Situation
Our client, a global retail company, had been planning to open a series of news shops. As part of their global strategy, questions regarding the digital offering for the imminent inauguration needed to be answered.
Digital possibilities are infinite and providers are numerous. With this in mind, our client was looking to have a clear picture of the digital options available on the market, in order to make an educated decision concerning their digital future.
This is when Open Web Technology came into play: to help define the digital strategy as a combination of the offline traditional channels enhanced with interactive digital services.
Approach
In a first step, we researched and discussed the global and local digital trends in retail. This helped our client clarify their digital ambitions and pinpoint the competitive differentiators that would drive the rest of our work.
Secondly, we gathered an extensive list of digital benchmarks about Apps, Websites, Modern Technologies, Screens, Consumer Trends, etc. and extracted a long-list of more than a hundred service opportunities. Those services were then clustered into functional domains all along the value chain: before, during and after the shopping journey.
At that stage, it became easy for our client to evaluate and prioritize each of the digital services into must-haves, high added value services and later stage opportunities.
We, at Open Web Technology, believe in digital to enhance the consumer experience, so we translated the identified services into a customer journey that simulated the digital in-store experience and crystalized our client's vision of the shop of the future. Moreover, we mirrored the journey from a back-office perspective and defined a set of KPIs that will be used to: (i) understand consumer behavior in order to improve the in-store experience in real time , and (ii) make long-term strategic decisions.
In only a few weeks, we successfully defined a clear digital strategy to reinforce offline sales with an adapted digital offering. In addition, we proposed a roadmap for the next 18 months starting with a list of concrete actionable next steps to kick-start the digital journey and reach ambitious goals one step at a time.
