Confer With boss Serge Milbank talks industry recognition, key client wins and his favourite time of the year

We last interviewed Serge Milbank, CEO at Confer With, a 1:2:1 video commerce specialist, in November 2023. Since then, the company has emerged victorious at the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards and been recognised by Gartner as one of three cool vendors in digital commerce. RTIH now sits down with him again to run through a hugely eventful past ten months.

RTIH: Tell us about Confer With

SM: Confer With is a live video shopping platform that transforms how online retailers connect with their customers. We enable real-time, personalised consultations between shoppers and brand experts, a bit like a shoppable Facetime call, plugged into the customer journey on your website.

I think with the recognition we are beginning to receive, it’s fair to say Confer With is at the forefront of connected video commerce. We empower brands to deliver deeper, more engaging, communication driven digital interactions.

For retailers looking to enhance customer satisfaction and leverage the latest in e-commerce innovation, we offer a proven solution that significantly boosts online retail performance.

RTIH: Which retailers and brands are you working with?

SM: We work with retailers and brands that sell high consideration products in e-commerce.

This plays out primarily into consumer electronics, furniture and homewares, sporting goods, beauty, premium and luxury fashion, plus the baby and nursery categories.

We are lucky enough to be working with retailers like John Lewis, Dunelm, Marks and Spencer, Hughes Electrical and Whitestores as well as brands like Samsung, Panasonic, Sage Appliances, L’Occitane and Oway.

RTIH: You were a big winner at the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards. What does industry recognition like that mean to you?

SM: We are retail tech through and through, with a big focus on omnichannel experiences.

So Retail Technology Innovation Hub is one of the primary reference points for us - are we being successful in our chosen field? What impact does industry think we are having?

The RTIH Innovation Awards were a fantastic night. We came away as the Overall Winner, plus we won most Innovative Retailer (Rest of the World) with L’Occitane Middle East.

We were a little gutted that we didn’t win for a client of ours, OWAY, because we thought they were one of the most innovative of our clients in 2023. They have reimagined the retail environment in such a way that new possibilities open up to retailers and e-commerce alike to create an amazing experience.

Recognition matters when you are disrupting the norm and working to show industry what new models look like and how they can benefit from it. So the RTIH Innovation Awards gave us a big step in the right direction.

RTIH: You have recently been recognised by Gartner as one of three cool vendors in digital commerce. Can you talk us through the process of gaining this recognition and again what does such recognition mean to you?

SM: About a year ago decided to invest time and effort into Industry analysts – given the core focus of Confer With is Enterprise retail, Gartner is a super important authority. They analyse the tech sector as a whole, so a really high benchmark for us.

Over the course of that year we have been briefing analysts on what we do, how we do it and how we fit into the wider scheme of things. Where do we fit? Live commerce is our primary sector (where we initially made the Market guide for Live Commerce).

Live commerce is also an emerging technology within digital commerce and we were mentioned in the Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce and eventually chosen as a Cool Vendor. So the process has been lengthy, but very much worth it.

To become a Cool Vendor, you need to demonstrate that you are solving problems in new and disruptive ways, taking advantage of intelligent technologies to scale and using those technologies to be more effective.

Confer With is ultimately an omnichannel solution that mashes up video and e-commerce to replicate as close as reasonably possible the experience within a store. A great analogy is that it’s live a shoppable Facetime call.

We have been painting a clearly different view of the market in live commerce – that one to one live commerce was the way to go. Specifically a shoppable solution. In the uptake, there have been issues with adoption - staffing capacity, staff location, customer experience barriers and quite simply the financial situation of both e-commerce and retail.

It’s also been a tough market in recent years. E-commerce has had a slump post-Covid and retail has been undergoing structural change for years now.

I think Gartner’s view was that we removed the location and capacity limitations of rolling this out in physical stores, our brand ambassador programme and the new revenue potential for retailers by partnering with brands using Confer With Connect.

Now, that’s great, because the work we have been putting into Confer With shows the sector that we are delivering tangible growth for our clients and giving them customer experience differentiators.

RTIH: Other than Gartner’s recognition, what have been the highlights of the first eight months of this year?

SM: We’ve had a big year. Client wins such as Samsung, Panasonic, Sage Appliances, John Lewis, Whitestores have kept us very busy. This was on the back of winning M&S last year.

Throughout this year, there has been a big focus on optimising customer engagement. We are now getting roughly between double and triple the customer engagement we were getting a year ago.

So much work has gone into understanding how customers engage with video, how they engage with audio and how they engage with chat. We know in detail what that looks like now, what real customer needs are served by each of those channels and how to optimise those for better customer experiences.  

Someone said to me the other day that we do “communication driven customer experiences”.

I really liked that, because it describes very well what we are optimising on and that when a customer chooses to communicate - that experience needs to meet their needs.

One of the biggest things for the year has been the soft launch of Confer With Connect - with both John Lewis and Hughes Electrical. This allows brands to interact with customers via a retailer in a way that supports both retailer outcomes for customer satisfaction and brand outcomes for sell through and intelligence.

RTIH: What’s your take on the state of the omnichannel retail sector in 2024 and the biggest challenges and opportunities?

SM: I think omnichannel has been dominated by fulfilment and payments. I see that as the plumbing of omnichannel. It has to be done.

Everyone needs to do it well, because it’s what a customer expects at a minimum. There are big issues to solve in there, but there is a big challenge there as well. Shopping is leisure for so many people - so we need to make it enjoyable!

I personally don’t think there has been a big enough focus on the omnichannel customer experience. Getting some joy into the experience. 

There has been a big focus on retail customer experience for years. The e-commerce customer experience is behaving the same way - focussing on its own channel.

There needs to be more of a focus on the omnichannel customer experience to win the customer today.

When we first started, a retail expert called Ian Shepherd said to me that he thought we were a bridge between retail and e-commerce - and that it was omnichannel. That really resonated with us at the time. We realised that we had a shopping experience that could truly cut between retail and e-commerce.

Now what is interesting, is that the contact centre is part of it too. The Gartner analysts seemed interested in that we were deploying in visual contact centres and distributed contact centres (retail staff working from home).

So the opportunity for retail is to focus on the experience in coming years. People that get that right differentiate and attract more and better customers.

RTIH: What can we expect to see from Confer With during the rest of 2024 and into 2025?

SM: I mentioned earlier that we have soft launched Confer With Connect, which links brands and retailers in the video call experience. That will be a big focus for us. I think within the next two years – every retailer that matters will be working in this way - it makes total sense.

The work we have been doing means we have a unique proposition that is very much needed in the market. We have a bit of work to do to show it to the market and what it can do, so that will keep us busy I think.

Now as for 2024 peak trading, it’s our favourite time of year. We really enjoy this period. It will also be interesting - in the current environment, retailers and brands have to work harder to win the customer and we feel like we have a solution there that is uniquely placed to support those endeavours.

2024 RTIH INNOVATION AWARDS

Video commerce is a key focus area for the sixth edition of the RTIH Innovation Awards, which is now open for entries.

The awards, sponsored by CADS, 3D Cloud, Retail Technology Show 2025, and Business France, celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.

It’s free to enter and you can do so across multiple categories.

Key 2024 dates

Friday, 25th October: Award entry deadline 

Tuesday, 29th October: 2024 shortlist revealed

30th October-6th November: Judging days

Thursday, 21st November: Winners announced at the 2024 RTIH Innovation Awards ceremony, to be held at RIBA’s 66 Portland Place HQ in Central London.