The Very Group is in the midst of a tech transformation and by 2024 it plans to migrate most of its app and website to its new Skyscape platform which will help deliver customer experience changes “more frequently and faster than ever before”
Retail Week speaks to Very’s digital customer experience director Paul Hornby about his plans for the new ecommerce platform, innovations within Very’s app, and the use of artificial intelligence and augmented reality to enhance the user experience.
What is Skyscape and what can it do for customers?
“Skyscape will be the platform that powers all of our digital experiences for our brands. We’re trying to give customers a fresh, consistent, easy-to-use experience from the first visit on the site or app and we believe that’s what they’ll get.
“Skyscape will allow us to add new technology and new innovations pretty seamlessly, really as they develop, to improve our speed to market and ensure that when customers come to Very in the future, they can have a world-class experience. That’s the aim.
“We’re introducing it in very thin slices. So we are focusing on the areas that we think will unlock value for our customers as quickly as possible. We’re getting those bits live to get rapid feedback from our customers and improve their experience far quicker than we would be able to if we waited until everything was done.”
Why is it important to deliver personalised experiences for customers?
“I always like to use bricks-and-mortar comparisons. If you go into a store and feel like the store is very much merchandised for you, you’ll feel like you’ve had a better experience than if you went into a store that didn’t know you.
“It’s exactly the same online. That said, we don’t think personalisation on its own is a silver bullet – it needs to be done well at the right moments in the journey by working with the right partners.
“We’re definitely on the journey with personalisation, which we know that Skyscape will help us with and we’re particularly excited about the potential of our new product discovery platform, which is powered by one of our new tech partners Constructor. Their platform is AI powered and will offer customers a personalised product discovery experience.”
How far are you into incorporating Constructors’ AI-powered discovery solution?
“We’re in the process of building out and embedding constructors’ AI platform into our product discovery experience and we believe that it will help us serve the right products to the right customer at the right time.
“When searching for a product, Constructor can work out its click-through rate, out-of-bag rate and search conversion rate, which causes the algorithm to learn and boost the product towards the top of the search page. It will make it so much easier for customers to find the product they love.
“We’ve done the underlying plumbing for this, now we are in the process of building the final part of that digital customer experience layer and getting all of our product data into Constructor, so as we move into the second half of the year we’ll start rolling this out.”
In the meantime how do you plan to improve Very’s app?
“Our app accounts for about 45% of our sales. We know that our app users are highly engaged and loyal, so the app is a vital channel for us. As part of the process of building skyscape, we’ve also been rebuilding the underlying technology that powers our apps and we’re introducing new design systems.
“The first thing that customers will see as part of this new app is the new home screen that will be redesigned with more personalised features like more tailored product recommendations.
“Further down the line, we’re going to make the experience even more immersive. We introduced augmented reality tools last year, specifically in the beauty space, and are looking to do more.”
How have customers reacted to the use of augmented reality in-app?
“The virtual try-on technology that we introduced for beauty is a quick and convenient way of giving customers more confidence with products that are right for them.
“There are specific categories where it’s been far more difficult to replicate an in-store experience online, but beauty does that well. We saw quite a lot of customer engagement with the feature and so we are now looking at what else we can do.
“Could we move into things like virtual try-on for hair colour, nail products and more in the beauty space? We’re also looking at some other adjacent categories, which at the moment are fashion – particularly watches – as well as homeware. We know that many of our customers want a more store-like digital experience and there is opportunity to do so.”
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