For the retail industry, global digital operation has become the key for enterprises to achieve sustainable and high-quality growth. However, it is not easy to achieve this goal. In addition to the difficulty and high risk of digital transformation, the shortcomings of many enterprises are also an important reason for the high failure rate of transformation, and they need to make up for many deficiencies in capabilities with the help of strong external forces.
Service providers are one of the key external forces that retail enterprises need to rely on. In the tide of digitalization in the retail industry, some high-quality service providers have deeply assisted and participated in the digital transformation of enterprises by virtue of their own technical reserves and deep understanding of digitalization, and have played a vital role in promoting the global digital operation of enterprises.
Not long ago, Tencent Smart Retail released the "2023 Annual List of Smart Retail Global Digital Operation", and set up the "Smart Retail Annual Service Provider Benchmark", and selected 10 annual benchmark service providers through the evaluation of several core dimensions of service providers' product technology, industry influence, service strength, and future potential.
We chatted with a few of these high-quality service providers to see what are the typical pain points faced by retail enterprises in the process of global digital operation. How can enterprises achieve more efficient growth with the help of service providers?
The 2023 annual list of smart retail global digital operation
Service Provider of the Year Benchmark
Take people as the center and promote the integrated operation of the whole domain
Entering the stage of global digital operation, the number one problem faced by many retail enterprises is cross-channel collaboration. Businesses are often busy trying to maintain synergy across channels, ensuring message consistency and user experience coherence. However, different marketing channels require different operational and management strategies, and many companies are often unable to achieve this due to their lack of experience and ability to collaborate across channels.
Only by establishing a people-centered business philosophy can we truly promote the integrated operation of the whole domain. "When enterprises are people-centric, they can directly establish a one-to-one connection with consumers, and form detailed user portraits by collecting and analyzing user behavior data, consumption habits, preferences and other information, so as to achieve an accurate grasp of user needs. On this basis, the next step is to carry out more precise and personalized marketing activities to cultivate user loyalty and activity. Ling Yun, vice president of Weimob Group, said.
To this end, Weimob proposes to provide enterprises with decentralized digital products and services, and provides enterprises with a complete front-end product matrix with the design concept of "one system supports the entire business", including enterprise and micro assistants, member CRM, user CDP, multi-store malls, etc., so that enterprises can close the loop in the integrated system from acquisition, operation to transaction of online and offline, public and private domain consumers, and realize global user operation.
In order to meet the needs of enterprises for global operation, Baozun Yuxin is also actively promoting its own evolution and upgrading, summarizing the practical experience of serving many brands over the years into a set of omni-channel growth model called "i-MORE", specifically, with intelligence-empowered as the core, covering Dynamic Merchandising and Connected Omni-channel), Reliable Supply-chain, and Unified Experience. From pallet management, to information and commodity circulation, to marketing and user experience management, i-MORE is almost "all-round", which can support the brand's omni-channel and full-link development. "Many enterprises lack an overall strategy when doing global operations, different departments do different things, and various channels are not completely connected, which will eventually lead to low efficiency." Liu Ting, general manager of Baozun Yuxin, said.
The Marketingforce platform not only provides "full-link digital and intelligent marketing and sales services", but also launches AIGC marketing content generation, as well as advanced tools such as intelligent customer service, intelligent shopping guide, and strategy assistant. These AI products are integrated with the Mmarketingforce platform to provide enterprises with a "fully integrated solution" that significantly improves operational efficiency and conversion effectiveness. Wang Shiyi, Vice President of Marketingforce, said, "When empowering retail and consumer enterprises, we should reduce costs and increase efficiency internally, stimulate new growth externally, and open up the fundamental context of enterprise growth from both internal and external aspects." ”
Refined operation and in-depth mining of user value
Focusing on people and promoting integrated operations across the globe is only a critical first step. In the smart retail environment, if enterprises want to realize the in-depth mining and long-term operation of user value, they also need to work refined user operations.
However, the reality is that many enterprises are deficient in their refined operation capabilities. For example, in the process of serving retail enterprises, Weimob has observed that some enterprises fail to effectively integrate digital technology with physical business when promoting digital transformation, resulting in digitalization being reduced to a formalized or isolated existence, and unable to give full play to its role. Specifically, it does not make full use of consumer touchpoints for digital upgrading, fails to effectively connect and interact with users, and ignores the importance of digital empowerment and user operation management of the role of shopping guides.
Focusing on this pain point, Weimob provides targeted assistance for retail enterprises. Based on Weimob Retail's membership operation system, enterprises can open up user contact data and unify all member information in the enterprise's public domain, private domain, stores, and franchised stores, so as to achieve unified management and precision marketing of user assets, and adopt personalized strategies according to the characteristics and life cycle stages of different users. At the same time, Weimob's shopping guide business system also further improves the user operation level of shopping guides, ultimately promotes the maximum mining and continuous growth of user value, and then enhances the comprehensive competitiveness of global operations.
In terms of refined user operation, Baozun Yuxin is committed to helping brands build "super users" through user life cycle management. To this end, relying on Tencent's WeChat ecosystem, Baozun Yanxin has proposed the "4C model": traffic acquisition (Capture), private domain promotion (Conect), mall conversion (Convert), and traffic precipitation (Consolidate). Traffic obtains the source of the concerned group, and evaluates the efficiency of traffic from the three dimensions of "quantity", "quality" and "efficiency" of traffic; Focusing on the process of consumers changing from information recipients to actors, private domain activation uses activity and interaction to divide the depth of the relationship between consumers and brands. Mall conversion focuses on the efficiency of consumers' timely conversion, helping brands improve conversion rate and customer order value in activities; Traffic precipitation focuses on the long-term value and fission value of consumers, and evaluates the brand's consumer equity. At the same time, starting from the four major operation scenarios, Baozun Yuxin also provides one-stop services such as advertising, contact point construction, private domain user operation, event planning, membership operation, and page design.
Marketingforce uses CDP capabilities to help companies understand basic user information, interest preferences, behavioral data, etc. through data analysis, and then formulate personalized marketing strategies, target groups, and improve marketing effectiveness. For example, Marketingforce combined the capabilities of Tencent's WeChat ecosystem to create a global digital marketing solution for Hengyuanxiang, which not only helped Hengyuanxiang establish a private domain system on the enterprise WeChat side, but also assisted Hengyuanxiang to achieve more efficient drainage, customer acquisition, retention and conversion through system and AI capabilities.
Rapid iteration to strengthen basic digital capabilities
In the process of promoting digital transformation, more and more enterprises have begun to realize that global digitalization not only means the upgrading and transformation of the front-end of the business, but also has an inseparable relationship with the technical back-end, which requires enterprises to have certain basic data capabilities.
However, strong technical attributes are a threshold for most enterprises to develop smart retail. For example, many retail enterprises find that with the rapid development of digital business, it is often difficult for existing technology systems to quickly respond to and match complex and changeable business needs, especially the large-scale management and collaborative use of diversified data such as commodities, users, and scenarios. At the same time, the compatibility and integration problems between the systems of different technology providers often make it difficult to ensure data integrity, real-time and accuracy, which seriously restricts the smooth progress of global operations.
Of course, this doesn't mean that all retail companies need to invest heavily in building these foundational capabilities. With the increasing requirements for professionals, computing resources, and algorithm capabilities in the construction of technical capabilities, the input-output benefits of this model are not high. With the help of service providers, enterprises can save time or unnecessary energy and better focus on the development of the front end of the business.
As a digital service provider integrating products, technologies, traffic, and operations, Weimob has built a decentralized WOS new business operating system based on Tencent Cloud's underlying capabilities. It provides retail enterprises with an inclusive, technologically advanced, and ecologically open digital business infrastructure by integrating a SaaS platform for digital application integration, a PaaS platform for digital capability sharing, and a sharing platform for digital ecological innovation, which can help enterprises achieve autonomous and controllable business data and efficient collaborative operation within the same business operating system. In this process, relying on Tencent Cloud's technological advantages in computing, storage, big data, network, security, etc., Weimob has been able to provide stable and reliable digital services for millions of merchants, helping brand merchants continue to grow their business operations.
In order to meet the strong demand for digital infrastructure among retail enterprises, Marketingforce is also continuously strengthening its underlying technology capabilities. For example, it has built a vertically integrated AI integration technology architecture, covering underlying basic technologies such as AI, big data, and cloud computing, to an open middle platform, and then to intelligent marketing cloud and sales cloud applications. It provides more than 200 freely combinable functional modules to meet the business needs of enterprises in various subdivision scenarios. In this process, Marketingforce adopts its own Tforce large model to gain insight into trends, accurately identify crowd portraits from a large number of customers in the retail industry, and automatically generate and execute marketing strategies with the support of CDP, MA and other products to achieve personalized services, so that enterprises can be more sensitive to hot spots, better understand needs, and make decisions more confidently.
"Innovative technology is the key to driving change in the retail industry, and excellent service providers should continue to pay attention to emerging technologies and apply them to retail scenarios to improve operational efficiency and optimize customer experience. Liu Ting, general manager of Baozun Yanxin, also believes that "facing the future, digital basic capabilities are one of the key capabilities that service providers should have. "Over the years, starting from the development trend of the industry and consumer demand, Baozun Yuxin has invested a lot of resources in the three core technology sectors of DTC consumer reach, omni-channel operation, data and artificial intelligence, continuously strengthened its technological innovation capabilities, consolidated its own scientific and technological foundation, and helped brands transform from traditional retail models to global digital operations. For example, the newly launched "i-MORE" model is the epitome of its scientific and technological thinking and capabilities.
In fact, today, in the Tencent ecosystem, a group of excellent service providers with diversified capabilities, represented by Weimob, Baozun Yuxin, and Marketingforce, have gathered to help enterprises solve many problems in development and promote global digital operations.
For more retail enterprises, it is also necessary to realize as soon as possible that global digital operation is a systematic project. Whether it is the evolution of business thinking at the strategic level, the improvement of refined operation capabilities at the application level, or the underlying digital basic capabilities, the lack of any one of these may affect the overall process of enterprise digitalization. Enterprises that make good use of external forces and strive to promote their own all-round evolution will be more likely to seize new opportunities and achieve efficient growth in the stock competition environment.
Zhou Qiang | wen
Zhou Qiang is a senior editor at the Chinese New Media Center at Harvard Business Review