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The FODcast
In the FODcast (The Future of #DigitalCommerce) we explore the real career stories of the people who have made it to the very top of the sector and those who are working at the cutting edge of innovation and change right now. Listeners to the podcast gain insight into the journeys industry leaders have taken to be where they are today, the challenges they are facing now and their aims for the future.
The FODcast
Elevating Customer Journeys in Digital Commerce with Alessandro Desantis
In our latest FODcast episode, we sit down with Alessandro Desantis, Partner and Chief Strategist at Nebulab, to explore how brands can transform their digital commerce strategies by enhancing customer experience, activating data effectively, and embracing cutting-edge innovations like AI and Digital Product Passports.
💡 Key Takeaways from This Episode:
- Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage: Why CX isn’t just about the purchase. From post-purchase support to reverse logistics, learn how aligning customer satisfaction with business goals can drive loyalty and performance.
- Unlocking the Power of Data: We talk about why many brands miss out by focusing on broad data instead of actionable insights.
- The Future of Digital Product Passport: With upcoming European regulations, DPPs are set to transform retail by providing detailed product information and bridging online and offline experiences. Learn how they can enhance consumer engagement and second-hand market insights.
- AI’s Role in Retail Innovation: From tools like Shopify’s Sidekick to hyper-personalisation, we dive into how AI is reshaping customer interactions while stressing the need for human oversight to maintain brand integrity.
🎧 Ready to rethink your approach to digital commerce? Tune in now wherever you get your podcasts for expert advice and forward-thinking strategies.
Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.
Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/
Welcome to the latest series of the podcast, where we bring you the latest insights into the future of digital commerce. In season six, we continue to interview some of the most respected professionals in the industry as we broaden the topics to cover what it takes to build a business within e-commerce, navigating through business change, as well as the future of technology within digital commerce. As we continue our journey to have one of the best podcasts within commerce, we ask you to like and share within your network if you enjoy our content. Hello and welcome back to the podcast the Future of All Things Digital Commerce. Today, I'm very pleased to welcome Alessandro De Santis, partner and Chief Strategist for Nebulab, a full-service e-commerce consultancy based in Italy but working with brands globally. As we continue the theme of improving customer experience, some of Nebulab's clients include Off-White and MeUndies. But let me pass you on to Alessandro to tell you a little bit more about himself and Nebulab before we start. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Alessandro Hi James, Thanks so much for having me Thank you for joining me, and yeah, over to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my name is Alessandro. I'm a technologist and strategist based in Rome. So I'm a software engineer originally by background, and I started about 15 years ago now. So it's been a while and I had experience with a wide breadth of different companies and different industries so consumer, saas and fintech and a bunch of others.
Speaker 2:But really around six to seven years ago I landed in e-com land and retail land, trying to figure out how technology could be applied to consumer brands and what kind of impact it could have, and I started working at NebLab, and at NebLab what we do really is we help brands use technology to create competitive advantage, and the way that we do that is by leveraging their digital customer experience in a very strategic, very intentional way to move the needle for their business, and we do this with our strategy services, our UX and UI design services and, obviously, development services in a variety of different models. Sometimes it's integrating with their in-house team, sometimes it's by acting essentially acting as the client's chief technology officers or fractional chief technology officers with the goal of helping them achieve their KPIs in a way that makes their exec team happy but also leaves their customers satisfied.
Speaker 1:And that is what we all want, right, happy customers, definitely yeah, that's what we're all after Exactly exactly. Easier said than done, though in some cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah. Sometimes the two things I would say business performance and customer happiness are not necessarily aligned, and so that's kind of a sweet spot where we live and what we try to achieve for our own clients. Try to line what we're looking for as a business and what our customers are looking for in their day-to-day so that we can move on with our lives and be happy and all achieve our objectives.
Speaker 1:Nice. I guess that moves nicely into the topic for today, which is looking at how brands can invest in CX to improve their returns, their loyalty and everything else. So I think it's probably a good starting point to talk about customer experience and what it is. How do you define it? It's such a broad topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I would say, if you ask 100 people, you'll get 100 different definitions. Ask 100 people, you'll get 100 different definitions. Yeah, for us, customer experience is basically everything that happens after you have acquired traffic, because we're focused on digital customer experience specifically. So everything that happens once the customer has clicked on that ad or email link or clicked on an organic search link and they've landed on the website, the entire experience that they have with your brand afterwards, so how they discover your product, potentially configure product. What happens during the purchase funnel so the entire checkout flow. What happens after they complete the purchase.
Speaker 2:So what does the post-purchase experience look like in terms of customer service, reverse logistics, product education and so on and so forth, but also how you re-engage that customer after that initial transaction. So how do you, once you have brought them into your orbit, how do you make sure that they stay there in a way that provides value for your business, whether that's most often it's incremental revenue. Sometimes you have a slightly different goal, so maybe it's data acquisition or it's improving your margins. But whatever it is, how do we make sure that we leverage that relationship for the brand's benefit and for the customer's benefit through their customer experience, because, at the end of the day, it all contributes to the brand image. So it's not just about how you show up, but it's also about what kind of experience the customer has as they navigate your brand and they interact with your brand at different stages of the journey it's um, it's a really interesting topic at the minute and I know it's an area where brands can uh, they can still make a lot of, uh, incremental changes.
Speaker 1:The the thing that only really hit home to me recently which probably sounds a bit silly when I say it out loud, but I always looked at customer experiences, like the process at which you get the customer to buy I never really associated the customer experience with the post transaction and looking at the returns and and and and then how you then re-engage the customer moving forward and, uh, that's obviously such a big area and I'm sure we'll talk about returns over the course of the conversation today. It's such a big topic at the minute, but but I'll be interested to know how many when you speak to to brands, do they? We've already touched upon the fact that if you speak to 100 different companies that you like to get 100 different definitions of cx, how many have a like are aware cx is the full end-to-end and how many are kind of similar to me in their full process?
Speaker 2:I would say. Lately, what we've seen is CX used to be something that you had to invent from scratch every time, because we didn't have so much technology and so many platforms that you can build a business on, and so every time it would be an entirely new journey where you had to figure out the basics, like how do I design a very good checkout flow or how do I go about visual merchandising so basic stuff. That has now been solved, and so, in that sense, what we see is there's at least a common foundational layer when we talk to brands, where we all understand what a good customer experience looks like at a basic level. I think there's also been a downside to that, if you will, in the sense that, past that initial threshold really good, cx is very, very brand dependent. It's not something that looks the same for every brand.
Speaker 2:Each brand has its own challenges. Each brand has its own product or products. Some brands sell their own stuff.
Speaker 2:Other brands are really multi-brand retailers, and so they sell a variety of products from different brands, and I think it's important to keep an open mind about the fact that, yes, you may have nailed that first level of customer experience satisfaction, but you need to keep innovating if you want to stay competitive, and you need to be very, very intentional about how you invest and where you invest in customer experience so that it actually moves the needle and it moves you closer to where you want to get, rather than just running a million different experiments in a million different directions.
Speaker 2:And so that's the kind of clarity that we try to create. Rather than only using the best practices and the existing platforms as a reference, we try to take a step beyond that and really really understand what it is that you're trying to achieve, and then we understand if it's something that we can do with existing technology or existing best practices, if it's a solved problem or if it's a problem that we need to solve for you and that's in a lot of or if it's a problem that we need to solve for you, and that's in a lot of brands. That's the missing piece, because sometimes they do not have the time or don't have the space, or they do not have the education to be able to think about cx in a more strategic way, and so it just becomes a bit more of a commodity interesting.
Speaker 1:You say that, and yeah, that was something I was going to touch upon actually, so I might as well do it now. But do you feel as though there are many brands out there that have the maturity within custom and the knowledge of customer experience to really know what they're doing currently versus what they could be doing, and then how they can get there?
Speaker 2:I think they would be able to figure that out if they applied themselves. But the reality is a lot of retail and e-commerce brands are very marketing driven, and so they are very focused on advertising and creative. And how do I attract the right kind of traffic to my digital properties? Which is great, and they're missing the second part, which is, once I have attracted the traffic, how to extract the most value out of it. And I think sometimes they're just blind to the possibilities.
Speaker 2:Because we do work with a lot of very interesting brands, either by nature of their product or by nature of the way that they show up with their audience and with their community, and there are always a lot of interesting scenarios that you can open up by investing a bit more into customer experience that sometimes have very, very significant ROI compared to a similar marketing investment that you could make, for instance, to a similar marketing investment that you could make, for instance. And so, yeah, I would say, in a lot of cases, the ability is there, at least in theory, but then a lot of that budget, put in terms of actual money, but also time and space and attention, is entirely dedicated to marketing, and so they end up just leaving CX as an afterthought, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, I mean I certainly feel as though it needs to be the central focus and you focus on CX and then you look at the wider areas as subtopics within customer experience right, but it sounds like maybe isn't the case for all brands at the minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, and it changes.
Speaker 2:It can change very often in the history of a brand.
Speaker 2:So there might be a moment where you're really really focused on improving your conversion rate, which is basically what everyone wants to do nowadays when they think of customer experience.
Speaker 2:But then there are also other types of efficiencies that you could create. One thing that you can do is improve operational efficiency, for instance, so basically be able to do more with less by investing a bit more in internal automation and backend automation. Or you can reduce return rates by investing a bit more into how you present your products to customers online or how you talk about product fit or through novel technologies like augmented reality, for instance, or dynamic fit guides. So there are all these micro niches that I think at times are very hard for brands to map out in a way that makes sense for them, and so the challenge is also I have a million things in front of them and it's hard for me to connect where I want to go with all these different levers that I could potentially pull and then be able to demonstrate an actual business impact on the other side once I'm done with that initiative or that implementation or that investment this is a really good point you raise there.
Speaker 1:And? Um, I am aware that there is not going to be a generic answer to this question. Um, however, I think it's fair to say that if we look at retail in general right now, um, budgets, budgets are tight and and businesses are looking at um getting as much kind of bang for their buck for for one of the better phrases as possible we've cx is obviously massive, but we've we've touched upon the fact. It's the whole process of engaging that customer through to keeping that customer and everything in between. That includes things like personalization, it includes um like, obviously, a seamless returns process and, uh, how they manage and store and use their data and so much more. Is there like one specific area that you feel is, but would add the most value to the majority of retail band sorry, the majority of retail brands? Um, above another area?
Speaker 2:uh, it's a great question in terms of initiatives that would make sense for a lot of brands. I think what we see most brands really struggling with is data acquisition, but also data activation, in the sense that the average e-commerce brand is very good, generally speaking, at collecting big data I think, website analytics or, again, conversion rates or how different stages of the checkout panel are performing but they're not particularly good at collecting microdata, such as information about customer preferences and then also understanding how to activate that data as part of their customer experience. Sometimes this can be very basic, straightforward stuff, like asking a customer about their gender so that you can personalize the customer experience. Or we have a client and they sell kids apparel and accessories and what you can do on their website, for instance, is create different profiles for your children and then shop basically filter the whole product catalog and only see the products that are relevant to each kid, and the brand also acquires this information so they can use it to understand what products are most interesting and what their target audience looks like.
Speaker 2:So not one thing specifically, but I think, if you zoom out a little bit more, being able to acquire data at a more granular level and activate it is the missing piece for the majority of brands of the foundations that checkout funnel, order tracking, stuff like that has been pretty much nailed. Nowadays you have Shopify and other platforms taking care of all this, but when it comes to data, it is so specific to each brand that you still need someone to actually think about what actually makes sense for my customers. How does my brand fit into their day-to-day life and how can I improve that relationship? By understanding the customer a little bit more, and pretty much everyone needs this, unless they're a very, very small startup that is still starting out and still needs to figure out everything. But most small to mid brands can benefit from this sort of strategy that's, um, yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 1:And there's something that I was just thinking about. When you're talking about, and actually when you go on a website uh, I've not experienced this personally, but it may be that this happens but actually they deliver some kind of questionnaire to you around you, your style, your preferences, colors you like, perhaps, example, clothing styles, etc. And then you could almost have like a um different um drop downs for, like, members of your family as well. So, oh, cool, you're shopping for your son. Okay, this is what your son likes. Bang, bang, bang. Oh, now you switch to your wife or to you, and suddenly you get presented with items that fit exactly what you've told it that you like.
Speaker 1:Um, I mean, I've not seen that personally, but I know I mean I wouldn't be willing to invest that time into every single website. I went on. But for the brands that I like to wear, if they were to send me a short questionnaire that would take two or three minutes to fill out and get some specific data for me, I'd be more than happy to do that. And then also, you could then use that to then push marketing to them, push promotions to them around styles that they actually like rather than just generic 15% off anything on their website. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and also it's something that you can do as part of the customer's regular discovery and purchase journey, so it doesn't have to be a dedicated questionnaire. You can also get a bit smarter about it and, let's say, when they're filtering, uh, in the product catalog because they actually went in and applied the filters manually you can ask them do you want us to store this information and use it to refine your browsing experience? And so there are more subtle ways that you can do this to actually create a positive impact for the customer without necessarily disrupting their day-to-day too much, which is, uh, I mean, we're all short on time and we appreciate when brands just sort of figure stuff out on our behalf.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course I mean if, yeah, I mean if that process can be automated, and and what have you then? Then happy days. I mean I was saying I'd be, I'd be willing to invest that time. But uh, if they can do that without the time investment, then then great. Is this something that brands are doing right now?
Speaker 2:It's something that we are doing with a few clients. I think it works especially well when you have a larger product outlook, because then you have enough diversity that you can meaningfully personalize the experience for each customer. There's always a little bit of friction and fear of personalizing too much, in a sense that there always comes a time where, in every customer's life, you want to basically reset the algorithm and go back to the standard experience, and so there are some nuances here and there that you need to be mindful of, but it is something I see more and more brands become interested in, because they want to understand their customers better, on one hand, but also they want to be able to use that information to drive actually meaningful business performance.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's something that's working out pretty well so far, and I think AI will also do a great job of helping us automate this process even more and make it even smoother for both parties the brand and the consumer yeah, I guess, um, a particular type of company that would, uh, really benefit from that would be like multi-brand retailers, as an example, because I guess if you'll go into a specific brand, it's normally because you like their style, their fit, etc. So and their numbers are going to be, their products are going to be quite limited, whereas you go to a multi-brand, you're going to have all sorts maybe 50 to 100 different brands being displayed. Now you might only like 10 of those, so if they're pushing the wrong ones to you, then, uh, you're probably going to go off that website quite quickly and go to go somewhere else yeah, exactly, um, and it also goes the other way around.
Speaker 2:So, as a multi-brand, you have so many more opportunities for providing an experience that is drastically better than a monobrand experience, uh, and it's a pity, uh, not to be able to leverage them by just presenting an infinite shelf, and then I, as a customer, have to um sift through everything that you're presenting to me, um. So, yeah, that's definitely um a business model, uh, where we see a lot of opportunities, not just for personalization, but I would say, for customer experience more in general, because you can uh, let's say, graduate from being one of many shopping destinations to being a primary shopping destination for a specific product category or an entire area of a customer's life, potentially.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then the final question. I've got there whilst we're talking about the area to invest in. If you had to pick one slash, sort of a quick win. But what? Looking at the data and the use of, and getting into the nitty-gritties and the granular data and how that can be used, how, if, if I, if you're an end customer here, I mean, how easy is this to do? Do they need to have a team of specific people, maybe data scientists or data engineers? Can this all be passed off to a third party like yourself? How can they do this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say, in terms of existing technology, there are a lot of very, very interesting merchandising tools. So, with different levels of sophistication and sometimes brands, the reason they don't do it is they overthink it and they start thinking about very complicated use cases or very sophisticated, maybe AI-driven, implementations, and so they just freeze and end up not doing anything. But really, at the end of the day, when it comes to data activation, you just need to collect the data and then figure out what to do with it, and your first implementation, your MVP, can be extremely simple. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, it can literally be I look at the data you've provided me, I translate it into a set of product filters and I apply it to your PLP, and you can do it potentially without even onboarding a third-party vendor. In terms of technology, most e-commerce platforms with minimal customization already support stuff like this, and then, as you refine your personalization model and understand what customers are looking for and want to invest more, then it can get more and more sophisticated where you're employing maybe AI or visual search or more advanced techniques. In terms of how you do it, whether it's in-house or an external team, I think nowadays brands have a lot of flexibility.
Speaker 2:Usually what we recommend to clients is that retain some sort of ownership or their customer experience internally. We don't want them to delegate everything to us. We don't think that kind of relationship works very well in the long term, and so we always try to have them build internal expertise at a leadership level. But then when it comes to the implementation and also the strategy behind specific initiatives, then I think the nature of e-commerce nowadays is such that it really helps to have an external partner. So when you want to invest more, you can pour a bit more into that third party.
Speaker 2:When you want to stabilize things, then you can scale back that investment without having to worry about internal teams and what they will have to do. So there's a lot of flexibility, a lot of different models. We work with each client to figure out what works best for them. I think, at the end of the day, what matters is that we all speak the same language and, uh, that do have some sort of understanding of what we're doing and why we're doing it, uh, in-house, and it's not something that is entirely delegated okay, okay, yeah, so I guess that that blend, I guess, would probably work best, and I feel like that's similar across a lot of different aspects uh, within within business as well.
Speaker 1:So, um, okay, all right. So, um, something else I was keen to talk to you about today, um, and I know it's a topic that you're familiar with you've done a blog on this and I believe you speak about it as well, alessandro is the rise in digital product passports, and obviously there is new regulations. I don't believe they've been implemented in the EU yet, so there's a compliance angle. But I know something that you feel quite strongly about is how companies can use the product passports to improve their customer experience. So I guess it'd be really good just to quickly I'm sure the vast majority of people know what they are and what have you, but it'd be good just to, yeah, quick run through what are they, why they're important and what are you guys doing at Nebulab to improve CX.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So. I would say the easiest way to describe a digital product passport, a DPP, is it's an electronic database embedded into a physical product that contains information about that specific product and the supply chain behind it. So, for instance, if I buy a coach bag, I can scan a QR code on the bag and verify the bag's authenticity and I can see the materials that it's made of. I can see where the materials come from, the different steps that it took through the supply chain and so on and so forth, and there's a um, it's a regulation, as you said. So there's a obviously a compliance angle for brands where in the next few years, different categories of merchants will have to start integrating DPPs in Europe. Also, us brands, international brands that are exporting to Europe will also have to have digital product passports, and really the idea there is to accelerate the supply chain transparency and critical segments of the industry where both the consumers and the institutions want to incentivize certain behavior from brands and manufacturers. So it will be more and more important as the regulation is rolled out in the next few years. But for us, what is more exciting about it is that we finally have we are going to have a standardized way to bridge online and offline retail experiences, whereas right now it's something that every brand needs to reinvent for themselves. We are going to have a medium that is commonly understood, that the consumers know about and are used to engaging with, to go from physical product to digital experience, and the really cool thing about them is you have to have all this compliance information in your product passport, but then there is nothing that is stopping you from enriching your passport experience with whatever electronic activations you want, so you can have a newsletter, for instance, where the customer can sign up to learn more about your brand and stay up to date on all the latest announcements. Or you can have end-of-life options so it can give customers ways to either repair or resell or recycle their current product.
Speaker 2:Coach, for instance, just upgraded their product passport and they have a partnership with Poshmark now where you can basically just scan the QR code on your bag and it's instantaneously listed for sale on Poshmark. You don't need to fill in any of the product details. It's all pulled from a database for you. So that's really cool, but you can also do it. You can integrate with real-life activations where you have maybe an exclusive event and you can only enter the event if you own a product and you verify the product through a digital passport.
Speaker 2:So it's a very cool way for brands and consumers to engage with one another in almost a sort of middle land that is both physical and digital at the same time, and it opens up a lot of very, very interesting possibilities and also helps brands understand consumer behavior a bit more by tapping into data sources that were not accessible before. So right now, as a brand especially if I sell through third parties I have very limited information about what happens once the product is sold to the retailer. With digital product passwords, brands are finally going to have a bit more signal about how their products live and how they're consumed in the wild, and also, potentially, what happens in the secondhand market. So are they being resold, for what price, how often, and so on and so forth. So I think it's one of those interesting scenarios where we have some piece of regulation that is maybe a bit annoying for brands and they will have to do quite a bit of work to be compliant. But if you see it and the right way, it can go from annoying to exciting very quickly.
Speaker 1:So it's important to start training that muscle now, so we're ready when the time comes I guess that's like a lot of things really like when, when there's a change that comes around, you can look at it as a as a frustration, and oh, we've got to make these changes. Or you can try and look at it as an opportunity okay, cool, cool. Well, this is happening. What can we do with this to benefit us moving forward? Um, and yeah, I mean some of the bits you mentioned there was really cool, it's it's, none of which is anything that I would have thought of myself. Um, which is why I have people like you on the show to talk about it and what have you? Um, so, just to be clear, sorry so, with the, with the dpp, if you were to uh, as if I was a customer that I bought something, uh, second hand, when I would all of the, would everything that happened in the future be tracked on the dpp as well?
Speaker 2:well, yes, not always automatically. So, um, if I as a customer, for instance, uh resell uh a random bag to someone else, uh, then the brand won't really know about it unless the new owner scans the product passport, and so some of these pieces will be automated. Like the coach and benchmark partnership automates some of the data collection, but there is a part of it where it will take a while before consumers get into the habit of using product pass passwords and they will only start doing it if it's compelling enough for them. Which means I as a brand, if I want to collect that sort of information, I also need to show up in the most exciting possible way in that specific channel, otherwise people just won't bother scanning a random qr code on a random piece of garment for no reason yeah, well, that's it.
Speaker 1:Like you said, there needs to be a reason why they do it. Yeah, I guess it's also the sort of uh sort of thing that will take a lot of time to to become the norm. I think, from the research that I I did before the call, this regulation has been rolled out this year, but it's they don't expect it to be on all products until nearer 2030, which is five years from now. Um, it's then also got to go through that process of customers actually adopting it and using it, which could be another five years or so. So really, we're not looking at maybe till 2035, in which it's being used by the majority of products and then it's being used by customers moving forward. So we're talking some way away from now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely a long term play. There are in luxury, product pass are already a pretty common concept and they're used by all the major players. So, for instance, I have my good suit. It is an Armani suit and it does have a digital product passport that I can scan, but the only thing that I can do there is really verify that it's an authentic product. I cannot do anything else. And that's really what digital beyond a few experimental activations like the Coach One, that's all.
Speaker 2:Digital product passwords are being used for today is product authentication, so it will definitely take a while before it becomes a more widespread concept. The good thing is we're already starting to see, uh, some infrastructure around them that will make the job much, much easier for brands that want to start doing it, and I think, uh, yes, on one hand, it will not become a reality, uh, for a little while longer. On the other, it's important for brands to start thinking about it in the next few years so that they will be ready once the time comes and they will also be able to leverage the new opportunities that it creates and that's it it's about.
Speaker 1:It's about forward thinking and if you're, if you're a business that wants to try something different, there's an opportunity here to, to, to move into this space, to do something a little bit different, to engage your customers in a different way, to get some different data, all of which is going to be super valuable to you as you look to evolve over the next few years, and we've we've seen that the change within retail over the last 10 years and the customer, the change in customer expectations, I mean, god knows what it's going to be like in the next five years, ten years. What we have now, we're probably not going to be happy with in five years time. So if you can start to, to, to take these opportunities and pick up more data and what have you, then it should, in theory, benefit you, um, as we go through that evolution yeah, absolutely, and I think there is an interesting uh conjuncture as well where different technologies will come together.
Speaker 2:So digital product passports, for instance instance, have some interesting implications. Also when you look at spatial computing and augmented reality, where maybe one day I'll be able to walk down the street and identify that t-shirt that the guy is wearing that I really, really like, and I'll be able to buy it on the spot and maybe he gets an affiliate fee because he contributed to that purchase. So this is some of the more outlandish stuff. But I think in general in technology, all of these technologies go from not being interesting to being very interesting maybe a bit too interesting at times very quickly and then they sort of normalize, in the sense that we figure out what their actual place is in the world. But we won't know until we go through that whole process and and also put a little bit of practice into it.
Speaker 1:So it will take some time and some work I find it fascinating looking at technology and just what it's capable of doing now. And, yeah, sometimes you can find yourself in a bit of a rabbit hole and you're just looking okay, what, where are we going to be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, what, what are our kids going to experience? And it's like, wow. Okay, sometimes you feel like it's like super far-fetched, but you know what?
Speaker 2:it probably isn't yeah, that's why you have people like us, uh, just trying to live and breathe this stuff, you know, even if it's very outlandish, and helping brands navigate it.
Speaker 1:That's it yeah, that's it. And uh, yeah, people like me that just uh, that uh just sit there and and dream and and have these crazy, crazy ideas of people like you that bring them to fruition, I guess so there we go there we go.
Speaker 1:So, uh, okay, um, touched a bit upon this earlier on in the conversation, um, but I feel like the rise in ai in particular has, uh has contributed to a lot of the advancements in technology, particularly within customer experience. I'll be interested to know from you kind of where you see us in this kind of like AI, like hype. Are we going to continue to see it push boundaries over the next couple of years? What can we expect from it? Basically, alessandro?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. It's something we've been discussing a lot with a lot of clients and just a lot of brands in general, especially over the last few months. I think nowadays everyone is waking up to AI, even the brands that were not interested in it before, and they're trying to figure out what it means for them and how it can be applied. What we're seeing in general is all the interesting practical applications, or most of the interesting and practical applications of AI today are a bit more operator-facing than they are consumer-facing, so there are tools that are not exposed to the end consumer or the end customer, but they're being leveraged by someone at the brand to be a bit more productive in their job and in the process, of course, they're also creating a better customer experience, because either I can offer you a better experience or I can offer a good experience to more customers with less work, and so there is a lot of it that is about customer service and helping CS reps deal with more tickets faster through AI. There's stuff around content generation and managing product catalogs a bit more efficiently and just automate all those more annoying parts of doing business in consumer land that are not necessarily adding a lot of value, so that you can claim some of that time back to work on more strategic stuff.
Speaker 2:What we have not seen yet, except for maybe a few very specific applications, are interesting use cases for AI that are also consumer-facing or not. I shouldn't say interesting, I should probably say effective. So stuff like AI chatbots, for instance, I feel it's interesting and has a lot of potential, but there's also a general feeling that it's not quite there yet. If you're trying to create a very cool experience for your customers, it will be there at some point, but not today, and so there still needs to be some work that happens either at the data level or at the implementation level to be able to create interesting experiences through AI that are exposed to the end customer. There are some exceptions to the rule. I think there are some industries that lend themselves a bit more than others to exposing AI to the final consumer, but in general, right now we're in this let's wait and see phase where we're waiting for some of the technology to mature so that the customer can be exposed to it.
Speaker 1:The chatbots piece is interesting and one of the guests I had on it's not yet been, uh, released. I think it's episode nine, maybe, um chat from love holidays and they talk about their, their chatbot, something that they've invested in massively and I think that. I can't remember exactly, but I think he said it solves about 55 of the queries that come to it. So I mean that actually sounds very successful and they've actually won awards for their chatbot, so, uh, so that's probably a good example. But yeah, I think we've all experienced a number of bad examples with chatbots, where you kind of just find yourself going around in circles. Or the one that frustrates me the most is when you just get like four or five options and there's not, there's never an option to speak to somebody and it's like they don't, they don't answer my question, and then you just go around and around and in the end you just it does the opposite and rather than improve your experience, it makes it worse and you just get frustrated yeah, absolutely, uh, to speak a bit more to that.
Speaker 2:I think what we're missing is, uh, really going back to what we were saying about customer experience. In customer experience, we have that for most areas. We have that foundational threshold where we understand what the basics are and how to nail them. But AI is still all very experimental, and so you can have a chatbot that is very successful and very effective, but it is an exception or something that the brand had to be very, very intentional in and something that they had to put a lot of investments into. When it comes to just the average brand, I think that there is still not a good enough playbook for what those sort of applications should look like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. That's why the majority of companies that have chatbots probably, I would say don't give you a good customer experience. I guess they're just not fed with enough information, right? I guess the idea behind it is they need to be fed with information to be able to give you the answer. That requires a lot of time, a lot of money and the right resources to do so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, they're not being fed enough information. Also, I feel, like with chatbots specifically, sometimes they're not the ideal interface to present to the customer and maybe there are more specific experiences that we could create that still leverage AI, but maybe it's not a conversational experience and right now we're not really thinking about that because the killer app in AI from day one has been chat GPT and so that's all we're thinking about and it looks very cool and it is very cool, but I also think it's a generic interface and sometimes you could just figure out a more specialized way to solve specific problems.
Speaker 1:Okay. So question for you then and it's a question I hear thrown about a lot, I've got my take on it, but at some point in the not so distant future, do you see AI taking a lot of jobs within this space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. Not in the longer term would be my answer.
Speaker 2:I think, long term, most, if not all, innovation ends up being a good thing for humanity as a whole.
Speaker 2:I do think in the short term there will be some pain and I think we probably need to be a bit more proactive as companies and institutions to navigate that new world.
Speaker 2:I think there are huge segments that either have been impacted already or will be impacted in the next few years, especially as we realize we do not need someone to call the ai model for us, because we can call the ai model ourselves and so we don't need to pay a human being where we can skip that middleman and go straight to the source of the data or the work.
Speaker 2:And once we reach that realization, I think it will be a bit painful as we try to readjust and understand how to reinsert AI in our lives in a way that increases everyone's productivity and well-being, even for agencies like us. For instance, we're actively thinking about what the new reality will look like and what's the best way to continue delivering value to our clients in a world where most of the implementation work will be commoditized. Realistically, because you want to change something on your Shopify site, you ask your Shopify AI assistant I think it's called Sidekick, if I'm not mistaken, and they make that change for you and to an extent extent it can already do this, um, but it's a very limited. We will reach a point where you just tell it to change my shopify theme and this or that way, and it does it for you, and so I think even for agencies. We need to be very mindful of that and try to understand what kind of value we can continue to create in this new setup.
Speaker 1:I wasn't aware of that tool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I'm still amazed by AI and exactly what it can do and I know a very small percentage of its capabilities, something I'm working with every single day to look at how we can refine our processes and become more efficient at kind of what we do. But, yeah, no, I didn't realize it was that simple to say to AI change my theme. And there you go. I mean, it could be dangerous for agencies but, like you said, it will get to a point where actually it becomes too automated and you need that human being to kind of okay, it right, and actually that's not what I want. And it goes back to what you were saying about going too far, then coming back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, and also this is in the more outlandish area of reflections, I think. But, um, I also think, short term, uh, we'll see a lot of noise, in a sense, that it will be a new for consumer brands specifically. Uh, it will probably be sort of like a drop shipping, uh 2.0 era, where we have a lot of brands that do not deserve to exist and are enabled by this temporary arbitrage created by AI and different sorts of AI tools and applications. But, long-term, one thing that I've been thinking about and I had a newsletter about this a few months ago is we still live in a reality less than in the past, but we still live in a reality where consumer brands have some sort of cultural impact and they stand for something, and one of the reasons for that is there are elements to those brands that remain consistent over a very long period of time.
Speaker 2:But, but, really, the promise of AI, and generative AI specifically, is hyper-personalization, where you have the same brands that shows up in different ways, maybe on a one-to-one basis, based on the person in front of them and what they expect, and this is something that Meta actually discussed at one of their latest events. Where their vision is you tell the AI about the KPI that you want to optimize for, and basically it does everything else for you. It does the creative, it does the targeting, you don't need to figure out any of that stuff and it will also continuously optimize based on performance over time. And so I'm thinking in this new world, what does brand stand for? At the end of the day, it sort of becomes a much more fragmented concept, and so I think it will also be important to have human beings that put limits and constraints around how much freedom we have for this sort of hyper-personalization and performance optimization over time. Yeah, this is a bit crazier, for sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, on the note of hyper personalization, then, do you feel as though we could get to a point where every single individual that goes on a website will have a different experience based on Absolutely yeah?
Speaker 2:We already have experiences, experiments, in this sense. I think pomade did just launched a proof of concept with google gemini, uh, where they're personalizing the product pictures in real time based on the person that is looking at the website. There is a also startup, uh, that is doing this to a smaller extent with landing pages I think it's called Fermat, and basically they have, they generate these landing pages for you and then they run continuous CRO on them through AI in the background, and so they continue to optimize them without you knowing anything about it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I think that for some brands at least, that is going to be the end state, and then again, I'm not sure where we will land eventually, if it will normalize at some point and we'll figure out that maybe hyper personalization is not such a great thing after all well, I mean, if it helps me, uh, if it helps companies not load up the female pages when I go on the website, so I mean I'm certainly for it, because I always find that frustrating when I for the home page I've got, uh, clothing that aren't relevant for me, but uh, but there we go. Um, yeah, I'm just interested to see where it goes. There's just so much opportunity in retail still and so much that can be done for brands to have more success but for customers to to also just enjoy the experience they have when they, when they're shopping with their brands as well, and I'm really fascinated that, uh, that I get just to just to have these conversations and just see the potential out there yeah, absolutely me too.
Speaker 2:I think it's a very exciting time to be alive, and we're grateful to be able to do it with our clients, and we can't wait to see what comes next. Exactly yeah it's?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's scary, uh, definitely, but uh, yeah, super, super fun. So let's see. Let's see what happens. But look, um, yeah, I think probably a good, good point to wrap up. Alessandro, really appreciate you joining me. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much. And look, to those of you that have enjoyed this episode, alessandro and Nebulab release blogs every couple of weeks around the future of digital commerce, exactly what we've been discussing today, so do make sure you check them out following the episodes. But, look, thank you for joining me. As always, please do like, comment, share and I look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Goodbye.
