Re-tales: An Interview with Jane Cannon
Posted by Amanda McLaughlin on Feb 25, 2020
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Re-tales is an interview series featuring experts in retail, commerce, and technology. In this post, we speak with Jane Cannon, Chief Product Officer at NewStore. Jane has spent the entirety of her career in technology, delivering industry-leading products to the retail software market. She talks about the best experience a product person can have, and how flipping your perspective can make all the difference.
I’ve spent my entire career in some form of software development or software support. The most formative experience in my career came early on when I was working for a small company building order management systems for catalogers. Understanding how to build an enterprise-class system that supported the end-to-end catalog journey was a turning point for me in order management. From there, I had the good fortune to expand into other areas, such as CRM, e-commerce, loss prevention, point of sale, and sales audit.
I’ve been in a leadership role the majority of my career, running both product and engineering. To this day, my passion is solving problems for retailers. A really good exercise for me early on in product was being in the field implementing the systems we were building. It is the best experience a product person can have. It is what helped me really understand the problems retailers are facing and how we as a vendor can solve those problems with our solutions.
When order management started, it was a discrete software category. It was the core system that managed all operational aspects of a direct to consumer business, including the call center, backorders, fulfillment and shipping, warehouse management, financials, customer management, etc. It has changed as retailers have blended their physical retail stores with their direct to consumer operations. As a result, the functions of order management are now part of the overall systems landscape and not separate systems. However, the core functions are just as important today.
Being able to centrally manage and track orders, ensure orders are fulfilled from the optimal location, change orders, handle returns, create appeasements and most importantly, include all this data as part of the customer’s profile, are all still key elements of an order management system. Having everything interoperate is what allows the retailer to provide the best service possible across any channel.
“We need to empower shoppers to ask for what they want. The biggest opportunity…lies in the hands of the store associate – but only to the extent we make it easy for them to provide the best experience.”
I do believe that many retailers have overcome a lot of the early operational challenges with regard to omnichannel. However, some of the technology systems available to retailers are what is holding them back. Taking your retail technology stack and modifying it or evolving to accommodate for the new customer journey has made the experience for the retail associate difficult. Often it involves many systems, which creates barriers for those responsible for executing a service. If I am a store associate and the experience is too hard, or there are too many steps, or I’m not comfortable performing a service, then I likely won’t offer it.
The other thing retailers are grappling with, but have done a good job handling over the last few years, is the in-store experience. How does the consumer even know what their options are? It’s not obvious to most shoppers that they can order an item from another location if it’s not available in-store. Making it more obvious and reducing friction is a must. We need to empower shoppers to ask for what they want. The biggest opportunity as it relates to education here lies in the hands of the store associate – but only to the extent, we make it easy for them to provide the best experience. They’re the best ambassador a retailer has inside their store.
From a retail tech perspective, we’ve been building solutions focused on features. Product roadmaps are laden with enabling this feature or that feature. Retail IT teams are being asked by business leaders, “Does it do X?” “Can it do Y?” That’s how we build solutions. But our perspective changes when we put the user – the store associate – front and center. What are the most important things they’re trying to do and why? This changes how you build retail software. It is putting the user and their experience at the core, and not necessarily the capabilities you’re trying to provide or the options you’re trying to give them.
I think about retail software differently when I put the associate first. I think about how they’ll use it, how they’ll talk to a customer, and what we want them to be able to do from a single view or in a single transaction.
There are certainly good user experiences out there today but one of the challenges is that most solutions are available as part of a suite. Retailers do a phenomenal job integrating the many solutions they buy but it is not always the most unified experience. They have to knit together solutions that are meant to be independent. I believe SaaS and the platform model is one of the best retail innovations to happen to the store associate in recent years.
Omnichannel fulfillment is table stakes right now. It’s a minimum expectation for the customer to get that level of service. In every generation, retail has been a competitive space. It’s no less competitive today than it was five or ten years ago. The key to success is differentiating yourself. However, you don’t want to be the retailer that differentiates by NOT delivering what your customer wants. Thus, it becomes a competitive disadvantage when you don’t provide omnichannel fulfillment services.
Many retailers think about omnichannel fulfillment as a way to reduce costs, improve margins, reduce the movement of stock – whatever the internal motivator may be. But if you flip this on the head and ask yourself, what does the customer need? It may or may not change your perspective on what you prioritize in omni fulfillment.
It is less about the components and more about the possible transformation. What will allow you to leapfrog competitors? Is it a complete transformation? An iteration of one? Think about what your customers expect then determine what’s needed to meet those expectations. So, my advice is not around buying a specific piece of software. It’s about knowing what problem you’re trying to solve to take your store and customer experience to the next level. This is true whether you’re a department store or specialty retailer. What you define as the transformation will be different, but today’s shoppers expect service regardless of what door they walk into.
“[At NewStore] we’re working tirelessly to show the iPhone is a very viable way to run your retail business.”
The predictions for retail over the past few years have all been wrong. Retail is not dead, retail is here. The way physical retail is changing, and how the shopping center is becoming more experiential, speaks to a need in the market from the customer perspective. It also speaks to how we should look at the market from a retail solutions perspective.
Separately, one of the things that still strikes me as amazing is how little the iPhone exists in the retail environment. Apple’s introduction of the iPod and then the iPhone were two of the biggest consumer tech changes to ever hit us. We all run our lives on the phone in our hands. Taking this tech and putting it into the hands of associates is so native, yet retail solutions are rarely deployed this way. There are hurdles in terms of connectivity across the enterprise. But the infrastructure has caught up. There is also no doubt that the user experience is far greater than the systems we can build elsewhere.
We believe at NewStore we can take this transformative approach and we’re working tirelessly to show the iPhone is a very viable way to run your retail business.
My travel apps – airlines, airports, hotels. I travel once or twice a month between the U.S. and Europe so I need to have this all on my iPhone. I also can’t live without my Kindle app where I read news sites, industry journals, and leisure books.
Act with integrity as a business person. You can always do the right thing even if the right thing is the hard thing at the time. When you’re young and have a lot of pressure to produce, it’s easy to get caught up in what you need to do to be successful. Sometimes, that takes you off your moral compass. It is hard to come back once you’ve gone sideways.
My experience has been that if you treat people fairly and with integrity, it will serve you well in your career and people will respect that. They’ll respect you and they’ll respect the company you work for. People want to work with people they trust.
Spending time with my family. In the summertime, we like to get out on the ocean and in the wintertime, we like to ski. My kids are older so any time I can find for shared activities I do.
