Empathy and Envy Can Drive Your Org to Customer Centricity, with Jennie Alexander, Ecommerce and Digital Consultant

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the digital shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute with 25 years in digital commerce, seasoned by 10 years at Estee Lauder and J&J. Jennie Alexander has learned the essential ingredient of commerce, always keeping the customer at the center, easier said than done, and Jennie is now sharing her data, organizational and humanistic lessons from her work with others through her work as an e-commerce and digital consultant, she joined Lauren Livak Gilbert and me to share the fruits of those hard fought lessons. Jennie Alexander, welcome to the podcast. We are so looking forward to chatting with you.

Jennie Alexander  (00:52):

Looking forward to chatting with you as well. Peter, thanks for having me.

Peter Crosby (00:56):

You have been on an e-commerce journey. You've been at a couple of large brands over the years, and you've seen how e-commerce and digital has evolved over the past decade or more, and I think the common denominator then and now, a lot has changed, but brands are always trying to figure out how to get their product to the right customer at the right time. But sometimes, and you can tell me if this is true, but sometimes at larger organizations, keeping the customer at the forefront kind of gets lost in that because there's so much sort of stuff to move through and metrics and everything, and sometimes people can lose their way a bit. And I'm wondering, my sense is on your journey, you really tried to stay customer focused and it's not as easy or as simple as you might think. So I'd love for you just to talk about how you manage to recenter yourself back to customer centricity every time, what it means to you and how that comes into practice.

Jennie Alexander  (02:00):

Yeah, Peter, thanks so much. And I think it's after 25 years in digital commerce, I've seen a lot of changes. And one is really, like you said, how brands and companies are putting the customer at the center. How do you get your right product to the right customer at the right time? And years ago when I was starting out, maybe one or two people were focused on customer experience and now you have entire departments focused on it and it's becoming more and more even part of everyone's job. So you have entire organizations saying, we want to be customer-centric, large organizations saying we want to be centric. And that to me, as someone who's been advocating in this space, my entire career is amazing, but it's also really, really challenging. Amazing. It's the right place to focus in a complex retail environment. How to get that product to that customer at the right time is really challenging and the right way to focus on it, but it's really hard to do well.

(03:19):

And when you think about it in a large organization with 10,000 employees or something, how do you get them all to be in lockstep, to be customer centric? And that's really where you say your whole organization needs to be looking at the same data, interpreting that data the same way or at least through the same lens, and having some shared goals to understand then how to go after and how to attract the right customers, how to convert the right customers. So those organizational silos that you have just frankly really need to go away. Our customers don't think about product categories, they don't think about product hierarchies. They just want a product that works for them and for their needs. So the challenge that I've heard over the years is I don't have the right data, I don't trust the data. Maybe I have the right data, but I don't have the budget to fix the issue or I have the data, I have the budget, I don't have the right resources to support me, and I have another team that has competing priorities and I can't get the support that I need. So for me, what I've stayed true to or what I really like about customer centricity is putting the data and the resources together in a way that serves the customer and not the organization. Balancing the internal competing priorities to really focus on the customer first. And certainly at larger organizations or more matrixed or complex ones, that can be difficult. But ultimately I think it's about the data and the resource structure and thinking about those a little bit differently to start to move some of those big organizations in the right direction.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:12):

And Jennie, you talked about data, and I totally agree it's a huge piece of the puzzle here. There's no shortage of data necessarily, but understanding how to use the data, what the data is actually telling you, can you talk a bit about how data can drive those decisions and how you can use that data to be able to keep the customer at the center?

Jennie Alexander  (05:34):

Yeah, I think you mentioned it, right? There's no shortage of data and you can end up, if you're looking at all of that data in that analysis paralysis sort of phase, and you don't want to be there. But I think when you look at keeping the customer at the center, but being org focused, there's maybe two places and two areas of metrics that are related to look into and speaking about it from a digital commerce perspective. Of course, the first one is what are those digital commerce metrics that make me the organization the most money or the most profit? And then two, how do I make sure everyone is on the same page to focus on those metrics as a priority? So what metrics do you need to measure and making sure everyone focuses on 'em kind of not the simplest thing in the world.

(06:28):

It's not exactly the easiest thing in the world. But let me give you an example because I was recently talking to a large retailer and we were reviewing their metrics scorecard and it became very obvious as to what the shift needed to look like when you're thinking about data. And so we looked at their metrics scorecard. It was very typical kind of metrics scorecard. You saw sales, conversion, traffic, average order value, and they were all broken out by channel. It had all the right data, looked like a really good scorecard. The problem was it was created in silo, and in this case it was data by marketing channel. So you saw SEO, you saw SEM data, you saw email and direct load data. Again, all the stuff we measure every day if you're in that business. But no one in the org was looking at those across the channels to see what the dynamic was.

(07:30):

And so when I took the data and less of a channel lens and more across a channel lens, what we saw was pretty astonishing. Email was bringing over 50% of site visitors, but only 10% of sales. And SEO was bringing in, let's say 20% of traffic, but conversion was three times higher than the site average. Now when you're looking at it channel by channel, you don't see that, but when you start to take that same data and put a different view on it, then you can start to see rather than fixing what's independently wrong within each channel, you can look holistically across the channels. And in this case, I was working with the retailer and we said, well, email has a lot of traffic, but there's either a conversion or an a OV issue and now you know what to go after and how to fix that.

(08:26):

And your SEO in this case can actually work harder than all of your other channels because it has great conversion in order to get that sales revenue. So you just need more of it. Again, sometimes a little bit easier to explain than to do, but at the same time, it's really thinking about what looked like a great scorecard and was a great scorecard. It's just the way that you were looking at that data or the way you were using it and interpreting it. Each team was looking at their own universe of metrics and then trying to go after each of their own priorities. And so by shifting the focus a little bit and desiloing some of those areas and those channels, you could start to see a better focus area. The same can be said for let's say digital shelf metrics or even brands or categories.

(09:23):

If you think about a brand within a company like what they might be looking at maybe on their digital shelf, each brand is looking at their digital shelf, what can I do to improve it? But what if we ask the question, what if it were less expensive for one brand to win on the digital shelf than another? Maybe it is, right? Maybe the economics of that brand work better, or maybe there's one digital shelf tactic like ratings and reviews that has a better ROI than all of the others. So how companies larger companies are thinking about shifting budget or resources to look holistically and what that data is telling them about their customers can be really, really interesting. And if you're looking at it that way, you are keeping the customer at the center and you can prioritize your focus really across those resources and across maybe digital shelf elements or across brands or across channels.

Peter Crosby (10:28):

So do, earlier as you were speaking, you were talking about the things that you hear from clients, which often is sort of a laundry list of the barriers that stand in the way them doing their job directly or not. When you make your unsiloed decisions, does that often involve saying, well, sorry, email folks, we're not going to give you the resources you need to do it because we're going to get more bang from our buck over here. And so you're making the decision that's best for the overall performance rather than yes, if everyone in this room started working each of their channels with the maximum investment or whatever that might be, we won't get where we need to go, does the conversations that they drive. That's what I was, yeah,

Jennie Alexander  (11:29):

Yeah, exactly. And it takes a real holistic approach to do that, and everyone has to be on that same page, so it's not easy to do by any means, but there were times when I was at one of the companies that I was at where each of us were in charge of a different sort of product focus. So the website CRM, maybe B2B commerce, whatever it might be, and there've been times where maybe B2B commerce isn't the focus that year. And as an individual, you have to understand what's your role within the larger team dynamic to say, well, okay, maybe it's just about keeping the lights on this year, but CRM is really critically important because whatever it is that the next metric up is sort of showing you that drives to whatever's needed from a p and l perspective across the organization. And so leaning in and helping the CRM manager get their job done and having those shared goals across organizations, across teams, I think really, really helps that. And it does sort of take an entire organization to come together and realize that. And that's certainly not easy to do from a team perspective, but it does pay off when done well.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:07):

You talked about shared goals, and I completely agree, and this is something I talk about a lot where y'all need to be marching towards the same thing. Do you have any examples of shared goals that have worked to break down silos at any of the organizations that you've been in?

Jennie Alexander  (13:24):

So I think one of the ways that we can think about shared goals, and a good example of this comes from a digital shelf example. And what we realized within the organization was that ratings and reviews and increasing our volume and our star ratings on all of our products was what was going to drive the business for us. And so what we needed to do and essentially operationalize a large group of people from a number of different parts of the organization to understand that we wanted to get our reviews to all be above a 4.5 in a certain category and each one to have at least a thousand reviews on Amazon, for example. And so that took that sort of being the goal, then took a number of different departments to make that happen. Certainly you had your digital shelf manager who said, I have this number of reviews on this product.

(14:32):

These are the products, this is where I want to make sure that we're making the biggest impact. You had your analytics team looking at what those changes were really over time and where to focus. Is it focusing on a star rating change or is it focusing on a volume change or a recency in volume change with your digital shelf? You had your brand team really saying, okay, here's the approach that we can take, and I hate this word, but I'm going to use it campaign that we can use to create more ratings and reviews or get some of our best customers to review our product or maybe even a different type of social approach. And you had your content team working on what was the content to really get out there and make sure that as you are getting those better reviews, you could start to use that to then promote the product, whatever it might be.

(15:36):

So you start to see how one shared goal of saying, we need our products to be above whatever I said, 4.5 and have a thousand reviews being that goal, but each person within a different silo within the organization, whether it's someone on content, someone on the brand team, someone in analytics, your digital shelf manager, of course, probably your channel manager as well, to understand what channels those reviews are propagating towards, all of them have to work in lockstep to be able to make that happen. Not one single person within that team can make it happen. And so I think that maybe is a good example of sort of showcasing how you can just take a simple goal like that and make it work throughout the organization.

Peter Crosby (16:26):

Simple yet complex.

Jennie Alexander  (16:28):

Yes.

Peter Crosby (16:29):

I would not be doing my job as a listening podcast host if I didn't ask you why campaign is a trigger word for you.

Jennie Alexander  (16:37):

Oh my goodness, that is great question. I think because if we get back to customer centricity, a campaign to me is a period of time it sits within a period of time, has a specific goal. And again, it's not that they're bad, but it doesn't necessarily show a true customer-centric approach. And so if you think about, for me, a lot of my campaign examples have been, we're going to do this campaign launch a new product about six months, this is what we're going to do, everyone great, Woohoo, we're on the path. And again, there's nothing wrong with it, but you're not necessarily looking at it from a customer at the center perspective. Maybe your customers aren't in the market for that product during that six month launch period. What do you do then? What happens after the campaign? I've also seen a number of brands where they might be looking at a particular campaign and let's again say it's about six months and maybe in the third month they're optimizing something. But really I think if you're being customer centric, you're constantly making those optimizations, you're constantly doing that work. And so to me, I think you really want to look at something much more holistically than, as I've trigger worded, it campaigned something. So for me that's just a little bit of the why

Peter Crosby (18:19):

That was really helpful because it does seem to me, because of course you have a business goal of we're going to launch this product we want in this six months, this is the revenue we want to get. So you need that underlying thing. But it sounds to me like getting to that campaign, you needed to have asked a bunch of questions about the customer that's sometimes get skipped. Is that kind of what

Jennie Alexander  (18:47):

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great way of putting it. You're putting all of this effort into a campaign and maybe you've done research and certainly a lot of brands do, right? You've done all that research to get all of that consumer insight, but why just focus it in on a specific launch or a specific product or a specific amount of time or season or whatever it might be? Why not use that constantly and consistently? So I think it's just maybe the way you ask that question and the way you do that research to say, certainly if something's fundamentally shifted about your customer and the way that they think or the way that they open their wallet, sure, you have to change directions, but continuing to sort of change campaigns season after season, to me, of course there's benefit in that. There's newness, there's freshness, it's great, but I don't think it's using the customer at the center as positively and the way that it could be that have the most impact.

Peter Crosby (20:04):

And it sounds like so much of that really relies on organizations shifting. You keep talking about the breaking down of silos, and we've seen a number of great examples on the podcast here, talking to people whose title has become head of omnichannel and therefore you don't have retail media over here and your product pages over here under different people. They bring them together to really force that, to force that combination. And so I'm wondering, in your experience, do you have some example or when you talk to your clients, what are you asking to find out how they ought to be organized to get to what you're talking about?

Jennie Alexander  (20:57):

Does

Peter Crosby (20:57):

That make sense?

Jennie Alexander  (20:58):

Yeah, it does. Peter, it's a really good question. I think it's about how are they organized to a point, but it's really just about how do they work? And so yes, some companies look at restructuring and reorgs and I mean it can be disruptive, it can be good, but I'm not necessarily sure that sort of putting a new manager or putting someone on a new team really translates to customer centricity. What I found that does work however, and that I do really is having people within the organization or the entire organization spend a day in the life of a customer. And that can be incredibly powerful. Helping a colleague who maybe works on digital for 10 to 20% of their role understand what digital commerce means in their role can shift their perception and their understanding that customer centricity or what that new omnichannel marketer role actually means.

(22:09):

So what I found is most account managers haven't been vendor managers, for example, and certainly plenty of brand managers have never been digital shelf managers. And so one of the training programs that I did, like I said before, was sort of a day in the life. And what that did was sort of build out a program to show what is our customer. So if we're talking about the digital shelf kind of thinking here, that customer is translating to say a vendor manager or a retailer for that matter. What does a retailer have to do to manage their e-commerce store? If you look at it through that lens, then you can understand how to better manage the digital shelf or like you said, Peter, retail media. And the way that we did it was a game. It was a business simulation. We gave the team goals and objectives that the vendor manager would have.

(23:13):

So not goals and objectives that you as a brand manager have, but what does your vendor manager have as a goal and objective, and how do you create scenarios that the vendor managers encounter every day? So that as you go through that training, you go through that simulation, you sort of see how a vendor manager is performing based on not your p and l as a brand, but a retailer p and l, which has a lot different parts and pieces to it. And so one of the companies that I worked with, we trained the sales team in this, we trained the marketers, we even trained our executive team. And what I really like about it was everyone went back to work sort of the next day, they went back to their responsibilities, but they had a different understanding of what happened after the product launched.

(24:04):

Right after you hand off all that content on the digital shelf, what was the retailer actually doing? How were they communicating with the end customer, the consumer? What ultimately happened if a brand didn't deliver something on time? So it was fun, right? It was a game and there was a little bit of a competition to it, but it was also powerful from that way, and it kind of broke down the silos in a slightly different way than just disrupting or maybe changing an entire org structure. But what it did is it sort of built trust, and it goes back to that shared goal that we were talking about before Lauren. It built some of those shared goals so people then understood what happened after the digital manager, after the digital shelf manager does all of their work, what happens to that product? I think a piece that some people it might just not see on a regular basis.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:02):

I love that example. I love that example because if I put my brand hat on for a second, I remember sometimes the brands would come at me and be like, why are you asking me this question? And they just didn't understand the context, but that provides context. If they understand how Amazon works or how item setup works, there's also a level of empathy that's delivered cross-functionally where you're not that people are doing this, but sometimes it comes off as a finger pointing or a, why are you asking me for this or This isn't my job, please leave me alone. But I love that example. It provides context and empathy to the process so that you can collectively work together and you're not just like, stop asking me 17 questions about if my shampoo has batteries in it, which have to fill out on Amazon forum. So an excellent example, Jennie.

Jennie Alexander  (25:59):

Well, I'm glad I got to share it, and I'm happy to talk about it even more if you want at any point in time. So yeah.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:08):

So Jennie, you've worked out a lot of large brands. You talked about org structures, shared goals, living the consumer as an example, and going through a day in the life, having your experience as a large brand. They've had the favor of market share for a while because the big players, but now there's a bit of ankle biters coming in and kind of stealing some of that market share. So for some of the larger brands listening, what would you say, what are their powerhouse opportunities or what should they focusing in on or leaning into as bigger brands?

Jennie Alexander  (26:45):

Yeah, I think it's a great question for a lot of those sort of mid to larger size brands coming in, because the issue there across lots of different verticals is now there's more and more brands competing for share of wallet, maybe even 10 x more brands or 20 x more brands than there were just even 15 years ago. And the cost of entry for all of those new brands is really low. They're incredibly digital first, they're creating buzz, they're getting customers attention, but they're not creating more market share. They aren't growing the market at least not significantly. And so those larger brands are feeling that sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. They're losing tiny, tiny fractions of market share to all of these multiple new challenger brands. And that is certainly not something that you want to look at on your brand scorecard and see.

(27:47):

And so from a larger brand perspective, I think it comes back to a little bit of what I said and sort of putting it together. Those bigger brands have but don't realize they have the power of data and pooling their data and their resources to drive that customer centric approach. They have share not only share of wallet, they have share of voice, they have share of budget. Those brands have bigger budgets than all of those smaller brands combined. You might not think you do, but you do. Those bigger brands have share of awareness compared to the much smaller challenger brands, but those teams and those larger organizations aren't working together to win at that share. They're not taking that budget, that share of awareness, that share of voice, that share of wallet and pulling it together. What you see, and I think what the challenge is is each brand or team or department is somewhat working independently.

(28:49):

And so you might be saying, well, that's all well and good, and if everyone worked together that would be great, but it is a huge organization and I just don't even know how to get started on that. And so without that executive buy-in or really de-siloing or having company-wide customer-centric goals, you can still use your data and your org to make smaller changes first. And a colleague gave me a really great piece of advice that I continue to share over and over again, and it's fine, just one other person inside the company that could benefit from a customer centric approach and someone that wants to work with you on it. Get person to understand digital commerce, customer centricity, help them execute their project, their goal, that brand, maybe it's a smaller brand, maybe it's a smaller market, maybe it's not one of your grow or must win categories or brands, but it's still important.

(30:00):

Ultimately help that person. Let's just say it's a brand manager, be a brand manager rockstar. Get them to dramatically improve market share, do all the things as a digital shelf manager that you know how to do, and I promise you their colleagues, other brand managers, executives are going to start wondering what on earth it is that you're doing and want you to do more of it. And so it's going to create that momentum. It's going to create the flywheel inside the organization to sort of say, now you have one colleague who is a rock star and you've shown them how to do it and all these other people sort of clamoring, so now you found more folks in your organization. You can either help them grow or protect, share, and you've kind of taken a leap, you started small, but that impact and that reach can be really big inside a big organization. It just takes one person, one other crazy person to go on that trip with you, and then from there you can start to get the eyeballs of the people who can make those larger shifts happen. I love that.

Peter Crosby (31:16):

So envy.

Jennie Alexander  (31:18):

Yeah,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (31:19):

Make it look cool. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Peter Crosby (31:23):

Make it make money. Hey, what's happening over there?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (31:27):

There's so much of Jennie, what you're talking about that just reminds me of my brand days because you find the person that listens and you have that person teach everybody else, listen to them. So I absolutely love that advice and especially in other functions. So if you are trying to get someone in RD on board and there's one person in RD who understands it and they see the value, they can then be the advocate for that function because those people trust them and you're not like an outsider coming in.

Jennie Alexander  (31:58):

Absolutely. Right. I mean building that trust exactly the way that you said Lauren is so critical because at large companies, jobs change roles, change org structures change fairly regularly, and so you really want to build the organization and the team structure and sort of your offense, if you will, through trust and through working together and showing someone that it works and putting in the time to, like you said, it's a brand manager or someone in r and d, then you can start to create that sort of flywheel effect, if you will, within the organization. And frankly, it's the same when you think about it from a customer perspective too. You can't build a customer base without trust, so the same can be said internally for your organization. You want to build through it through trust, and I think it just provides a much longer term and sort of more sustainable approach than pointing your finger and being like, everyone must now go after this goal. I think it's just a nicer and more effective way of working.

Peter Crosby (33:25):

It must be so interesting, Jennie, to be on the brand side, be in the trenches for so many years, and then flip over and all of a sudden being the person that's brought in, and you're looking at this table of people that now have this consultant there, and I would imagine, I'm just wondering now that you're on that side of being somebody that's brought in to help, I would imagine achieve some of these things that you're talking about, these sort of shifts or changes in processor, and I'm just wondering how it feels on the other side, and is there a message that you would give to yourself now that you're the consultant? Jennie, what message would you give to in the trenches, Jennie, to think about how to make all this work?

Jennie Alexander  (34:18):

Yeah, I think it's having the perspective of hindsight, if you will, I guess in this case or sort of seeing it from those two different angles. It's ultimately not all that different. Sure, I have different clients. Maybe I change verticals here and there or the platform or the type of retailers that I'm working with are different, but the fundamentals are still exactly the same. So I'm working right now with a client and I'm essentially their merchant. They don't have someone who's able to do it. I'm sort of filling that role, but at the same time, you're teaching the rest of the organization. You are training the rest of the team. Lauren, to your point before you're asking those ridiculous questions if your shampoo comes with a battery or not, to really help them understand what it is to do so that you can eventually move on as the consultant, but you've left them with what it is they need to do to continue to continue that work.

(35:41):

And so when I look back on it, I don't think anything that I did in my corporate days was probably very different than that. I've sort of always had that. If I succeed in what I do as an individual inside a corporation, well my role or my job as it's defined, hopefully in three to five years actually shouldn't exist. And it's really scary to say, it's really scary to say when you're in the corporation to say out loud, but it should work that way. I mean, ultimately, I've come into organizations that I've worked full-time at and I've come into organizations where I'm a consultant to in a way, evangelize that sounds really fancy and fun, but ultimately it's just to get the work done. It's just to get the work done and show someone else how to do it so that ultimately you can move on to the next thing that is that you want to do.

(36:50):

And that's again, probably no different as a consultant just moving to a different client than it is in a role within an organization where if you've taken it to such a point, you let the rest of your team grow so that they can take it over and you get to move on to something else, which I think is, again, whether you're in a consulting role or you're in an organization full time is probably, hopefully, at least for me, it was very fulfilling to be able to move on and then move into different types of roles and have different types of experiences. So it's probably why I ended up ultimately moving to that consultant role anyways, but you can do it in both places.

Peter Crosby (37:36):

Yeah. You're wired for change, it sounds like. Okay. I think so. Done. Check, learned it, move on, pass it along, move on. Yeah, that's very cool. That's very cool. It's how I think our, I've always gotten that sense from our community, the people that are built for this work and for this much change and this much breadth in their roles that's required when you're doing something that's still continues to change like this, it just takes a lot of that sort of hunger for new, for how can I do this better? How can I pass this along? Okay, next. I think it's really inspiring to hear about that. I think that's a great mindset to keep fresh and engaged in this industry

Jennie Alexander  (38:21):

And this industry is so new still, and it's changing so quickly that if you have that passion and you sort of have that interest and that sort of spark, if you will, then the good news is there's always that next thing within this broader industry that you can find passion in. And so I think that, like you said, Peter, just really that sort of type of personality will likely do very well in a digital commerce type of role because there's so much newness, there's so much going on and there's so much to learn that you can kind of just keep moving forward with it and whether you choose to be on the cutting edge of it or just behind that personal choice, but ultimately that searching or spark towards something that's coming new, and there's always going to be something that's coming new in this digital space.

Peter Crosby (39:26):

Jennie, thank you so much for bringing your passion, your experience, and maybe even always most valuable, those examples of how to work in a way that drives towards customer centricity and brings greater value to your customers and of course to the folks that you work with. And I'm presuming you're on LinkedIn. I understand.

Jennie Alexander  (39:50):

Absolutely, yes.

Peter Crosby (39:51):

Perfect. Is that the best way for folks to reach out to you if they want to dig into any of these examples or sort of get your perspective on something?

Jennie Alexander  (39:57):

Yeah, that's absolutely the best way to reach out is just find me, Jennifer Alexander on LinkedIn and you can reach out and happy to have a conversation with anyone around this. It's my passion area. I've been in it for over 25 years.

Peter Crosby (40:13):

That's crazy. I think they were doing it on mainframes then 25 years ago. Yes. With dos spill around. Exactly. Floppy discs then.

Jennie Alexander  (40:26):

Yeah. It may have been. It's slightly embarrassing, but awfully true.

Peter Crosby (40:33):

You're a founder, Jennie, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it.

Jennie Alexander  (40:37):

Thanks so much, Peter. Thanks, Lauren.

Peter Crosby (40:40):

Thanks again to Jennie for sharing her wisdom. So many experts do the same at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Tap into it all by becoming a member. Thanks for being part of our community.