Inside The Innovation: Delivering an Outstanding Holiday

Hello and welcome to Inside the Innovation. My name is John Feldman. I'm delighted to be joined by Chad Goldsmith, who is the industry solutions architect for Salesforce. Chad, how is it going? What are you architecting for industries these days?

Hey, John, it's going good. We've got a lot going on, especially now that Covid is here. We've got a lot of people thinking about new solutions and, and how they're communicating with customers in new ways. Things that I didn't have to think about back in the day when I was on the retail side. So it's been interesting. But there is a lot of innovation going on, so it's exciting from that perspective.

It is exciting times in E commerce. Absolutely. I think that we have sort of similar experiences on the retail side of E commerce and it's really exciting to see sort of like stuff blooming again.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Renaissance from. From a technology side, totally.

Yeah. It's great stuff. So we're going to be talking about order management and holiday more broadly. So I wanted to start out by saying that, you know, order management is really becoming a point of differentiation even beyond selection and price. And, you know, it's really now a key part of sort of the experience of a company. So, you know, how can companies prepare to make sure that they're delivering the best, best possible fulfillment experience? Particularly as, you know, we see volume come up and down and it's trickier than ever.

Yeah, you know, there's a couple ways to look at it. There's some things, especially with holiday spikes, that you just can't do anything about. You know, it could be thinking back in my experience, I actually had my own retail brand at one time and during the holidays we had a FedEx truck roll out of our warehouse and get in an accident, start on fire halfway down the interstate. When I was at Harry and David, we dealt with a lot of perishable goods, flowers even. And so part of it is realizing there are going to be things that happen, it's the way it is and what you can do about it. And so the things I always have focused on, and I see successful retailers focusing on, is about communication, getting out ahead of the problems, having a holiday readiness plan, you know, over preparing. I got my start in logistics in the Navy and it's very complex logistics and fulfillment operation there. There's a lot going on. So it was kind of instilled in me to always prepare holiday readiness meetings. Make sure that you can deal with the volumes that are going to happen when there is a An issue when there is a supply chain disruption, you know, with products coming in or something on the outbound that you're not flooded with with calls and you're able to handle that. So those are good places to look at where things might break and where automation can really step in and help out with that.

It makes a lot of sense. I mean, communication as a key way of making sure that even if things aren't going perfectly, that your customers really know what's going on. And it's. As you were describing, planning for holiday, it occurred to me that so many retailers are coming off of really a supply chain shock after Covid, where things that traditionally weren't in high demand or in huge demand and stuff that you expected to move was sitting on the shelves. So it's hopefully for all of us, this, this will be an easier time.

Right? Yeah. I think I got an email today from somebody from a consulting firm and they said they've never had so many supply chain conversations in retail. And even myself, I'm having a number of those as well. I had started my Ms. And supply chain a few years ago before I moved to Oregon and I'm finishing. I'm excited to go back. I did. I didn't realize that it was going to be so relevant, so it inspired me to go back this semester and wrap it up. But it is going back and reading some of my old papers around supply chain disruption and quality management, a lot of those are still relevant and a lot of the topics were around, you know, identifying your key suppliers, having a communication mechanism in place before things get bad so that you can get quick responses and then communicate to your customers as well.

It must have also been interesting to go back and look at those with the experience of, you know, being at Harry and David and having run these huge, you know, these huge supply chains. Did you feel like you were. How were your insights back then?

Yeah, well, it was funny. Like I thought the Navy was complex. Like Harry and David was a whole different animal. We'd actually surveyed people at one point and a large percentage of people don't know that Harry and David actually grows and bakes a majority of their product assortment. So from my office I could look out and see pear trees. So there it takes the supply chain back to a whole new area that I wasn't even familiar with on the agricultural side and when you pick and how weather temperatures might impact your forecasted production. So, so there was that aspect and then just dealing, as I mentioned, with some of the, the outbound getting, getting Products to customers where you might have a greenhouse, have a, an issue and you lose flowers or you might have pineapples stuck on a loading dock somewhere, those type of things. You know, some of them are weather though. They happen every year. I think this year we could see more of that. As you see, you know, know people on loading docks get sick or, you know, they don't have enough people to actually manage the process. Also, I'm sure everybody's already seeing the strain right now on the common carriers, UPS, FedEx and others as they try to keep up where as everybody shifts to digital and this, this increased volume that's going out there. So, but, but yeah, that was definitely an MBA and fulfillment and logistics from a retail perspective, anything that could possibly go wrong could in that environment. But I tell you, the thing that Harry and David did about it, my team did about it, is their customer satisfaction was 110%. If you had an issue, we talked appeasement all day. We empowered customer service agents to be able to do partial refunds, replace orders so that we didn't get stuck in. I got to go talk to my manager or supervisor situation. So that's another area from the preparedness I think retailers can do is make sure that they have those kind of pass some power on to people to make some decisions so that they can keep those customers happy, knowing that issues are going to pop up.

It's really smart so that issues can be resolved immediately rather than snowballing.

Exactly.

I actually once worked in Medford, Oregon and had been past the Harry and David plan and I'd heard that two thirds of the volume happens over the holiday. I mean just some huge amount compared to the rest of it.

Yeah, the teams are pretty explosive. And I think that's why when I think about preparedness, I also think about onboarding seasonal employees, people that are touching and communicating about orders. Not only was 75% of the business in that period, but I think 75% of the staff from a service perspective and supply chain were also during that same window. So there were people that hadn't actually interacted with the brand as an employee for, you know, three quarters of the year. And they're coming in so tools to help them get familiar with procedures and new product lines. And it was a pretty big undertaking to get, especially for service agents to get them through that process of getting familiar with the product assortment for that year. And we, what they could, couldn't do with an order. But yeah, it's, it's, there's a lot of areas to think about. But the person I reported to the, the senior VP at Harry and David was a former army Ranger. So we did, we had holiday readiness. My daughter was born on September 8, we call it in season there. That was, that was the busy period I believe. We started our seven day a week meetings October 1st. So all the management staff was there every day. We met with supply chain every morning to find out if there were any disruptions on products coming in or out of stocks. We also met with the outbound team. Harry and David runs their own trucks out of Medford and then they actually have two other distribution centers that they use as well. So it's quite an operation.

It's really, I mean just anecdotally, you know, I worked at a large furniture retailer and their order management system was this old as 400 thing and the only people that could work, work on it where people are in the Navy who apparently had all the training. It's really interesting that so many of the logistics, these logistics processes are run by ex military people. The other thing you said that I thought was really interesting is that when you do have such a seasonal workforce, it's like how are you able to, you have to make sure that your systems are bulletproof so that when you have someone who really needs to be effective on them, needs to be able to learn it really quickly and then needs to be able to not crash things as they do it, it's a really interesting challenge.

It is, it's, you know, one, getting them trained on it and two, making sure they can effectively take an order. You know, I've, I've been at places and I've worked with retailers that are running 20 year old order management systems and I always kind of joke it's you're spending a week training them how to do control. F4 hit the shift key with, you know, their elbow to be able to add a new line to the order instead of telling them how to upsell a product or cross sell a product. It's, it's a lot of time spent on those older, older systems. So it's, it's been interesting to see the order management landscape for technology really shift more towards service focus so that you have all those tools right in front of you to be able to interact with those customers instead of swivel seating to six different systems to find out what's going on with an order.

And it's interesting because that really sort of parallels some of the core arguments around Salesforce and its CRM product is that you know, Unify everything to one place, make sure you don't have to go to a bunch of systems. And it's interesting to see that now playing out in the same way sort of between commerce and order management systems.

Yeah, it's great timing because right now that's such an important thing. I think I've had experience in organizations where Harry and David, for example, where you could have a customer that has a food blog and the clock is ticking right away when there's some sort of issue that comes up. And if you're having to run to one system for chat, one for email, one for the order management system, one for the commerce system, staple some paper packet together to hand it up for review on what the problem was. It's, you know, I've seen three or four people working on one specific customer order like that, trying, trying to track it down. And I think now when people aren't working in physical proximity to each other, we have, you know, virtual call center agents working at home. They can't go to their neighbor, they can't, you know, walk two doors down or two desks down and have a conversation. They really need that in front of them. Otherwise, you know, the biggest nightmare in servicing during the holiday season is to see your call center board start backing up and to calls in queue. And then the ultimate nightmare is abandonment because you don't get those back in the holiday season. People, you know, especially people that are ordering the last couple of weeks, they're ordering, they need it that day and if you don't have it, if you can't communicate with them, if they're on hold, they're going to move on to somebody else. And that ties back into that. Get as much self service and automation going, get those customers help like when is my delivery date? So that your agents are freed up to actually deal with things so that you're not backing up and losing those customers.

And it's interesting as well because you know, earlier you talked about sort of enabling your agents to completely resolve a problem on the spot was really key to sort of, you know, a well functioning, you know, customer service, order management, appeasement situation. But then also, you know, with, with now customer service primarily taking place in people's homes, it's sort of, you're also saying it has to be that way because if the agent can't resolve it right there sitting down their seat, like it isn't going to get resolved. So that's really interesting, right?

A lot of retailers, especially catalog, you know, retailers that grew up in catalog the agents actually in the call centers would have a stack of catalogs or a book or a binder book on their desk to go through. They would have, you know, printed procedures as well. Or they would just raise their hand and the supervisor would come by and answer a question for them. That's, you know, that's not happening right now. And you have to find a way to surface that information for agents. So it's moving into something. We talk a lot about surfacing order history and the customer information in a single pane of glass, so to speak, but other things like popping up knowledge base articles on how to handle a return, how to handle an exchange. So that's their kind of following along as the associate moves through, looking at different areas of the order. And I've seen some. Some retailers do some really interesting things with predictive CSAT scores and things using artificial intelligence to assist the agent to say, this is what you actually should be doing. You know, this customer will respond to an appeasement more than they would to a refund or replacement. It's just any tool that you can give them is going to help out. And I think that that follows suit to every group in the organization. So supply chain people have that same, you know, what's the weather coming in as I'm looking at it, not just that there's six products in a. In a bin somewhere, but, you know, what possibly could go wrong with that order either getting replenished or going out the door?

Really great. All right, last question, Chad. So holidays coming up. We've talked a lot, sort of in broad strokes. What's the best tip if I'm, if I'm, like, staring at a holiday, I made it through Covid. What's the number one thing that I should do to prepare?

Well, I think that the last word you said, right, prepare the holiday readiness. So make sure you have points of contact in all of the different teams that you've reviewed, communication procedures with your top vendors and suppliers, and that you have quick and easy access and visibility to things like weather patterns or, you know, do I have a disruption? I'm seeing a lot of really cool things in tableau. You know, actually looking at where patterns are and where returns are spiking or missed deliveries or delays. So get some sort of overall view in your operation. So you're not looking at an individual order and saying, hey, there's something wrong with this order, and not realizing it's because everybody in the eastern part of Wisconsin, which is where I grew up, is snowed in and nobody's getting any, any deliveries. It'd be a great opportunity to know that and actually proactively communicate to those people to say, hey, we know you're in this part of the state. We know there are delays coming into the order. We're already on top of it. And you know if it's going to be a major issue, you can start looking at that point on what action do you want to take. So those are all things you can pre plan to get ready for because once it starts like that, you know, that season, that six weeks, that four weeks, there's no coming back from it. So the no bonus days, there's no bonus, there's no redos, there's no do overs. It's just, it is what it is. And after that point like there's you, you just, you know, you can't come back from it. So if you're, if you're doing something new this year, make sure you looked at it three or four times. I know first year that I was involved in pop up stores like in malls, whole different concept, the training and technology and how much product they have. So just look for the areas that are going to break. Use your consumer hat and think about bad experiences you've had in the past and it kind of helps drive you to the areas that are going to be the most challenging.

Awesome. And it's interesting as you sort of touched on as sort of the technology enables a better consumer experience and the consumers expect a better experience. And so like it's sort of faster and faster until it's you know, same minute delivery, I guess.

Yeah. Expectations are up every year. Definitely. We see that over and over in surveys that we do.

Totally. You're judged by the person's last best experience. Right?

Exactly.

Chad, this has been an outstanding conversation. I really want to thank you for your time.

Yeah, thank you.

Want to learn more about you. Where can they find out more?

Probably the best place is they can go to LinkedIn, they can go to Twitter as well. Chad Goldsmith. And check it out there. And yeah, I'm always happy to share thoughts and insights from both the technology and being on the retail side of the table as well. Thanks for the time.

My pleasure. Thanks Chad. And thank you for joining us. Have a great day.