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SMG retail engagement leader on taking care of the customer
Brian Dennis, senior vice president, retail customer engagement, for Service Management Group, has seen the transformation of physical retail stores from serving as a point of purchase to playing a far more important part in the overall customer experience.
December 10, 2019 by Judy Mottl — Editor, RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com
Brian Dennis is no newcomer to retail customer experience strategy, innovation and helping retailers better understand the customer to drive a more engaging and rewarding retail customer experience.
He has two decades-plus of experience, which includes helping Kohl's, Albertsons and Supervalu, and is excited about his newest role as senior vice president, retail customer engagement at Service Management Group. SMG provides customer, patient and employee experience strategy and insight to more than 500 brands.
Dennis' focus will be collaborating with major retailers to change the way they do business — using customer feedback to deliver actionable insights.
Given his vast and deep knowledge, Retail Customer Experience reached out to get his insight on what's gone on with CX, what's to come and what missteps retailers often take when driving the retail customer experience forward.
Q. Congrats on your new role. Can you share a little insight on your roles before joining SMG and how you initially got into the retail world?
A. My retail career began at the tender age of 6 when I started selling seed packets door-to-door in my neighborhood. I had a neighbor who one might compare to old man Marley in the "Home Alone" movie. I sold him a packet of seeds that did not grow and when he approached me on it, I instinctively just reached into my pocket and refunded his dime. Fast-forward to the next summer, the same man asked me how many packets of seeds I was selling. I told him I just got my kit and have 100 packs. Then he said something that stuck with me: "I'll take them all because I like the way you do business, kid."
So, I learned very early on the power that is afforded when you take care of your customers. As I expanded my retail journey into the food/drug arena and then into apparel, I consistently witnessed that the most successful store leaders in sales and associate retention were also the most likely to have equally impressive service scores.
My role was to guide the business on customer experience by defining a path of success both organizationally and individually to deliver a leading service model. I am a huge advocate for the usage of insights—but insights that you can tie to ROI, even long-term, always gained the greatest traction.
Q. Given your decades of experience in retail CX what has been the most dynamic and compelling innovation in the past five or 10 years even?
A. There are so many measurable innovations in the past five to 10 years such as incorporating data at every step of the buying journey, experiential retail, mobile payment and digital wallets, technology, personalization, and the list goes on. It's difficult to single out one, but perhaps multi-channel becoming the new normal would stand out the most for me.
The physical retail stores have transitioned from just being a point of purchase to a far more important component of the overall strategy. What's fascinating is that multi-channel is now being overtaken by omnichannel, meaning, multi-channel is simply a set of choices that a customer has to purchase or research within the channel they choose.
These channels are often unintendedly pitted against one another. Omnichannel takes a much more customer-centric approach where the entire brand network is utilized to optimize the customer experience. Rather than managing the channels individually, it's synchronized to ensure the experience is channel-agnostic and seamless.
What's compelling are things that were considered innovative in the past five years are already being expanded upon. For example, just think about personalization where everyone is trying to better understand their customers and market to them. It used to be good if a retailer understood their customers' shopping habits, basket size, what they enjoyed most, and so on.
Today, personalization goes far deeper by more accurately offering items that complement their shopping choices and help guide how they choose their future purchases. As retailers agonize over how to drive footsteps into the store, it becomes more of what you do with that traffic that will become the differentiator.
Q. What do you see as one of the top challenges for retailers when it comes to enhancing the customer experience today?
A. There is no denying that increased labor rates, whether for competitive reasons or through state/local mandates, are forcing retailers to think differently about how they deliver on executing a customer strategy. It's challenging them to become much more productive on the sales floor by utilizing improved customer-facing technology, self- or no-assist checkouts, and finding ways to better engage their associates.
Why? Because it's consistently proven that those companies that rank high in terms of customer experience, have 50% higher employee engagement than the companies whose CX they outperform, and the turnover is far less.
The other challenge I would mention and have seen huge improvement on is the total view of the customer, organizationally. Specifically, aligning the entire team — from stores to the C-suite — on what the CX priorities are.
No more siloed budgets, technology spend, or competing agendas. Instead, there's an aligned approach that will allow retailers to spend their capital more wisely, deploy technology and upgrades faster, and consistently communicate in a way that's easy to understand at all levels of the business. When my team goes and speaks with retailers on how to improve customer insight strategy, often the meeting now includes marketing, IT, operations, insights and HR all in attendance. Go back several years and rarely did you see that group assembled together.
Q. What are some common missteps retailers often make when it comes to developing a strategy focused on CX?
A. I know I noted that a lot of retailers have made some great strides in this area, but I still think the most common misstep we come across is that CX strategies get siloed in just one area of the business. When we meet with prospective clients that have struggled to embed CX into their company culture, more often than not, it's because the CX program has become an operations project or a marketing initiative. What that really means for most people is that it's "someone else's job."
It sounds cliché, but it really is true that every single role touches the customer experience in some way or another, whether it's IT implementing the back-end technologies that keep the company website up and running or HR integrating service-related insights into employee training modules.
That's why it's mission-critical to engage every functional area of the business right from the outset when you're developing your CX strategy. Having a cross-department steering committee makes it so much easier to get that buy-in across the organization and sync up improvement efforts when opportunities arise.
Q. What is one of the most innovative and promising CX technologies in play or coming and why?
A. Artificial intelligence and augmented reality will continue to play a key role in reducing the gap between online and offline experiences. Retailers are now successfully beginning to embed online capabilities into the offline platform which is allowing the online customer experience to more realistically mirror physical interactions. You can virtually try on products anywhere you have a device and look at 3D products in your home without ever having to set foot in a store.
I came home recently to find my wife scanning our guest bedroom with her phone. Turns out, she was using the Wayfair app to see if the table she wanted to purchase would fit next to the chair and not block the window. She was able to virtually move the table around with a full view of the room and never once needed a tape measure.
Soon after, she used the Project Color app from Home Depot and was very quickly able to find the perfect shade she was looking for and confirmed that decision by sharing it on social to her friends who agreed it was the right choice. Now, armed with that knowledge, she was able to go to our local Home Depot and quickly get the paint she wanted, eliminating any of the usual hassles.
When it comes to AI, retailers are just at the starting line of really using it to enrich their insights as they capture more customer data. AI can quickly derive very meaningful conclusions from massive amounts of data, which is why it's proving to be such an exciting technology in the data-driven CX space.
Just as an example, SMG's data science team has used AI to enhance our text analytics capabilities by building models — trained by millions and millions of customer comments — that can detect high-impact, low-frequency events like food safety concerns and customer churn and then automatically trigger the appropriate actions in real time.
It's truly an exciting time to be working in CX, and one of my favorite parts of the job is seeing how brands use these innovations not just to improve their business operations but to do it in ways that directly benefit the customer.
About Judy Mottl
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