Digital Customer Experience Different in China than in U.S.

David Walmsley, Director, M&S .com, for British-based Marks and Spencer, offered an interesting example of how the digital customer experience and customer needs and wants differ in China compared to the U.S.

During a session at last week’s IBM Amplify 2015 Conference in San Diego, Walmsley talked about the company’s digital approach to customer experience and customer engagement in China.

“We have our own digital team and stores there,” Walmsley explained. “It’s about similarity and diversity. Customers the world over, they want you to deliver the parcel to their hands every time consistently. That doesn’t vary. But, there’s a huge amount of diversity in terms of the customer experience and the product display, in particular. In China, customers don’t want two or three shots of the product. Customers in China want 20 shots of the product. They’ll take in 10 times the amount of information that we’ll typically take in at a glance. They don’t want crisp design. They want density. That puts new pressures on the merchandising capabilities to be able to flex and change. They want dense information and rich pages.”

Walmsley described the 138-year-old Marks & Spencer−which sell food, fashion, and home products−as “intrinsically British in our outlook. Our style is British, our approach is British, but our market is global.”

He said the company prides itself on innovation, having introduced the avocado to the British public and created the first men’s washable suit.

“You have to be able to flex and change in this digital age,” Walmsley said. “It’s very much about a journey, rather than any specific destination.”

He offered three key goals for the company:

“To help drive our conversation, we created our own authentic editorial voice,” Walmsley explained. “We call it Style of Living, a digital magazine published daily with high-end creative credentials, high-level photo shoots talking about style, and key catwalk trends. How we use this through social channels will be the next big for us.”

The second key Walmsley noted was stock awareness.

“Having a tight grip here is the backbone of our business,” he said. “Stock awareness is dynamic. We can surf store stock in digital space in a lot of useful ways and create strong omnichannel connections.”

Third is a strong mobile presence. Walmsley said Marks & Spencer is working with Google on near-store proximity initiatives that are rich in content, supremely shoppable, and seamless.

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