Pop Culture Tech Podcast 2.3: Shop Culture Tech

nothing heals a heavy heart better than a heavy shopping bag i'm blakely thomas aguilar and this is pop culture tech an original podcast brought to you by vmware [Music] do you remember the first thing you bought online i do it was a textbook and it blew my mind fast forward to today a mere 25 years later and there are two whole generations of human beings who couldn't comprehend the fact that you couldn't open an app and get something shipped right to your home in two days or less online shopping is now so common that grandview research says the e-commerce market value exceeded 10 trillion dollars in 2020 and over half of consumers use smartphones for shopping according to a recent statista report these exceptional numbers are due in large part to the crazy world we lived in in 2020 but before we jump into the present day shop culture tech experience let's take a step back and dive into just how quickly we went from buying only books online to what retailers now call omni channel shopping experiences to take us from the past to the present here's joe skarupa retail expert and editor at large for ris news oh it was definitely the consumers i mean amazon was certainly in the right place at the right time i mean other people were around too certainly ebay had a lot that was going well for them uh yahoo at the time had a lot that was going for them they were they were all making money in different ways and retailers basically thought hey you know i wanna uh you know shoppers are adopting this uh in you know large numbers and and and that's something we can't ignore but all they did was put up a website you know all they did was you know put up a product catalog i mean they had prices on it and and then and people were able to buy but then it turned out that they they didn't really have warehouses that could ship individual products and people were ordering from amazon and getting it in two to four days at that time and retailers would give them like two week delivery time frame and then it would be delayed it wouldn't even make that and so so then the customers became dissatisfied with how the standard retailers were operating and so retailers had to catch up and it took them quite a while they did it kicking and screaming in a lot of cases but shoppers demanded it so they got on board where were you know shoppers really drove the process and another thing i love about retail is retail is on the front lines of what people want they have no business unless they satisfy shoppers they have no business and if they aren't giving shoppers what they want so shoppers definitely wanted the ease of shopping from home that said they also realized that there was a lot of efficiency associated with shopping from home i i could search i could compare i could get uh prices and sizes and colors and and things that that i could never find uh inside a store but but then that became kind of a way that you know we we called it store rooming for a while yeah and uh uh you're show rooming for a while and then retails really you know showrooming is a great thing why don't we enable shoppers to come into our stores and if they can't find what they want let's give them the app or the the way to access it from a kiosk or or some sort of digital system to allow them to to actually look at things in the store find what they're looking for maybe they can't find their size maybe they can't find their color but then we give them the access to do it right there order it online or allow our associates to order in our line so that's that's the kind of blending of you know the physical retail with the digital retail that really works best for shoppers and retailers both is defined as an experience that integrates the current methods of shopping available to consumers such as online in a physical store or even by phone the key is that the experience is seamless and connected like the retailer knows your preferences past experiences and help it makes it easy regardless of where you actually buy shop or get the product and this is much much harder than it sounds a ton of tech innovation software big data machine learning goes into making these modern connected shopping experiences possible cloud has really been a transformative uh delivery mechanism for all of the systems that operate stores and keep them running efficiently and prior to the cloud so many of this was developed along the lines of uh you know you don't really hear this that much anymore but it was so big a few decades ago was erp systems and those erp systems were so proprietary and so customized that they could not scale to all of the omnichannel things we're talking about and they were really roadblocks and choke points and it was so hard to add on new things a simple thing like what was happening during the covet 19 epidemic was well let's set up curbside pickup do you know how many retailers had curbside pickup prior to covet 19 very few i mean probably less than 10 percent and all of a sudden given a few weeks notice they had to roll that out that's a very hard thing to do with proprietary systems built on the old server model main frame model erp model and so the cloud has been a lifesaver for retailers to standardize their systems to create micro services containers to be able to plug in plug out whatever they need whenever it's you know whenever the flexibility demands that they respond to consumer trends so the cloud has been a huge uh component of digital transformation and digital transformation itself has been a major trend it's not about technology for technology's sake it's for its technology to support all the things that consumers like and support your business you should never invest in technology if your company has no plans for growth one of the retailers absolutely killing it is dick's sporting goods and the retailer's success lies in its 73 year old legacy of customer obsession here's jason williams vp of athlete technology so we we consider all of our customers athletes in in some way or another they they have an aspiration to do sports whether they're playing themselves it's their kids playing in you know they're just doing as a leisure specific word or to stay in shape regardless they are our athletes and that's the way we treat them we want to view them so not only my title but a lot of the teams that we create under my portfolios that i support have athlete as part of that on the naming culture in that convention we call it uh being obsessed over the athlete that's what that's that's part of the roots of dick's sporting goods i've personally shopped at dick's pretty much my whole life we take family trips to the store or i order online and have everything from golf balls to boxing equipment delivered right to my door in other words i'm a huge fan of the company's omni channel experience we want to create that experience where that in-store um as well as online have that same omni-channel experience you know our e-commerce is an extension of our stores so we really see our stores as the hub of the the omni channel experience that we offer so um whether you're fulfilling from one of our stores where you buy online pick up and store or shipping from our stores because we have 800 uh forward points of distribution so we can get the hands of the product into our customers hands as soon as possible but we we see that as one holistic experience um when you when you when you see it externally and we want to create that interactive experience for our customers um because folks still want to come in and they want to feel and they want to see and they want to try on but we want to give them ability to either order online or order in the store and combine that experience it's something we're continually investing in um we made strides over the years to really understand who our customer is collect all the necessary data that we have across the online shopping experience the in-store behaviors um knowing what our customers buying trends are and what they're searching for online and and creating that scorecard loyalty program which was pretty significant in 2021 um in 2020 over the course of the year i think we we increased our loyalty um in our athletes we acquired i think was 8.5 million new athletes according to our 2020 uh earnings call so it's it's really understanding how we leverage that data and how we expose it um we obviously take uh consuming and ensuring that the data could be aggregated and used appropriately across our different organizations and portfolios and really it's it's it's driven around real-time personalized data like so many other companies across the world the pandemic had a significant impact on dick's sporting goods and its customer athletes we saw a significant spike in demand for sports like golf and tennis and in-home fitness we realized our customers wanted to remain active and healthy and they wanted to move and those were some of the activities they could do safely but we had to really figure out ways that we can provide that product to our customers in a in a safe way so we stayed focused on that from a merchandising perspective working with our suppliers and vendors to get that product into our stores um we found that the curbside service was extremely beneficial for that uh as customers could you know same day delivery options for for products that they that were in high demand since our teammates weren't focused on the foot traffic coming in the store we were able to fulfill those orders very quickly we saw a significant increase in bot disorders and online sales over the course of the year we often reference uh our curbside pickup or contactless curbside pickup process is one of the big de facto wins that we had during that time and we were able to deliver that service within 48 hours but if we hadn't made that investment you know within those years prior we would not have been able to do that um so you know making those mean meaningful investments in technology with the long long game in mind it's really changed our mindset and allow us to stay nimble and try new things and be resilient and be able to pivot and work on things that matter our customers that time nobody could have guessed what we went through this past year um but being flexible and nimble and having the ability to make those changes uh is is uh is extremely important the end result that we had to our customers we built um but it was based on a lot of services that we already had readily available with our our pick and pack process and the stores that we built for our teammates with the image real-time inventory services that were readily available we will tie that together and put a product out there quickly across multiple portfolios so this touched marketing it touched e-comm and it touched stores um and we were able to build a service uh and quickly light that up and then um after we had that initial mvp in place we were able to iterate to add additional features to it um you know i it it was stood up quickly but um it was probably years in the making to tell you the truth um and it really resonated with our customers it provided a safe means for us to provide our products that was safe both for our teammates and for our athletes the dix technology team isn't taking their foot off the pedal even remotely they're focusing on continuing to be a leading innovator that pushes the entire retail industry into the next era and as always core to their purpose and values are people its employees and its customer athletes i think the game's going to change the next five years and staying ahead of that is going to be key obviously data is an area that we're going to continue to invest in taking a mobile first approach we've often done that we see them the mobile uh whether it's it's on the online shopping experience for some of the mobile apps that we build uh to ensure that our teammates are more efficient so obviously within the stores connectivity will be a a very very big topic over the coming years but really we see the differentiator being our talent you know we dsg is hiring futurists they want people to really think outside of the box and build more innovative software you know it may not be a software solve maybe it's a business process all but we as a technology work may be able to provide that understand our business and know where we can drive uh efficiencies or new capabilities um to help the entire organization now let's go back to joe to talk about one of my favorite future gazing topics you guessed it robots people don't really like to use this word robots or robotics because it sounds so techy and so goofy with all of the the movies so let's use the term autonomous services and advancements certainly the predated covid like artificial intelligence and computer vision and advanced sensing systems were all ramping up and making big gains prior to code but guess what during covid touchless um and autonomous you know services autonomous processes became very very important and so when we realized that that a lot of the warehouses that are you know going up by advanced retailers today many of those are completely autonomous and guess what that has a value um in the touchless uh coveted world but it's not just limited to to to warehouses and in that way there are a lot of robots now going into stores that actually uh do automated um you know cleaning and sanitizing um they sanitize the stores they they clean up spills and they enable stores to practice a better kind of social distancing and contactless protocols both sam's club and schnooks in the midwest uh they recently began expanding their robotic fleet by adding autonomous floor scrubbers to make their stores safer other retailers that that are you know doing more with robots include amazon of course in their warehouses but also the gap american eagle chewie and others and so autonomous uh processes um that are being handled by bots that is a major trend and i see that really exploding in the next year or two it will be mainstream and every retailer will have robots in one form or another for some shopping is an art for others it's a sport it can be a vice and it can be a cause some love it some hate it rarely is someone indifferent pamela klofka and that's it for this episode join me in giving a warm thanks to our expert guests jose garupa of ris news and jason williams of dick's sporting goods i'm blakely thomas aguilar and this is pop culture tech our podcast is brought to you by vmware the software that powers the world's complex digital infrastructure learn more at vmware.com have questions about today's episode or just want to talk about your favorite shop culture tech follow me at blakelyags and use pop culture tech until next time [Music] you

Channel: VMware

Views: 78

Keywords: vmware, pop culture tech, podcast, dick's sporting goods, retail, tech trends

Id: O5i5fVS_feo

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021