Defining Innovation With The Customer Experience

By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
Follow Me On Twitter @ErinHarris_1

May 2015 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

Dave Finnegan is one of the retail industry’s best and brightest CIOs, as he’s known for his technical and business acumen as well as his appreciation for innovation. He spent nearly 15 years as CIO at Build-A-Bear Workshop before settling into the same role at Orvis last year. I caught up with our Integrated Solutions For Retailers editorial board member to learn his take on the role innovation plays in today’s modern retail landscape.

Innovation As A Mindset
I believe that innovation is not about the shiny objects; rather, innovation is a shift in mindset — a change in the company’s philosophy and culture that forces it to think differently and ultimately to be better. Finnegan agrees. “When it comes to innovation and the technologies needed to bolster the business, we often ask the right questions at the wrong times,” states Finnegan. “If retailers ponder the disruptive technology approach they’ll adopt or implement, they are off base right out of the gate. The key to innovation, from my perspective, is to start with the customer’s experience — the human connection. Blending the in-store experience with the digital enhances the human connection in a more meaningful way. As a result, truly understanding the Orvis customer’s experience has set the stage for the disruptive technologies we will use.”

Customer Playback In An Innovation Lab
Finnegan explains that building a culture of human-centered design, which starts with the guest experience, is key to all Orvis’ strategic projects. “At Orvis, we’ve created a process called Customer Playback that helps us become very clear about the guest experience. We literally map out the customer’s experience — it is a prototype, it is a story. It is not a large business requirement document; no one thinks in ‘business requirements’ terms for a process like this. Rather, our team thinks about the customer’s experiences, and to bring these experiences to life, we created a lab, which mirrors a retail location, and we play out the stories in the lab. We actually walk through the lab to determine how various shopping scenarios play out for the customer — how mobile works for them, how they may easily add something to their basket that’s actually on the website, how and when the associate should engage them, how easily they can find certain products, etc.”

Through the course of Customer Playback, Finnegan and his team do not discuss technologies per se. Instead, they use the Customer Playback process to recognize and appreciate how the customer feels throughout the entire in-store experience. “We do not talk about POS, for example. We talk about the retail store experience, and POS is part of that experience. We discuss neither distributed order management nor an upgrade to our warehouse management system. We discuss the guest experience for inventory that can be accessed anywhere in our chain. One of our key objectives in 2015 is to become clear about our guest experiences and to begin placing the building blocks to deliver those experiences.”

Even In Times Of Innovation, Security Still A Top Priority
Security has been and always will be a CIO’s top priority, and so it goes at Orvis. “Security is a fundamental part of who we are, what we do, and what we need to provide our people,” states Finnegan. “Security is a broad end-to-end conversation about brand protection. We believe that the best recipe for brand protection success is to have a dream team approach — a who’s who executive table. And seated at that table are members from the right public relations team, the right legal team, the right internal team, the right forensics professionals, the right IT professionals, and so on. Doing so provides our security team real context around what we should invest in to protect our guest’s data. Security is important for every CIO, and we believe having a cross-functional team involved in brick-and-mortar and cyber security is the best recipe for brand protection success.”