B Q Marketing

Watch Joanna Robb’s presentation from eTail Europe on how B&Q utilizes responsive design.

Video Transcript

Joanna Robb: First of all, I’m going to just give a bit on the landscape that we’re all working in. Talk about what matters to B&Q and then just give you a bit of an overview of this program that we’re running and then I’m going to talk about responsive design and also I’m going to talk a bit about another way of looking at responsive design; it will all become clear I hope. And then give you some top tips so just things to take away with you that I hope that I’m going to be right about but I’m not going to know until our program is finished. So the landscape that we’re all working in, the way that that we look at it is really over the last 30 years, we’ve gone from having a single channel; the store, along came e-commerce; that’s great, we’ve got two channels now and then we started talking about multiple channels and these channels were not just channels of communication where we talk the way we talk to our customers but also how we deliver to them. And then fairly easy to map out, you can put them in a nice little table. The world that we live in now in Omni-channel, we’re all talking about Omni-channel and it’s more of a cloud, it’s almost impossible to map out as Tom articulated really well earlier, actually trying to say these are the customer journeys that we’re tackling is not impossible.

So a little bit about B&Q if you haven’t heard of us, we were living under a rock all from the States, so we’re basically Home Depot for anyone from the US. We’ve got over 360 stores, we’ve got huge amount square footage in the UK. At one point we were rivaling Tesco for the number one spot, we’ve been around for 40 years and really we’re doing pretty well; 4 billion sales to the last three or four years, so it’s great, so it’s not really anything to smug about anymore. We’ve got this challenge, we’ve got kind of two-fold challenge, first of all we are the market leader by a country, modern home improvement but we’re being challenged on all sides for these little resellers that can spring up, specialists that can develop with very low cost, we always talk about the guy in his bedroom who starts Sheds Are US but it’s not really a joke anymore because not only are these small players nibbling on our heels but also the generalists are getting into our market as well; Tesco for example selling kitchens. So the way that we are approaching this is by developing a program of change, we call it Darwin; by name do a little bit marketing. Because it’s an evolutionary program, it’s about trying to evolve the business and we really recognize it if we don’t evolve we’re not going to survive. It’s one of the largest multi-channel transformation programs in the UK, it’s going to change the way that we sell, and we’re completely re-engineering from the ground up to our technologies but also our processes and our operating model.

There are over 20 systems, many of whom our partners are out there today, we’ve got over 200 people working on this and it’s across four countries but not here to show off about that because it’s not need to be proud of, spending a fortune on that. The challenge that we’ve got is really and I’m going to go into the UI’s that are at the top of these, this is the kind of overall look at the program; it’s the foundation systems, it’s the platform that we’re creating, we’re creating a single platform that underpins all of our direct selling. We’re putting user into phases on top of that, focused to all of our customers but also to our colleagues and then we’re looking at the brands that set on top of that.

So I want to focus a little bit on responsive design and the challenge that that we have in creating those UI’s, we really need to get to a place where we can guarantee and as the guys were talking about earlier; an excellent customer experience across all web enabled devices so that whether that would be Smartphones, tablets, desktops and I’m really going to try and avoid saying mobile too much. We need to be able to deliver the right functionality at the right time for the customer but also to ensure that our business operations are efficient and are lowest cost and that’s something that’s really important to us and limit the need for IT change every time we need to respond to a retail challenge, so this is trying to put the power in the hands of the business teams to the merchandizes. So you’ll a lot of stats and I said I wasn’t going to do stats but I’ll give you one which is what B&Q over the last two years to see our access to our internet offering from mobile or tablet devices go from less than 20% to over 30% in the last 12 months actually and we anticipate that within the next year it’ll be pushing towards 50%. It’s not just device types though, really behind all these; if we just think about device types you’re kind of missing a trick. It’s also about the dimensions of operating systems that we have to consider, bandwidth, touch versus mouse, and with all those in mind we’ve taken a very specific approach to how we build our UI’s.

So we’ve started with the hypothesis which is that the device the customers are using can tell us something about what experience they’re trying to create themselves, where they are on that customer journey. So for example, if they’re using a mobile they’re probably going to want to be more of a transacting and helping journey, so it’s always with you, they’re going to be using it with a single hand, they want to have a short journey, so they want to get to what they’re looking for really quickly. With a small tablet or with a large device they’re more likely to be looking to be inspired, to browse, to shop, they can look at the whole journey, they’ve got a longer dwell time that they’re more interested in the experience as well as the outcome that they’re going for. They’re going to be using multi-tabs and probably multi activities like you could be sitting in front of the TV while they’re browsing on their tablet.

So with that in mind we have a tact list by building an experience that meets those needs so from an absolute basic so for those of with a Blackberry in your hand, it’s absolutely crap browsing websites. We need something that’s screen readable, it’s simple but it’s really low function as well. Going up to some of the best of Blackberry’s, the iPhone, the Galaxy S, the Galaxy Note, we’re kind of bucketing that into what we call Experience One, so this will give the customer quick easy access to the basket and ways way to browse our product sets, have easy integration into our apps and have maybe some short videos because they want help and advice as they’re doing a project but very low level of texts, little nuggets. The small tablets and the large devices now come back to how we separate those in a minute. This experience is like I said rich content, account management for the customers so my account and how are they looking at their past orders using planning tools; it’s highly visual, this high content and they’re probably going to want to print from that. So with that in mind we’ve basically said, if we use a device detection solution, we can built out across all these different experiences and start giving customers help at the point of need.

So we’re creating three versions of this essentially; the basic, I will show you here on the left hand side and then a single column version which is for our smaller devices but there is also fluid between landscape and portraits and gives better depth considering the resolution that a customer might be looking at and then in the larger device is also again we’re fluid but we’re going from two columns to three column and this is not the final design, don’t get too excited; board gets very excited whenever we’re showing this but we then get a sense of what the same experience can look like across multiple devices. So that’s how we’re tackling responsive design and very high level in a non-tacky way because I’m not a tacky but I also wanted to talk to you about the other way I could have looked at responsive design and this is how we’re tackling our program so we started in 2011 and four years is a really long time in retail; I was just thinking about some of the people who are not with us anymore, some of the technologies that have emerged, some of the different processes and experiences that the customers are going to expect from us like taking class but at the same time, the other end of the paradigm is the pure agile is really a sponsor’s nightmare and in fact it’s my nightmare and it’s a program manager’s nightmare because you can’t predict the time, you can’t predict the cost, it’s very very difficult to keep everybody’s expectations and meet everybody’s expectations if you’re working in a pure agile way.

A bit of a question here about how have we tackled between these two things, so what we’ve done is we started with having a really, really clear program vision and Tom nearly said it earlier actually when our vision for the program that we’re running is to create a seamless experience however our customer shop with us and that’s been true right from the outset, so for the last 2 ½ years, 3 years every single person who is working on the program knows that that’s what we’re aiming for. How we do that has changed, so this responsive design approach around UI, that I was showing you there; we only came up with in the last nine months and we have to come up with that because mobile and tablet and everything in between took off in a way that we could have never predicted three years ago, so we had to have a way to be able to respond to those kind of questions and we knew it was going to happen. So we have a combination of methodologies across the program; we’re using waterfall for the really really big ERP level development and then in our front end, the nearer the front end that you get the more agile that we are and that allows us to be able to be really responsive to changing business needs, changing technology, changing customer needs as customer expectation change.

We have an excellently robust and consistent change governance across the whole program and that allows not only us to consider our changes in a really good and thorough way but it gives us permission and it gives… sponsors have real trust with us because they know that we manage change very well. We have embedded business decisions makers into the program, so we take in the amount of their day jobs, we’ve put them into the program, so that means they were able to make a decision on a day to day basis without having to go back to bored or to senior management. So we’ve got real empowerment at the program level, we’ve got real permission to make decisions on a day to day basis, to make changes and we’ve made some big changes over the course of the last three years. And finally, we’ve got really good easy access to a sponsor, so he’s really bought into what we’re doing, he’s completely dedicated to us and he’ll drop everything and come to us if we need to make a big change so that’s the approach that we’ve got from a flexibility point of view.

This is actually my last slide and I’ve got lots of time. Dammit, because I don’t want to take any questions because … but I will… these are the four things that if I were starting this again, I would want somebody to have told me so with so many people who are embarking on this journey in the same way as we were a couple of years ago ears and maybe halfway through it, I just wanted to share it with you. So we have talked about flexibility, the world is changing faster than it has ever been and ever has before, I had a brilliant … not a stat, I heard that in the last 18 months we have created more content than has ever been created before which is absolutely terrifying and the needs to be able to respond to that, we could never have predicted so you have to have agility through your process but also in your thinking and be prepared to say, “Well, we made a mistake there. We’re going to throw that app and we’re going to move forward and we’re going to do it differently.”

The way to keep flexible while keeping confidence in your senior management is to cement your core purpose so essentially you’re on a path, have you got a lighthouse that everybody can look at? In a program the size of us is very difficult, with guys out in India, guys out in Ukraine and people in two or three locations in the UK having a core purpose that everyone can look at. It has been vital but being clear from the outside and what success looks like and then sticking to that means that we remain confident and we’re going to deliver what we said we were going to.

Thirdly and this is a really big one for me is to recognize early the impact of change that this has on new business. Too many people and a lot of people that B&Q when we started said that this is just an IT project, you’re going to go off and you’re going to spend tens of millions of pounds on technology and brilliant, we’ve got a new website at the end of it; awesome. What we spent the first year doing is going around the entire business and saying, “Listen, this isn’t about us giving you a brand new website”, you have to completely change the way that you think about how you’re selling to the customer because the customers change their mind, they don’t think of it in the same way, they didn’t think about channels. If you go to somebody who doesn’t work in retail and talk to them channels and “I don’t know what you’re talking about? Channel tunnel?” Actually, we need to catch up with our customer and B&Q had to completely transform the whole organization and the culture, this is one of the big ones. So everybody needs to embrace that culture change and once it starts to happen as this happened to us in the last six months… it’s been a right pain in the ass because everybody’s got it now and now they’re running off all over the place, building apps and having a jolly good time and we happen to pull it back but we’re embracing that and we’re saying it’s better that they’re behind this culture change than they’re not.

So finally, this is about being pragmatic and recognizing that really IT and business change programs like this will never end. I mean they have to end for us because we’re running out of money but we’ll continue to transform as a business so every time I make a choice whether it would be about technology or the processes or the operating model or whatever we’re building, we’re always thinking about. “Are we making life easier or harder for the next guy?” so for example we’re saying, “Let’s do investment now in areas that mean that the business is more empowered to change the future” and that’s it. That’s my little insight into the program. Okay. I’ve got five minutes for questions.

Q: Hi, Joanna. So you guys are obviously… do you allow for pick and collect, do you guys do that?

Joanna Robb: So currently we offer reserve and collect, so you can reserve online and you collect from store and it’s picked from store stock.

Q: So you chose which store you’re going to collect?

Joanna Robb: Yes, absolutely. What we’re doing with the program recognizes is that we’re letting customers down about… don’t tweet this, about 30% of the time and so what we’re doing with the program is we’re looking at where we can make customer promise so we’re moving to a click and collect model where you can pay online or through any channel and then you can collect from store but we’re delivering into store.

Q: Okay. So you take it upon yourselves and deliver them to that store just to make the experience.

Joanna Robb: Yeah.

Q: The reason why I’m asking is that you guys aren’t really in that size because you don’t franchise out to, through that channel but for some of our clients, they have to do … something that they have to overcome is how did they go online because everybody knows you need to be online but if you’re setting into channel or adopted kind of a hybrid franchising model, how can you take your brand online without the single franchise and how can you assure that’s properly, so I don’t think you will answer for that better … I just wanted to figure out the click and collect model.

Joanna Robb: I think if I can dig a point out there, it doesn’t end with the all replacement so if you can’t fulfill against your promise whether it’s you fulfilling it or a partner and we have the numbers of partners, we’ve got over 300 vendors who deliver on behalf of us to our customers. If you can’t manage that and ensure a consistent experience across that through the way that you managed those vendors then forget it. You have to focus as much on that as you do on the experience you’re offering up front. I can hear you. I can repeat it.

Q: [Inaudible] [00:18:28]

Joanna Robb: Do some of us get irritated by online sales? Yes. Yeah. But this is part of the culture change I’m talking about, so we’re going back to a model that we use originally when we set up the direct business which is store attribution, so that we can encourage the in-store staff to say that it doesn’t matter whether you buy it online or on your mobile or on that kiosk over there or ______ [00:18:58], actually you’re buying from B&Q, how can we be saying that to the customer and not saying that to the store staff so we’re changing the attribution model so that our stores get measured on the sales around them as well as that.

Q: How will you test that your new designs are good and going.

Joanna Robb: We will be measuring the site as everybody else does; usual dashboard, web analytics, customer sentiment, voice of the customer, we’re launching with MVT so we know we’re not going to be 100% right, we know that we’re working off for hypothesis here but like anyone it’s a continuous test and learn. We do it on the existing site now even though we’re not going to have it in a years’ time, it’s going to be replaced. We’re always testing and learning by you doing big change through looking at trends; for example, checkup, abandon or whatever and then doing the smaller fine tuning trends through MVT and testing target.

Q: So you’re going to MVT your site side by side?

Joanna Robb: We don’t going to MVT them side by side by our launch is going to be a slow roll app, relatively slow over a short period of time where we’re rolling out gradually a B23 to final site. Does that answer your question?

Q: Okay. Thanks.

Joanna Robb: Any other questions?

Q: Hi. I was wondering what you expect your turnaround time to be for features on the website given that you need to account for the different screen sizes, portrait landscape and I’m thinking one of the time that between someone wanting their change on the website design related and actually being tested and implemented.

Joanna Robb: That’s how long can you string kind of thing I think but if I can do it on sort of… the percentage difference that I think is going to be versus a single site that we have at the moment. We know that it’s taking probably about 30% longer more effort to build that multi UI approach and it would have been doing a single looking film which I’m thrilled about actually because we get multiple experiences off to sort of 30% more effort. When it comes to feature turnaround time, we don’t know. We recon it’s going to take slightly longer but it’s worth it.

Q: Have you had any additional web facilities to be able to design and development to handle the responsive implementation?

Joanna Robb: It’s a really difficult because we’ve reorganized the team so we’ve got a lot more resources going into Omni-channel and front and development because we think that’s where the value is, so just the Multi UI has brought that in but we definitely done a lot of thinking about how we can put in place tools that mean that it doesn’t take development, so we’re putting inside building which will allow merchandisers to be able to make changes to the content on the side which keeps them away from having to use the design in UX team and the front encoders to free them up to be able to do more kind of a big change, that’s how we’re doing that. Any other? Okay. Thank you, James. Thank you.