is tailored to reflect the different needs of each country and also the different stages of development.
Knight says: “It’s down to each county manage to determine how the global standards are deployed in the country through tailored marketing messages, USPs, even taking into account the different competitors.”
This tailoring informs which products are promoted and how they are promoted. Knight explains: “For example, cylinder vacuums are popular in Germany whereas in the UK, upright vacuum cleaners are popular. The different look of people’s homes from one country to another, the different types of food they eat, how the food is prepared etc needs to be reflected across relevant marketing material.”
What does remain consistent, however, are the key messages for each of SharkNinja’s products – and for the brand as a whole. Knight comments: “When it comes to marketing, we use a variety of different channels depending on the country and demographic. However, it’s important for us to maintain consistency. We have a key set of messages that remain the same across all channels to ensure that our brand and values are instantly recognisable.”
IRX (InternetRetailing Expo) will take place 1st and 2nd April at the NEC, Birmingham. It’s free to register at internetretailingexpo.com
