Anna Samkova: If I don't get answer to those questions, they're not customer centric. You know what, if I didn't know anything about E comm, I would just binge on your podcast and I would, I promise I would be better off than many people that's been in e Commerce for 10 years. But someone has to innovate and someone needs to disrupt it and someone needs to serve a customer better. So it's nice to lead the way because being 54, I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of knowledge and I'm happy to share it.
Nathan Bush: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading
[Voiceover]: e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail.
Nathan Bush: Here's your host, Bushy. Have you ever wondered why some brands have die hard repeat customers while others just struggle to get a second purchase? I'm not sure about you, but I've been in both camps before and it turns out there's a lot more to it than discounts and loyalty points. It's about having a solid customer strategy. But what does that actually mean? Today we are going to dive into that. Welcome back to ADD to cart. My name is Bushi joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia and today I am lucky enough to be joined by Anna Samkova, who is the founder of Albany Advisory and just a powerhouse in retail customer strategy. Before going out with her consultancy, Anna was Group General Manager at Brand Collective, which is home to brands like Reebok, Super Dry, Clarks and Hushpuppies. And in these roles she led digital transformation and customer first initiatives across massive retail portfolios. Today she helps retailers uncover what their customers really want and how to turn that into long term growth. I really wanted to pick Anna's brain. So in this episode Anna reveals why most brands completely misunderstand customer ownership. She tells us the key questions that every retailer should be asking to gauge real customer loyalty and tells us why so many businesses are actually sitting on a goldmine of customer data but don't know how to use it. Plus, she shares her unexpected take on loyalty programs.
[Voiceover]: Spoiler.
Nathan Bush: She hates the word loyalty and tells us how AI can enhance but not replace human connection in customer experience. Before we get into this episode, I want to invite you along to a very special event that we have coming up. We have an Add to Cart live event coming up on Wednesday 26th March in Brisbane. I will be joined by the CEO of the Iconic fashion brand Black Milk, Jackie Krueger for a live podcast recording. Jackie and the team have had a turbulent last 12 months with lots of changes including a RE platform and we're going to dive into that as well as their international expansion and how they keep their community of sharkies active and engaged. I'm expecting a lot of unfiltered conversation, plus you'll get the chance to connect with like minded e commerce professionals who get what you do and are really interesting. How good's that? Win win tickets are $20 and limited to just 100 places. Head to add to cart.com to secure your ticket before they sell out and I look forward to catching up with you. There's let's get into today's episode. A big thanks as always to our partners at Shopify and Klaviyo for making this episode and our podcast possible. Now let's chat customer Strategy with nsm Kova Anna welcome to Add to Cart.
Anna Samkova: Thank you so much Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here.
[Voiceover]: It's so good to have you on because we've been talking about this for a little while. I think I met you at Retail Fest two or three years ago when
Anna Samkova: you were still how longer than that?
[Voiceover]: Longer than that.
Anna Samkova: But yeah, we'll go with two or three years.
[Voiceover]: Let's go with that. I can't wait to get into this conversation because you are all about the customer and I've been loving your LinkedIn at the moment. But you've been taking some of your real life experiences and almost unpacking the customer experience with someone who's very, very experienced in retail, but more from a customer lens. Tell me about that. Has it ruined your shopping experience? Because I can imagine that you walk into a retailer now and you go oh yes, they're very customer centric. Or these guys have no idea what's going on.
Anna Samkova: Yeah, good question, Nathan. These days I don't walk into a retailer, I just do everything online because I can't be bothered wasting my time walking to a retailer.
[Voiceover]: You're a kind of person already.
Anna Samkova: Yes, but I am your type of person. But I think it's just for shopping. Customer centric experience. When I work with my retailers, well with my clients who are the retailers, then I will definitely do my due diligence and do a bit of mystery shopping in a non invasive way. But then in that case I will walk in into physical retail. Otherwise no, I just can't justify spending time on it. I'm so sorry for those people who are making all their stores look absolutely beautiful, but I'm sure that I'M experiencing the same thing digitally.
[Voiceover]: And when you are talking to those clients for the first time, I bet
Nathan Bush: you get lots of people ringing you up to go.
[Voiceover]: Anna, we need your help. We think we're customer centric, but we need, you know, your guidance. What do you look for to get a really quick reading on whether an organization or a leader is truly customer centric?
Anna Samkova: You know, I didn't think that I will be getting phone calls about customer centric culture. I thought it will be more around digital innovation and digital transformation considering my expertise in that. But no, it actually starts with the data driven strategy. So I do get a lot of phone calls and DMs about our data is a mess. We don't know where to start. We don't know. We think we know who the customer is, but we don't really. And then I always ask one question, who in your organization owns the customer? And I normally get two types of answers. It's rather everyone or it's no one. And both are equally wrong because everyone is no one.
[Voiceover]: That's fair.
Anna Samkova: And no one is self explanatory. And if this is the answer I get it means that no one has that ownership of checking the journeys, creating the moments with intent. Everyone sits in silos, E commerce do their thing, retail ops do their thing and they're all doing amazing things. But most of the time they just sit in BAU and executing a business strategy that is product led in many cases. Let's just face it.
[Voiceover]: So then in your view, if it can't be everyone and it can't be no one owning the customer, who should own the customer in a medium to large organization?
Anna Samkova: Look, it needs to be driven by the leadership team for sure to begin with because they're the only ones who prioritize in the projects and the roadmap. So if it's not a priority for them, it won't be a priority for the team because everyone just will come up with hundreds of 50,000 excuses why they're not doing it and how busy they are. So it definitely needs to stem from the executive team and then it needs to be passed on to the people. The person who is in charge of the customer service team cannot own that. So it's rather the chief customer officer or in many cases it is a cmo, whoever that centralized body that sits across multiple departments but reports to the senior team, rather the COO or CTO or a CEO.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Now as a bit of background, for people who don't know you, you Were group general manager for Brand Collective and formally under the PAAS group before that for a decade. So you we're talking about big retail here, both online and physical, which obviously we've got a disdain for physical retail. Now tell me about the executive buying because I think that's really interesting. I've worked in large retail as well and there's plenty of executives who say they're customer centric, but then the first thing they will talk about is product or stores. What are the signs you look for in a leader that they are actually thinking about the customer?
Anna Samkova: Simple questions. What is your retention rate? I normally ask what is your customer lifetime value? What is the tenure of your customer? Who are your high value shoppers? And normally I just get the eyeballs that get widened. It's like, what do you mean? It's like, well, who is the customer that spends the most money with you? How many do you have? How often do they come back and what is the average order value and how many people? How do you track active customers? How many do you have? How many sit in your one time buyer, two plus time buyer, three times plus buyer and what have you? If I don't get answer to those questions, they're not customer centric.
[Voiceover]: What proportion of executives would you speak to that know the answers to that?
Anna Samkova: Some do. They might not answer that. This is a loaded question. Some may not give me the answer immediately, but they can tell me, you know what I know, we track it. Let me come back to you. And I normally get a spreadsheet.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, okay.
Anna Samkova: But yes, you're right. And the reason why I'm saying so this question from you because you know that it's quite unusual to know the answers to those questions. That's when I get a phone call.
[Voiceover]: Yes. And do you find that it's usually a reporting problem or a data problem that you know, you mentioned there that the data does exist somewhere? Usually. But it's not in front of leaders in those large businesses most of the time neither.
Anna Samkova: It's a priority problem because if you don't prioritize it, yes, you do have access to many dashboards and many reporting. But if you don't ask the question from your team of what it is that you need to know about the customer, they won't tell you because that means that's not the priority for them to track it either. You have to ask the right questions.
[Voiceover]: Okay.
Anna Samkova: That's why you have the podcasts where you educate people about the questions to ask. You know what if I didn't know anything about E comm, I would just binge on your podcast and I promise I would be better off than many people that have been in e Commerce for 10 years.
[Voiceover]: Oh, I'm hugely lucky to do what I do to be able to speak to people like you because I'm constantly learning. That's why I do it. Because I've been in E commerce for almost 20 years now, but every week I learn something new. So I can imagine that if you were new to it, it would be like a bit of a fire hose at the start, but you start picking up themes over time, right?
Anna Samkova: Yeah. But the difference is you shop every week and you record these discussions, so you're very consistent with that. Not many people are. They hop on, they hop off, and then they say it doesn't work.
[Voiceover]: That's true. Some would say stubborn.
Anna Samkova: Yeah, we'll call it stubborn.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it's a long burn. So I am interested because obviously I love what I'm doing. And you've gone from the corporate world of retail and now started Albany Advisory. Tell us about that move for you. Because when you did that, I was like, yes, so good to see you do it. But at the same time, I know that that comes with risk and uncertainty. What was the motivating factor for you behind making that move to starting your own consultancy?
Anna Samkova: I didn't leave to start my own consultancy. I was with PAAS and later Brand Collective for closer to 15 years. And I've learned enormous amount. I met fantastic people. I met amazing vendors. So there was more of a. It was a question, actually going to share it with you. I asked myself one question. If I have five years to live, will I be doing it? And we don't have to go into spirituality behind this question. But the answer was, hell no. So that's why I stepped out, you know, achieve what? I think I've wanted to enter a very different stage in my life. I am at the different stage stage in my life. I'm much older than you and probably many people who listen to this podcast as well. And you know, when I was 20 years old, I didn't know that I will have an opportunity to leave after the age of 54. So for me, it's a blessing and I don't take it for granted. And I'm very grateful for everything that I have experienced up until this point. However, I do not know how long I have and, you know, every day is a gift. So I want to pack every single day with as much freedom to make my own decisions. And add value and service others as I can without being constricted into anything. So I stepped out. I had no idea what I'm going to do. My idea was that I will have a sabbatical for undisclosed length of time because I didn't know how long I would want to be on sabbatical. I've never been, so I thought it was very attractive and amazing. I'm going to have the best time of my life. And two months into it, I was so bored. So bored. I was just bored out of my mind and I needed that intellectual stimulation. So it didn't take long. There's one particular client that's calling me three times and on the third time I was like, okay, let's have a meeting. Let's just see what, what I can help you with. And then it turned out that they wanted me to consult with them. And at that point, actually I told them, I'm going to think about it because I didn't know what consultants do. So I just called and I said to him, so what? What do consultants do? And he had to explain to me. He's like, okay, just come home, I'll just explain to you for status, maybe get rid of your Gmail address and start communicating with people from your professional address. So. And he set up Albany Advisory probably six months prior to me exiting Brand Collective. So, yeah, by the time I got home, he gave me a Microsoft license and say, here's your email address, here's the domain. Welcome.
[Voiceover]: No more sabbatical for you.
Anna Samkova: No more sabbatical, thank God. Because, yes, you were not a very pleasant person to be around whilst you were on your sabbatical. Enjoy the food that you were cooking and everything else. But no, can you just please do what you do best? And yes, so I joined the company.
[Voiceover]: That's brilliant. The idea of moving from a corporate world into a consulting role where you are in control. Has it worked out for you that you actually have more freedom and more free time? Because I know a lot of people have this idea of that's what it's going to be. Is that what it is for you?
Anna Samkova: I have more freedom. I don't have free time. I work all the time.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, I'm the same.
Anna Samkova: Yes. But I think I have psychological issues because I just enjoy doing it more than I have to do it. I don't have to, but I choose to and I want to. And I'm really enjoying it. I love the people I engage with, I love my clients and I love the community. And yes, I'M enjoying the freedom. You know that the political freedom was my motivator behind me leaving Ukraine 31 years ago. So freedom is one of my personal values. So as soon as I had an opportunity to exercise it again, I jumped at it.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant.
Nathan Bush: And so tell us about the type
[Voiceover]: of work that you're doing now and if you're able to some of the clients that you're working with.
Anna Samkova: Sure. I normally focus on customer strategy. I'm trying to stay away from loyalty because loyalty comes across as it means different things to different people. But when you talk about, well, I speak about customer strategy is pretty self explanatory because. And I'll tell you why. So the moment you start talking about loyalty, automatically people think loyalty program, hard work. I need tech, I need to automate it, I need humans to explain it to me what to do. And I need the attack to enable it, meaning I need many upgrades, I need to invest a lot. So it's already. Before you even finish the conversation, it's already too hard and I think it could be laziness as well. So we just want to stay away from that. And in many cases I tell my clients, okay, let's just imagine that you already have the loyalty program. What do you want this to do? How do you want to serve your community, your customers, considering that you already have it? And this is where the conversation gets stuck as well, because they actually don't know because they haven't thought about it. Unfortunately, there are plenty of businesses out there that have not done any customer service forever or for a very long time. So they don't even have this feedback loop to ask the questions and the platform to facilitate the answers as well, where they can collect this feedback too. So that's dangerous because you need to understand how you can collect those insights from your customers. First of all, your retail team will know they're the ones who have the answers to all the questions. So always ask them. Your customer service team will definitely know. So get them all in one room and have a conversation. So you will have a lot of answers and run the survey, which is a very healthy thing to do. I'll give you an example. One of the clients that I currently have, I asked them this question. So you want to build the loyalty program. What is the motivator behind it? Why would you want to do it? Are your customers asking for it or your retail team are begging for it? Turned out that the retail team have been asking for it, but they were not sure if their customers would want it or not. So I said to them, okay, well, have you asked your customers? Us said, what do you mean? Have you run the survey? Turned out that they haven't. And the last time they did it was about 10 years ago. I thought, well, do you think it's a good idea for us to maybe do that? Anyway, they're very receptive to all my feedback. So we run the survey, and the overarchingly overwhelming response from customers was, have the loyalty program. Because my hazard Bunnings has it, officeworks has it, Mecca does. We go and shop there all the time. So we want to feel special and we want you to recognize it as well.
[Voiceover]: I think there's a big difference. I'm working at the moment with a client implementing a loyalty program, but we are very upfront about it, saying, this is actually a promotional program. For now, it's just part of our promotional strategy because it is rewarding. It's coupons, it's all that stuff. It's very straightforward using the oppo platform, which is another story. But it's been very straightforward. And we said, guys, for the first six months, this is purely promotional to keep customers, to train customers in a certain behavior. Because there is a big business transformation that's happening and really important for the next six months that we train customers to buy online and to repeat purchase. And we're very upfront about that. We said, but it cannot be this forever, because what we need to transition to is into a community. And once we transition from a loyalty program, which is essentially promotions, into a community, it's a different ballgame altogether. And when you said about laziness being at the heart of why people want to implement a loyalty program, usually I think you're so right because there's so many retailers who you speak about loyalty programs, and they're like, yep, that's good, because we can control that. We can automate it. We can use tech to do it. But then you turn the conversation to, we've really got to have a strong community. Like, oh, that seems like hard work. Community's hard because it's real, right?
Anna Samkova: Absolutely. But you're right by starting with transactional loyalty and being transparent about it, because it doesn't actually matter where you start as. As long as you do, because you will start building that community by offering the transactional discounts, but you're still building the community. And then you have an opportunity to learn more about their behavior. And this is the trick, the behavioral tracking rather than transactional.
[Voiceover]: Yes. So I'm interested in behavior because you mentioned surveys there. So I'm interested firstly what your view on what a useful survey looks like. Because we all know that what customers say and what they do is often different. So how do you set up useful surveys and then what kind of customer insight data do you use alongside of those surveys to understand that real time behavior? So we might start with that survey side. How do you set up your surveys to make sure that what customers saying actually reflect what they're going to do?
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Anna Samkova: It's a very good question. You know, I normally start the questionnaires because I want to find out about customer behavior, if they prefer to shop online in store, if they discover things online or is the online discovery helps them to go into physical stores and continue to shop. So there are many behavioral questions that I include in the survey. The moment I pass it around for approval and that goes through marketing, merchandise planning, executive team, then it just, they beef it up to a fiction book. So we need to strip it down and understand. Okay, so first of all, let's just go back to the purpose behind it and what's the why behind we do what we do. And this is to understand who is that customer and why they shop with us and how can we create that connection with them that they continue to support the brand and keep shopping with the brand. That's what we want. So that in many cases for people to come back not because they're just necessarily just in love with the product, but they also have that emotional connection with the brand. So going back to the survey, we do need to strip it down from making it the questions about absolutely everything that they do and narrow focus to customer behavior. And if they want to run the survey about the product, then they can do so. But it has to be a separate conversation. So it has to be short and sweet. I ask about five people to test how long it takes. I always ask to disclose the timing. How long does it take to complete the survey? Just for that transparency reason and obviously you need to incentivise it as well.
[Voiceover]: And on those two things, is there an optimal time that you think customers will give up to do a survey and what's the level of incentive that you find works to get them to actually care to do it?
Anna Samkova: Anything between three and five minutes is absolutely essential because you don't want them to write long stories, you just give them the multi. Obviously just break it down. So it's not everything is multi choice. But yes or no, just whatever you do with the questions, it should require a very short answer. 3 to 5 minutes at length will get you a very good uptake. Right. With this particular client, the rate was astronomical. The uptake rate was 47%. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the report. 47%, I've never seen that. So that means that they've never asked the customer, but when they did it's like, oh, thank you for asking. We've been waiting for you to ask these questions and we are very happy to tell you because we love you. But there are a few things that we would prefer for you to do differently or better or we just wanted to have an opportunity that we do love you and we love what you do and we love wearing your clothing. In this particular instance, this is an apparel business as well. And then the incentives can be depends on the average order value. But I found anything between 15 to $20 is a sweet spot.
[Voiceover]: Okay.
Anna Samkova: And can I tell you, in many cases that don't actually redeem it really the redemption rate can sit around 50% meaning that we just wanted to share the feedback. So the incentive is there, but it's not a driver.
[Voiceover]: And I suppose it's a nice thing to say for customers to go, actually we're really valuing this feedback. So we're willing to put something on the line for you to say that we value this, that we're not just going, we're asking everyone for feedback and then we'll probably. We might look at it, we might not. It's like we're actually paying you to do it. So it automatically says something about the value of that input when you are sending that out to customers. And we could take this example. Are you sending out to everyone on the database or are you sending it to the top tier of customers Only
Anna Samkova: depends on the questions.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Okay.
Anna Samkova: So it really does. Because if you don't want to have skewed answers, then you shouldn't widen the net a little bit and don't just send it to your high value active shoppers or even active customers who have purchased with you in the last 12 months, just go a little bit wider because that's where it becomes interesting. If they haven't shopped with you in the last 12 months, that potentially you might get the answers why they haven't.
[Voiceover]: Do you ever change up the questions for say churned customers versus active customers?
Anna Samkova: Well, absolutely, yes. Or you can widen it to the point where you include the Churn customers as well. And then again this is your definition because Churn could be after 24 months or after 36 months that they haven't shopped with you. So that could be the reasons. Could be, it could be not. So it depends. But you don't want this to be too diluted because what you want this service to do, you want to get some answers from it. But the answers that will propel your customer strategy and drive some sort of initiatives. And I tell you with this particular survey that I keep reverting to when I read it, and you can imagine there was many, many hours of reading that feedback, I came up with the customer strategy that will keep them busy for the next two years pretty much straight away.
Nathan Bush: Wow.
Anna Samkova: That's how powerful it was.
[Voiceover]: So was there anything coming out of that survey, that incredible response rate that really surprised you?
Anna Samkova: Yes, the overarching appetite for having the loyalty program in that particular brand?
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Okay. And so above and beyond surveys, what are some of the tools, the tech, the data that you think is non negotiable that we should be looking at to understand customer behavior?
Anna Samkova: I think you have to create an ecosystem of these tagging tools because it's pretty much depends on the retailer. If it's a pure player. I would suggest to do the online mystery shopping to identify the gaps. We know that Humi is doing it very well in the omnichannel world. It's anything from you mentioned yacht park collecting product reviews to doing progressive profiling at point of sale. And we know there are tech companies that allow to do it currently and integrate with the point of sale and even plug in AI to communicate with customers afterwards. And there are a few tech players on the market right now, they're doing an amazing job with it and too many people and brands are too scared to jump on. But someone has to innovate and someone needs to disrupt it and someone needs to serve customer better. So it's nice to lead the way. But I think it's not one thing in isolation. It's many things you know. Well, maybe you don't know, but I am a big fan of the customer data platform. I was actually the first person when I was at paas who launched the customer data platform in retail and we never looked back. So we had this single customer view that served us incredibly well during the pandemic. So there were a lot of conversations with merchant people and property people that was incredible for us. CRMs are good for communication and engagement purposes. And then we have email marketing automation platforms that are also AI driven. There are so many, it's a combination of so many tools because it really depends on the business maturity stage and if they're pure player or they have an omni true omnichannel environment and also the number of stores that they have, it's a hundred plus or 200 plus. So it's a very different conversations to have. So it's very curated to a retailer or a business. I can't generalize it.
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[Voiceover]: no, no, no, that makes sense. I think there is general confusion or overwhelm in retail at the moment around that single source of truth. I mean you just rattled off a few options there for people in that you can have a CDP which is, you know, a single source for data across the organization for a customer. You can have a CRM which is sometimes seen as interchangeable. And then you can have email and direct marketing platforms which host a whole lot of both personal and behavioral information for customers. And depending on who you speak to, any one of those can be their single source of truth around the customer. What's your view especially around CDP vs CRM vs direct marketing platforms around how that should be handled?
Anna Samkova: Very good question and you absolutely right. There is a lot of confusion and There is still to this day I don't see a massive adoption of the CDP platform. And for the life of me I don't understand why. I mean if you have a look at how much money brands spend on performance marketing, that kind of just, you know, you might as well flush it down the toilet and just hoping for rise of 3 to 4. This is why I know that many brands are not customer centric because they're not tracking that behavior. Because to track that behavior, the email automation platform not necessarily going to show it to you and neither is CRM. So what is the source of truth? And many retailers will tell you that's point of sale. But how is it collecting the information from online and how is it integrated in the back end? And most retailers nailing the sales data, you know they're using TRS or any other tools that spit out that reporting for them in terms of sales and profit margin. But which platform actually tracks the customer behavior? How many times they shop with you across which category? Which skus do they purchase? What color they prefer, where do they live, how old they are, what is their geographical location? Do they prefer to shop online or in store? We were able to extract that information from the CDP platform so that served for us very well. And we could have the conversations across different departments and as I mentioned, including properties. So where did we close the store and which customers shop at that store we're reopening in this location. Okay, can we communicate to that cohort of clients that we opening in a different location but is it still in close proximity to where they live? Hi. You can have these conversations like where are you going to extract the data from? Not from your point of sale.
[Voiceover]: Yes. Okay. In the ideal world you've got a CDP sitting in the middle which is pulling information that is sales data both online and offline for those customers. Personal data, behavioral data, perhaps what they clicked on, what they looked at online, maybe even survey data, maybe customer service data. So you're getting a full view in one central space that can then feed out into all the activity that you're doing, whether that is property looking for what are the new locations that we need to open up in all the way through to performance marketing, Are there segments or are there customers that we haven't yet talked to that are screaming out for us. Is that kind of a fair summary?
Anna Samkova: Yes, absolutely. But then you need to also know what questions to ask and what are you going to do with the answers to? Is it going to feed into the business strategy or it's Just going to just be voiced out and forgotten. I think this is a very important narrative. It's not the information for the sake of collecting information, but always have that purpose. Why are we actually doing it? Why it's important, important to us. And what are we going to do with that information? Because, you know, we. I don't have to tell you, in retail, there are hundreds of thousands of reporting available all the time and it just stems from every single direction. And my suggestion is to run the experiment for any retailer, stop circulating the reports and see how many people going to ask for it. That's going to be a true indication if they actually read it or they don't. And if they do something about that. Yes.
[Voiceover]: Oh, I've got flashbacks now to a guy I worked with, Alan, he actually did that and it was amazing. He said, guys, just stop sending the reports. No more reports going out. And there was silence. Like literally nothing. Like, okay, so that's our problem as much as it is their problem because our reports aren't adding value to their life. So it goes both ways. And then he was also about, you know, the right questions to ask. So if you wanted to test how good the data is that you currently have, and you mentioned some of these at the start around the questions that you ask when you go into an organization, what are kind of two or three questions that E Commerce managers could ask of whether it's their marketing team or whoever has access to this data that gives them a good view on whether they have the right data to query. What are the questions you would start with?
Anna Samkova: What are they tracking currently? And we're going back to what we mentioned in the beginning, the retention rate. Many times no one can answer what is the tenure of the customer in their organization? No one knows. And what is the customer lifetime value? That becomes a cumbersome question because people can't answer that question straight away. It's like, we'll talk to data analysts. Well, if you need to talk to data analysts, that means that you're not. That's not top of mind for you. This is something that you don't discuss in trade meetings. So what do you discuss? Acquisition. Well, acquisition is pointless if you don't have the retention strategy because plus it's very expensive as well. So you'd rather have one customer shopping with you 100 times than a hundred customers shopping with you once, because that's expensive. And then again, the question is how expensive? Going back to lifetime customer and then tracking the. Obviously you have to include the profitability of Each channel, which my favorite question, how profitable is each channel for you? How profitable is your new customer versus their returning customer? This is a very different level of discussion and I don't get many answers to that. And that's not a problem. But it means that we just need to keep educating the market about the questions to ask and why it's so important because that impacts your growth and your profitability. So you need to talk to the executive teams, their language and maybe park the emotional loyalty. But start with mass first.
[Voiceover]: Yep. And the more you've unpacked this for us, it emphasizes your earlier point that this is an organizational issue. This isn't someone in marketing looking after it. Like those questions that you just asked around profitability and lifetime value. They're CFO questions as much as they are marketing questions, right?
Anna Samkova: Yes, absolutely. You need to show them the numbers. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: A lot of executives might see customer based activity as the soft stuff. Right. If you come from a customer background, you know that that is the engine of everything behind it. How do you convince executives when you are looking to get sign off on customer activity, which might not be direct ROI activity, that in the long term this will pay off?
Anna Samkova: Yeah. Don't convince them, show them the numbers. Because retailers care about the bottom line. So instead of talking about loyalty, I talk about customer strategy. Because the moment you say loyalty, they think points and discounts and that's profitability, that's margin erosion and it's not real customer value. So it's simple math. You say retention equals profit, keeping your customer, it's cheaper than acquiring a new one, easy. Then you go churn equals lost revenue. And I show them how much money they're leaving on the table. So then you talk about customer experience equals long term growth. And the best brands will be thinking beyond the next transaction. So it's a long term game for them. By the time you finish the whole three, they're in.
[Voiceover]: And so burn the word loyalty. Loyalty is a dirty word. Get it out of the conversation.
Anna Samkova: Look, I'm steering away. This is just my observation in the last few months of being in this space. That's why I came up with the term. Not that I invented it, but customer strategy because it just opens. It's just a different, slightly different mindset and it's open more discussions as opposed to loyalty because everything just, they just put it all in a box that is too hard.
[Voiceover]: And what's your view on, on those connection moments? So when you're starting out or you're a small retailer, you can Absolutely. Do things like handwritten notes within parcels and you can do the surprise and delight and you can do the community events. You kind of notice that as retailers get larger, there's a tendency to drop these kind of connection points off and turn it into automated programs or let the machines do the loyalty work. Do you feel that still at a larger retailer level you can do those connection moments?
Anna Samkova: Well, 150% you can. It actually doesn't matter about the size of organization. It depends on their priorities and if they are customer focused, then they will find the way to do it like many retailers are doing it very well.
[Voiceover]: Who's your favorite? Are you going to call someone out as your most customer centric retailer at the moment?
Anna Samkova: Well, I started to call it that on LinkedIn just because I realized that we don't do it often enough. So I kind of want to lead that way. And every single one of us experience it every day. There is something that we come across that we rather annoyed or we're excited about it. So I choose to ignore the parts that are annoying and focus on the ones that where there was a surprise and delight. So you picked on it. My post about Sasha, I didn't plan it. I was just so in awe of how quickly he turned the whole experience around for me. Like I can't live without my laptop. So when I dropped it on the floor, that was a moment for me that taking a deep breath became a thing. You know, maybe a few deep breaths and think, what the hell am I going to do? So half an hour later I was having omen. I was there 10 minutes before they actually opened it. So by the time I walked 10, I was not in a good shape at all. So. And maybe I was like, I had this sense of shock and the guy just took over the whole thing. He just, he. I don't know that he had a very high level of awareness of what happens when people walking in with that shock on their face and their laptop and saying, I just dropped it. And he just took over the whole experience for me. He says, look, don't worry, leave it with me, we'll figure it out. And then half an hour later he said to me, I don't have good news for you, but you have to replace it. But we can transfer the data and by the way, your laptop will be ready to go by 11am tomorrow. So I was at Harvey Norman at 9am on Saturday and everything was ready for me and I was operational at 11am on Sunday. You know, we can talk about it.
[Voiceover]: Amazing. That's so good to hear too, because Harvey Norman often gets a bad rap, right? So it's brilliant to hear those examples and for you to call them out.
Anna Samkova: Yes. But next, you know, they can do 1,000 things, right, but then only one person will experience, have a bad experience, and then it just skyrockets. So I now want to reverse engineer it. By the way, Sasha is called Mr. LinkedIn now in Harvey Norman circles. It got escalated.
[Voiceover]: You've made him famous.
Anna Samkova: Do you know how good it is, what a good feeling it is because one of the executives, his boss's boss, read the post. Maybe because I attacked Harvey Norman. I don't know why it happened, but he read the post and he extended their recognition to Sasha. So when I walked back to Harvey Norman again, he goes, now I'm like a hero there. It's like, is this Anna? And Sasha's like, no, no, this is the Anna. And it made such a difference to them because they could not believe that someone actually recognized it publicly and nowhere else but on LinkedIn. So, yes to your original question. There are many retailers that do it very well. We just need to call it out more frequently. And I have to be that person. And I'm not ashamed of that.
Nathan Bush: No, I love it.
Anna Samkova: It makes the difference.
[Voiceover]: It does make a difference. And I think, especially for those that are on the front line of customer service, it's really important that they hear how positive and how much of an impact that they can make on people's lives, not just shopping experiences. In that Sasha example, do you think that's an example of an individual with a really great customer service mindset, or is that systemic within the way that they've been allowed to operate and trained up within the Harvey Norman system?
Anna Samkova: Well, I have a perfect answer for you. And it's definitely systemic because that post went viral to a degree that even Sasha's mom actually commented on it. But it went viral within Harvey Norman circles as well, because the employees were tagging each other out just to spread the word. And because they were so impressed, someone else contacted me on LinkedIn and said to me, anna, we live in the parallel universe. Because I just went to Hobby Norman in Bondi and had a very similar experience. And I remember you posting around this. And I said to him, do you remember the names of the people that served you? And he named them immediately. And I said, great. So he said, you know what? I'm going to take a leaf out of your book and I'm going to call it out on LinkedIn and he did post it. I just asked him to tag Harvey Norman and he couldn't tag the people but he mentioned their name and which Harvey Norman it was. And I saw the post and I tagged Sasha on it as well. And again it just spread across. So it's definitely instilled in the culture and I'll tell you why, because the executive team just calling out that excellent customer service because I know, because Sasha is the one who got the text message and he showed to me as well from the executive team. So it's then they in the stage. So he was in Victoria and wanted to see Mr. LinkedIn as well and have a chat to him. So it is part of their culture because when the executive team calling it out, that means that they're nailing it.
[Voiceover]: That's brilliant. I hope that you're getting staff discount there now.
Anna Samkova: Well, you know, he said to me, you're actually going to, for the rest of your life you're going to have a. He put it, I think as golden ticket. I don't know what that means, but that I certainly, when I walk in there, I'm very well recognized. But, you know, not that that was the intent, you know, obviously the intent was to highlight their fantastic experience and what an amazing job they're doing. I was so impressed. I didn't have to post it on LinkedIn, but I said to him, look, I'm so impressed. Can I just record it? I didn't know what he's going to say. He was just in his element. So good on camera. Yes, it was such a satisfying and fulfilling thing for me to do. So I'm definitely going to do it more often because I come across it all the time.
[Voiceover]: So good. You mentioned before, I also like that's what Humi are doing with Inside Retail is they've got data across a lot of online shopping experiences and they could have easily gone the negative path of calling out retailers who aren't doing it well. But every headline, every post that you see is about the ones who are doing it well and what we should be striving to meet in terms of standards and customer expectations. So I think it's really great that you're putting a positive spin on it, 100%.
Anna Samkova: They set up such an amazing benchmark and I use their stats very often in my content writing in my reports as well. And by the way included we have a download on the website about the best loyalty programs in Australia on the market and that was stemmed from the conversations on LinkedIn. Someone few months ago posted about very well known brands wanting to have a loyalty program, asking the network if they know which loyalty programs that they're impressed with. And we did further research and they just reorganized it as a download. So if anyone wants to have a snapshot of that and the summary that they can download it.
[Voiceover]: Great. Are you prepared to give any spoilers there? Who came out number one?
Anna Samkova: We didn't write it but we just put it into. Yeah, we just collated into a digestible format so that if you want to have a snapshot view then yes, do that. But Adam Posner, you know the loyalty specialist, the Adam Posner, he does it very well. He's got the report so he always calls it out who's number one and two. But there are so many brands doing an amazing thing. It's just, and you know we see it on LinkedIn when they get called out, they win the awards and I just, I love seeing that. I love celebrating the brands that provide such great customer experience to their customers. It's just, I don't know, it just creates beautiful moments for all of us and something to strive for.
[Voiceover]: I love that. That's good energy. That's great energy and I love it. You started as well. Speaking of energy, I saw you started your LinkedIn Friday sessions. Tell us about that.
Anna Samkova: Ah yes, Spotlight Fridays. I don't know, just. I came up with it. I just woke up one morning. Somehow like every Saturday morning I come up with something and some of the ideas are completely atrocious so they don't see the day of light. But I just thought wouldn't it be nice to call out those beautiful people in our community and our network but with the view that make it short and sweet for them to focus on what problems they solve for our community and the network as well. So when they know and can identify the gaps in their processes or the struggle with tech or the integrations or whatever it might be that they think of that person and the business immediately and there is something to say about that. So this Spotlight, you know, is the last thing I wanted to do is to learn how to do live streaming because I was just staring at the screen, I'm thinking how on earth I'm going to create the LinkedIn event and link it to the third party software. Well, I don't have to explain it to you because you're nailing it, but I just, it was a disaster for me, so. But anyway, we are three weeks into it and we gaining the momentum and people love it because it is about them. It is Short. And they share practical tips very quickly and the community get to know them better, so. And like you, you know, I learn a lot through these sessions too, because when I want to, when I see the opportunities, when I can do the introductions, and I know that that solution would be very impactful for my clients and beyond. I want to call it that. I don't want to walk around saying, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. It's like no one cares about me. I just, I don't even care about Anna. It's not. It's irrelevant. It's just how much value we can add. How can we serve our community and our network better? That's what I'm interested in.
[Voiceover]: Well, we care about you, Anna, and we've learned so much from you today. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you have. Tell us, what's the priority for you for the next 12 months? Where are you putting your energy?
Anna Samkova: Exactly what I've just mentioned. How can I serve my clients better? How can I be a better person? How can I add more value? That's my overarching motivation every single day. And it's just, it's for my clients, it's for wider community and for vendors as well. How can I stitch it all together? How can I bring the right people in the right room? I get approached for mentorship, who would have thought? And coaching as well. And I never thought that I enjoy it as much as I actually am enjoying it and helping people to transition from corporate to consulting and beyond. And just in general, you know, being 54, you know, just I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of knowledge and I'm, I'm happy to share it.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. So if people do want to get in touch, you've mentioned there your LinkedIn profile, which is very active and very informative. I love keeping up with you there. But how else can people get in touch? Maybe the website to download the report as well?
Anna Samkova: They can, but LinkedIn would be a very good start. And by the way, I'm not outsourcing anything for LinkedIn. I do it all myself. And yes, it does take time and energy, but absolutely love it.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And thank you so much for joining us on Add to cart. I loved having our chat and you've taught me a lot around what good customer experience looks like.
Nathan Bush: Oh, my goodness, so many light bulb moments in there. What I love about Anna is that she does not hold back. I think we had trouble just getting the trailer quotes for that because there were so many little snippets in there when I was like, oh, you got to bottle that up. That is just hitting the nail on the head when it comes to customer. But there were three big takeaways for me. Number one, if no one owns the customer, the customer gets lost. Yes, it's very easy to say that we're all responsible for the customer in a retail business. But too many brands assume that because everyone cares about the customer, the responsibility is shared. But really that just means that no one is truly accountable. Anna pointed out that in most retailers, e commerce, retail ops and marketing all operate in silos, leaving the customer experience fragmented. To solve this, you need to ensure that one, you appoint a clear owner, a chief customer officer or a centralized team needs to have visibility across the entire customer journey, if not the marketing team. Number two, you need to track what actually matters. Retention rate, customer lifetime value and repeat purchase behavior should be discussed in every trade meeting as well as profit and revenue. We're not just talking new customer acquisition here. And number three, make sure customer strategy is a leadership priority. If the executive team isn't driving it, the rest of the business won't either. So yes, everyone needs to care about the customer, but you need to make sure that someone is responsible for that customer experience. All right. Number two, data without strategy is just a bunch of numbers. Retailers have more customer data than ever. That's a given. But if it's not being used properly, it's worthless. Anna shared how she asks leaders basic questions like who are your high value customers? And often gets blank stares. I think we can all relate to it because it's a huge problem. So in order to get over that, you need to know your numbers. If you can't answer key questions and know what those key questions are like what's your customer lifetime value? Or what's your churn rate? You are flying blind. These things should come naturally to you. You need to be able to break down silos. If your customer data is scattered across marketing ecosystem, commerce and finance, you don't have a unified view and you will never be able to answer with confidence. A customer data platform or a CDP can help centralize this. And lastly, without action, these insights and this data is actually worthless. So make sure that with every report, every piece of data, what's the action that comes out of it? Data without strategy is just a bunch of numbers. And lastly number three, loyalty is an approach program. It's a mindset. Anna isn't a fan of the word loyalty because too many brands think it means just points and discounts. My personal take is I think we just use the word loyalty wrong. Loyalty is still such a powerful word, but it's not a loyalty program Anna challenges retailers to focus on true customer connection because real loyalty isn't something you buy, it's something you earn. It was really interesting though that when Anna talked about one of her clients that assumed that they didn't need a loyalty program, but then they ran a survey and found overwhelming demand from their customers. For one, it means that customers want to engage on a deeper level. Now that loyalty program might not necessarily mean discounts, but they want to be recognized and that's a core human trait. So customers want to feel valued, not just rewarded. VIP experiences, personalization and strong community engagement can be just as powerful as discounting. Recognizing customers is so key and Anna's experience with Sasha at Harvey Norman. Granted, Harvey Norman not normally called out as an example of great customer experience, but I love Anna's example. But that experience in itself was recognition because it was not a loyalty program. But it was a moment where Anna's laptop disaster turned into an experience worth sharing. And you heard Anna talk about how loyalty loyal she will be to Harvey Norman. Now that is true loyalty. So yes, whether you believe in loyalty as a word or not, loyalty is a real thing. It doesn't necessarily need to be a program though. Thanks for joining us today on Add to Cart to listen to all our e commerce conversations now in the hundreds. You can head on over to add to cart.comau there. You can also also join up to our free private Slack community to share e commerce ideas, tips and questions with other listeners. You can also subscribe to the Add to Cart weekly newsletter and browse some of the video highlights from our chats. There is a lot there that's add to cart.com and if I can ask you one thing before you go. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague who could benefit from it or leave us a review.
[Voiceover]: It really makes a difference.
Nathan Bush: Thanks again for listening. And until next time, keep those customers adding to cartoon.
