What you need to know:

• Mecca's Chief Digital Officer Sam Bain along with Chief Technology Officer Michael Hobsbawn are leading the retailer's ambition to match its obsessive in-store customer experience strategy in digital channels.
• Mecca started with consolidating its IT so that Mecca's staff didn't have to open "four systems" to answer a customer question.
• It has already started on personalisation - success is measured by rising NPS and average transaction values.
• It is now looking to invest heavily in a customer data platform, overhaul its "world leading" loyalty program which avoids discounting and build out a new e-commerce capability to unite customer, content and commerce in digital channels.
• Salesforce VP Retail and Consumer Goods Jo Gaines says retailers are the lab rats for many other industries, including banks and auto, who watch the sector for clues and signals for their own digital strategies.        

Humanising digital

About two years ago Mecca started in earnest on a digital overhaul, partly forced by Covid lockdowns and a realisation it needed to do digitally what the retailer had achieved in-store with its obsession around customer service and experience. 

Mecca started its program by connecting up all its customer service channels and a large investment in new digital talent capabilities – it has restructured its “CRM” function and team for a “personalisation” unit, for instance. 

Chief Digital Officer Sam Bain says prior to landing a new customer service platform which delivered a single view of a customer, Mecca’s people had to open “four systems to answer a question”. Next on the Mecca transformation agenda was personalising communications to its various customer segments. Bain says between the deployment of customer service tech and more personalisation, Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are “up significantly” – as a privately-owned company, it won’t divulge specifics – while Mecca’s “average transaction value” is also up although not yet as high as it’s early NPS gains. 

Mecca knows it needs to be as strong in its digital experience as its store experience, says Bain. “We’ve always over invested in experience for the customer, we just needed to do it in this channel. What we'd like to do is bring that intense service model and the ability to really support customers into the digital world. We talk quite a bit about humanising digital and trying to bring that level of expertise and advice direct to you, whether that's through live chat, whether it's through video interaction, whether that's through just really good content and guided website navigation.

“People are not searching the way they used to. They're not searching for an eyebrow pencil. They're searching for a certain look or a certain style or something to complement an outfit. So then when they find the content, they need to be able to shop for the products that you've used in the content while they’re in the content. That’s far more relevant to consumers, younger consumers in particular. Our new site will bring up content search results as well as product search results and actually, shopping through content, blending content and commerce, is pretty much the core of our approach for the new site.”

Mecca heads to Mecca

Hence Mecca’s exec leadership journey to tech mecca in San Francisco in September. The retailer is now shopping for its next investments in a customer data platform, an e-commerce play and a super-charged loyalty system reboot. Salesforce has been the primary tech beneficiary of Mecca’s program so far and Mecca is assessing the merits of its broader suite of cloud products. The annual Dreamforce evangelical event, back for the first time in three years due to Covid, has proven “eye-opening” for Mecca’s broader exec team, says Bain.

“So we had both our co-CEOs, we had our chief retail officer, myself, our CTO and then we also had our CFO on this trip. For some people it was very much their first time at any kind of technology conference. And for some of our team who don't work as much in technology, it's been quite eye opening. Because we when we talk about digital transformation, we want to lift our overall digital literacy capability and we felt this would be a really interesting way in for people in some of the other functions to see a bit about what [Chief Technology Officer] Michael [Hobsbawn] and I do every day, but also how it can connect to what they're up to.”

So what was Bain’s assessment after Dreamforce? The tech giant, for instance, has taken a different approach to tap the rising interest in customer data platforms – essentially a tech layer that unites all customer and marketing data. Salesforce has a CDP but has essentially turned an intangible product into an animated character that represents its efforts to link all its various cloud platforms and company data. Bain wasn’t so sure about “Genie” the CDP mascot, and she’s not yet giving too much away on who it will partner for its next wave of tech investments although Mecca’s exec leadership migration across the Pacific for five days could be a signal. Mecca, though, says no decision has been made as it assesses the vendor market.      

Rabbits and tech

“I was slightly surprised there wasn't a larger scale acquisition announcement [at Dreamforce], Bain says. “But I think the conversation around CDP, the prevalence of CDP there speaks to all the challenges everybody is having around connecting all their sources of data. I'm not too sure about the bunny rabbit and the wand [Genie] - so the branding is quite interesting. And it was interesting to see the level of focus that's being put on that from a personal perspective. Coming to the conference, both myself, Michael and a couple of our team came specifically to have a bit of a deep dive into loyalty and Loyalty Cloud, because that's something we're looking at as part of the next evolution of our digital transformation journey. And with that [loyalty] product, it's around in Australia but nobody has really done a full scale implementation. So one of the benefits of coming somewhere like this is to talk to other customers. Particularly customers who have already implemented and we can learn from them about pros, cons and pitfalls going into it.”

Bain said Mecca’s team met with “quite a few different customers” globally at different stages of their digital transformation programs and because the retailer is trying to figure out the “sequencing” of its next platform deployments.  

“One of the things we're trying to grapple with is what order, what the sequencing is and is Salesforce Loyalty Cloud the right product,” says Bain. “Where should we go next in terms of consolidating all of our data? We've had some really interesting thoughts but knowing that other people are in the same situation, are asking the same questions and then other people are that bit further ahead is important. We’re talking about the way to go into things, levels of planning and the kind of effort that needs to go into our data upfront.” 

People upgrade 

And the same goes for Mecca’s digital capabilities and talent. Bain says the people are critical in these tech deployments.

“We've significantly grown both our digital and our engineering functions,” she says. “So as we brought on new platforms, we had to get new skills. We didn't have an app. Now we have that app development capability. From a marketing cloud perspective, we have automation specialists and we did a bit of a restructure so that rather than have a CRM team, we have a personalisation team. We're very focused on that. We have a separate loyalty team and then we have a separate customer data squad. So we've had to bring in new capabilities around data analytics, automation and different engineering capability. And then also we've heavily upweighted our product, user experience and business analyst functions.”

Jo Gaines, Retail and Consumer Goods Area VP for Salesforce, says retailers like Mecca are the “canaries in the coal mine” for most industries and reckons outside of airlines, Mecca’s current loyalty program and how it’s tackling its next generation loyalty strategy is, along with Gucci, world leading. 

“The thing about retail and commerce is everyone I speak to across lots of different industries and categories all want to know more about what retail and commerce is doing. Retail is like the canary in the coal mine. They do it first and everybody, whether it's banks, whether it's automotive, all industries are influenced by retail. Retail was the most disrupted in Covid, right? So retail had to innovate more than any other industry, really because there was no alternative. We’ve had customers who had no web presence at all pre-covid who had to then start from scratch and they started thinking about digital commerce, loyalty, CDPs differently.

“The way Mecca thinks about loyalty, for a start, is this idea of loyalty not just being about accumulation of points or discounts. They are certainly unique – they're thinking about how they reward people for being part of the community. Customers don't expect discounting from them, which is smart, especially in the current economy. We've spoken to some other brands who are thinking that way as well. But they're all starting the journey. There's no one really further ahead than they are. They have one of the strongest loyalty programs in the world outside of the airlines.”

Along with a CDP and e-commerce overhauls, Bain says Mecca’s loyalty program is critical. “We want it even more experiential,” she says. “So it will be things like special access events, access to time perhaps with brand founders and we'll leverage content a lot. It might be classes and education. It will be things that really engage you as rewards rather than, as Jo says, baseline discounting.” 

*Paul McIntyre travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce