I had a lot of fun making this one.
The second episode of People Tell Richard Stuff is all about retail.
I caught up with Jeremy Fennell to talk about life, business and his rise from ecommerce director of Dixons Retail to managing director of Carphone Warehouse.
Jeremy’s background is commercial, but he managed to transform the ecommerce function of PC World and Currys – by, of all things, keeping it simple.
Now he’s at the top of a massive multichannel business.
We talked about:
• Getting multichannel right from top to bottom
• Focusing on the customer experience
• The importance of brand in the retail sector
• Using data to personalise the customer journey (and who you need to hire to do it properly)
• Why he doesn’t like talking about his heroes
Key takeaways:
Jeremy Fennell on…
Restructuring teams to foster innovation:
We put ecommerce people into the business and we bought the commercial people into the commerce team. We made some structural changes that meant that the guys that were running the commercial side of the sites were much closer to the rest of the organisation and the guys that were making the decisions.
Realising the importance of face-to-face service:
We didn’t invest a lot of money in kiosks in store, because we asked customers and they said “I don’t want to go on the internet in store… but please do put something in the store that a colleague can help me to understand things with.” They want to come in and talk to somebody.
Combining the on and off-line:
We went from developing a website to developing a shopping experience and that meant that way in excess of half of the initiatives that we were working on with the website were all about how the customer interacted with it and the shops together.
The importance of analytics in marketing:
The marketing team, we went from spending pretty much none of the marketing budget to spending more than a third of the marketing budget on digital channels and measuring it.
People Tell Richard Stuff: Episode 2
Jeremy Fennell, Managing Director, Carphone Warehouse
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