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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Speaker 3 (00:07.286)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce Live from Shop Talk. Today I have Kapil Dabi and Anne Rushtow. Kapil is with Google and Anne is with Manhattan. don't you both, Kapil, Kapil, why don't you go ahead and do introduction for your first and...
what I am. Yeah. Thank you, Brent. Thank you for the invitation. And I'm looking forward to this podcast. My name is Kapil Dabi. I'm the Americas market leader for retail and CPG. And in that capacity, from a Google perspective, I run the Global Retail Strategy, Industry Solutions, and Partnerships.
And my name is Ann Rockstow. I am the chief marketing officer at Manhattan. For those of you that may not know what Manhattan does, a little explanation. We provide supply chain and all-me channel commerce software, like order management, point of sale. And we're good friends with Google, because everything we do is cloud-native, sits on top of this awesome platform called Google Cloud.
That's awesome. All right, so I think today we're going to talk a little bit about unified commerce. And I know about Manhattan, but why don't you tell us how, why don't each of us tell how it fits in, each of your solutions fits into unified commerce and let you start.
Yeah, sure. So UCB, Shore for Unified Commerce Benchmark, is something that we actually, two companies came across about two and a half years ago. What we realized that, you know...
Speaker 1 (01:38.272)
Most retailers have stores, have online presence and lately shop fill in the blank, TikTok shop, Instagram. It's all becoming part of your go to market and your store presence, if you will. And you need to manage the customer experience, whether they're shopping, how you present your product, how do you manage your inventory across online versus offline? How do you deliver customer service? How do you get the stuff to them?
that somebody need to come in here and look at the whole thing, if you will, and say, all right, to be great at Unified Commerce, in a layman term, is serve your customer quickly, know them, serve them, and don't waste their time, right? We need an industry-wide standard. So that's where the Unified Commerce benchmark came in. We partnered with Incisive, and we look at about 300 attributes on how people shop.
How do they check out? How do they get their product? And how do they get service? And then we developed this benchmark based on eight shopping trips per attribute. Five online, three in store. So when a brand gets a grade.
It's based on statistically significant real purchases and return and exchange and a bunch of things So we thought we would give the retail industry a nice starting point to show them what it looks like And what we found out that if you do this thing, right? Your revenue top line revenue growth is gonna go about three times faster than the rest of them Your fulfillment costs gonna go down 31 % your AOV will go at a minimum 14 % So that's why we
ended up doing this in a long way.
Speaker 3 (03:27.406)
And how does Google fit into this then?
Yeah, so Google is one of our partners with Manhattan. And one of the things we are also passionate about similar topics, which is basically unified commerce. And unified commerce is basically, for us, is very important because the consumer behavior is changing, as Ann mentioned here.
the way consumers live, the way they engage with the brands, the way they shop with the brands. And I think one of the common linking factors is the unified commerce. It's basically the same connected experience, whether you're pre-purchase cycle, purchasing cycle, or post-purchase cycle. And there are various aspects, whether it's personalized recommendations, or whether you're talking about inventory optimization at the time of your purchase, or intelligent fulfillment, like as Ann mentioned, the customer really needs to know when the product is going to get delivered, right?
has to be on time. Our post purchase like customer care. Now Google Cloud and Manhattan work together. Basically, we empower the technology. And Manhattan obviously has the solution, industry-retail focused solutions to help.
retailers with the unified commerce. So those are some of the elements of we truly believe that unified commerce is that common link, especially in today's world. And one of the other things which we provide from Google Cloud perspective is the Gen.AI, so our own version around Gemini and the rise of Gen.AI and agent AI. And how does that help the unified commerce journey?
Speaker 2 (04:55.904)
So if you think about any retailer who is currently using generative AI for hyper-personalization, we have seen an average order value of about close to 14%. They have also improved the customer lifecycle, lifetime value by about 11%. So it's their very, very positive outcomes of basically utilization of the technology, but then also usage of gen AI and agent AI to support the customers and retailers in their basically maturity.
I think is the important element.
And so as far as I understand it, it's a benchmark that retailers can work on and get graded in, right? Is that the?
We already benchmarked 220 brands in North America, which is Canada as well as in the United States So pretty much other large specialty retailer from footwear and luxury consumer electronics all the way to the hard goods like furniture and things like that So yeah, so do check it out and take a look, but it's not a opted-in We just benchmarked all the top brands to let you know and what we found out is if you
you put them into cohorts, right? We have the leaders, which is the top level. You have advanced, which is the next level. Then you have the developing and then you have the basic. So those are the four categories. The leaders, they behave differently. It's like a cohort of top performers by themselves. Included in there are the Sephora's and the Apple's of the world, right? They really know their customers online.
Speaker 1 (06:36.28)
or they walk through the store or on social media. They pick up the conversation where they left off. They recommend to them things that is relevant to them, right? And they make their whole shopping experience, the checkout experience, awesome. It's frictionless. And even before you check out, there's a whole bunch of personal recommendation in the cart, and it's OmniCart, by the way.
And then as a couple will say, even when they decide to get the goods, we find a lot of our smart retailers, they actually sometimes artificially encourage BOPUS. Pick up buy online, pick up in store because they want the traffic in the store where they can build relationships. And sometimes they even find short is a common industry challenge that you sold more than you have. And then somebody's going to come into the store and pick up that Pokemon and you don't have it.
know this ahead of time because they're so on top of their inventory across the network right DC stores and everywhere else they literally can turn a what I call a disaster situation can you imagine a kid coming to pick up his Pokemon toys right you don't have it because you have a promise they literally send them heads up going we're short of this how about a Charizard and by the way we're so sorry that we don't have the Pokemon and you come in we'll give you a 50 % discount so we're fine
Finding that inventory visibility become an opportunity to save a sale and GEN.AI makes a lot of the self-service, you know, change your order, change the shipping address. They can converse directly with a GEN.AI agent that sits on top of your order management system. So that's 24 by 7. It works.
Do you think some of these are just givens nowadays that big retailers should have it?
Speaker 2 (08:29.87)
It's that's fundamental question in for 2025. think 2024 was especially with agent again. Gen. AI was a time of use cases. People were dabbling into one use cases in content creation for marketing or customer care. think 2025 is very we're seeing is it's going to be a scale. So it's it's not a trend anymore. It's a fundamental shift in how you actually run your business. We at Google and including with Manhattan. I think this
seeing the fundamental shift in narrative, which is saying, what is your AI strategy? Versus like, what's your business strategy, which is enabled by AI? So solutions like Manhattan Associates is actually solving that problem with that unified commerce. And to Anne's point, inventory visibility is one of the most difficult thing to do for any retailer, especially when the consumer is shifting between multiple channels. And one of the things at Google we often talk about is that the consumer is almost
is doing 10 steps or 10 touch points, whether it's TikTok or social media or whether e-commerce or store or their mobile, they're actually interacting with the brand almost 10 times before they're actually purchasing it, and that's on an average. So just think of that journey when he's going through and having that visibility to inventory, getting that unified custom experience while you're on mobile versus website. So some of these things are pocket change.
So we have to basically every retailer has to do it now retailers who are actually winning the unified commerce are the retailers who are actually Getting ahead of the curve. They know the customers problems before the customer actually voices They know when the inventory is not there and reaching out to the customer they know that there is an agent decay I sitting to support their customer service because number one question which comes to customer services. Where's my order? So these are some of the things which the retailers really need to basically
stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:29.616)
implement but then retailers who winning is actually getting ahead of the curve and utilizing technology to support their customers.
Is there a correlation between client telling, a sales associate at a POS system and they're getting some information, like you said, they're getting this information that my Pokemon is out of stock, make sure that you give them something, and training those salespeople to help.
people to buy more things online, to pivot them to be more empathetic to the client when they come in.
It's interesting, I have a couple of, you we all have favorite brands. I'm going to just name a top couple of them, even though we have tons of brands. Okay. I love Artarix. At least I'm skiing still until the season's over. I love PacSum because I have girls that are surfers and hikers and a whole bunch of things. They arm their sales associates with everything they need on this one point of sale system that has a CRM to it. It has obviously ordered history, has preference history,
an Omni cart, also Wishbooks, so that we're at a point in time that concierge service is not just for the thousands of large ticket item merchandise. To win the wallet share, mind share of the customer today, you almost have to do that for a t-shirt, right? But then you can recommend more things, right?
Speaker 1 (11:59.15)
We found that through the benchmark, for the brands that arm their sales associates with technology and Gen.AI enabled as well, they can do endless aisle, they can change shipping address, they can change order for them, they can do refund, they can do everything, that their average customer lifetime value is about 1.25 times that.
of someone who doesn't do that, and you'll be surprised. I would say that empowerment is not quite there yet.
Yeah, I think store associates or store operations are ripe for destruction. And there's technology to support it, especially agent-ic AI, generative AI. We have seen a lot of our clients have been powered by technology. So you go to Home Depot, you can see them, or you can go to Krog.
They all have tools in their hands. So you go to Home Depot and say, hey, I'm doing a DIY project. And here's a tool which is missing. They can take click of picture of that. And then it will go search the entire product catalog within that store. If it's not available, it will also recommend.
the next store where the product is available. the whole idea is that you can even talk to that data. So store associates have been now empowered to service your customer in a much better way because now they have access to that data. What's it like going to, let's go to this aisle and let's look at the product. They know everything about that data. So think store associate is an element.
Speaker 2 (13:31.554)
We have also seen post-purchase, so this is also a store associate. But think of, like, know, there are companies which also do services like S5. So they sell the TV, but then have an installation service. Now, Agent TKi has been launched where the store associate can actually change, you know, all these things by just talking to the agent versus basically going through three different systems and trying to bundle.
mean store is a very complex, I would say, piece of the puzzle because there's a lot of different technologies embedded into the store. There's POS, inventory data, the store associates, task management.
receiving stuff. So when you pull all the data together, that's where the agentic AI comes into picture because you can seemingly pull all the data and make the storage of your library easy. So client-tailing is actually on steroids now with AI and agentic AI growth.
We're at Chop Talk 2025 in the spring. What are you looking forward to seeing here?
my gosh, like a kid in the candy shop around here. Every time you turn around, think Gen. AI is a big part now because you can automate proactively the workflow. So you're not leaving it up to like individual, right? You can say, purchase that television from Best Buy. There's a whole workflow that follows that is happening for you automatically. So when somebody does come in to look at this, they can really give that human touch and build relationship versus doing what I consider to be the tactical work.
Speaker 1 (15:05.298)
So I would say I'm excited with storytelling because even the presentation of your content, there's so much influencer developed content for product nowadays. So you can get the authentic voice, I guess authentic voice of how they work, style and everything. I'm really excited with the three dimensional storytelling. I'm excited with real time inventory visibility because all of us want instant gratification and you will
go drive 50 miles if you have to, if you really want that coffee table or you can wait, but you want to make sure that when they say they're going to deliver that thing on Friday, you have a holiday Christmas party on Saturday that you're to have a table to sit people and put your stuff on, right? So I think I'm excited with like all those pieces are coming in from shopping experiences to the checkout experience. You can pay now, pay later. You can split whatever and you know, the world is or oyster if you will. And of course I'm
I'm a nerd. I'm inventory. I do believe inventory is key because you can promise anything you want Until that order is shipping receipt
You cannot book that revenue. So inventory is very key. then customer service, like what you were saying, that 60 % of the calls into contact center is all about, where's my order? Can I change my order? Can I exchange? Can I refund? It's always that. So if you can make that something that you can, the customers can interact with the order data directly through AI, just think about the frictions that you have taken away. It's really awesome.
I think if I have to pick one thing about the many things is especially with the consumer behavior changing, consumer trend changing, think retailers are a little bit, I would not say that they're as ahead as they should be. So I think from a shop talk's perspective, one thing which you should see or any retailer who is coming should see is how can they use technology to advance themselves because the consumer is already using Gen.ai, AI, Agent.ai,
Speaker 2 (17:14.061)
because the brands are already, when you search on Google, Gemini is already there. When you go on WhatsApp, MetaAI is already there. So how can retailers leave Frog, not just in like step, but leave Frog with the rise of AI, agentic AI, and other things. Like one great example from a numbers perspective is companies who have been using agentic AI for customer care, we are seeing almost 30 % call volume reduction.
That's a huge number. Or you can improve your average order value by 14%, which we talked about. These are some of the things where you're utilizing Gen.AI to not support your top line, but then also your bottom line. So in summary, I think the technology is leaf-frogging, and retailers really need to get on the bandwagon.
And so the benchmark, will that help brands like Home Depot, LeapFrog over another big home builder brand type like Lowe's or something like that? is it just a way to make sure that they're meeting the expectations of the general?
So the brand can actually request their own brand specific benchmark that cuts across the 300 plus attributes. But we don't disclose anything that is brand specific outside of your own brand. But you absolutely get to see the benchmark average, right? Kind of, know, where are you relative to that? So I would say from a prescriptive digital transformation perspective, it's a wonderful roadmap.
embrace to begin with but as what Kibble was saying I think you're right it's always been like that the consumers actually especially the Gen Z's what's after that Alphas those are our kids that's your next generation consumers if they are using things that you're not delivering that dichotomy is a room for growth
Speaker 3 (19:14.154)
a couple and end at the end I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug and would you like to plug anything today?
I don't think I'm going to plug anything except I would say for the Chief Digital Transformation Officers, the CIOs of the world, this is a resource for you, the Unified Commerce Benchmark. So come over and download the report.
site, Manhattan Associates, and take a look at that and happy to help out and answer any questions, but do occasionally look at where you stand. It's a very good thing.
Yeah, a couple.
No, to Anne's point, I think the key thing is we're trying to help retailers accelerate and innovate at a speed at which they should be. And I Benchmark just gives them a perspective of sometimes they're on the edge saying, hey, can I really utilize this and then will it actually help my business? And the Benchmark basically gives you that perspective that yes, you can. There are retailers who are actually leaf-frogging. There are retailers who are helping, improving.
Speaker 2 (20:24.666)
their customer lifetime value, their retailers were helping in utilizing this technology and doing these things at scale. And I think this benchmark result just gives them other retailers, just gives them sort of a roadmap as Anne mentioned, right? That there are things you can do and there others who already done it so you are not alone. So from that perspective, they should just look at the report.
engage themselves, see where the leaders are going, then sort of utilize the report to leapfrog.
Perfect. And Rukh Stoll, Chief Marketing Officer for Manhattan Associates. Thank you for being here. And Kapil Dabi with Google. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
safe here. Thank you.
Thank you, Brent.
Speaker 3 (21:15.354)
All right, thank you.
Yep. Would the quality come out?