Retail forecast, the global conversation hosted by Alex
rezze Van Veen. Hello image and how you doing?
Can you hear me everything? Okay, hi yes, I Canna a great to
hear you. Brilliant Imaging, for those who
don't know, you are the CEO and founder of Q Deanie.
Why don't we start with the story?
Because I think it's really interesting story and this whole
series is about empowerment. I think your story sort of just
shows, you know, if you follow your the path, you can be very
successful in it. So, it would be lovely if you
could sort of give us an Overview of how Q dini started,
great. Yeah.
I left University and I was kind of interested in setting up a
business. So I went along to this
hackathon which was sponsored by a to see if anyone who doesn't
know what a hackathon is. It's an event where you kind of
meet up with developers and ideas and designer people over a
weekend and you come up with an idea and kind of code very basic
prototype around the table and you kind of pitched at the end
of the event. So, I went to hackathon and came
up with this idea for virtual queuing.
So this concept that you can join a key virtually from your
phone and get updates about when Your turn.
So we actually won this hackathon for the most
commercially viable idea. And as a result we about
telephonic has accelerator space that they were building in
London and from that we got accepted.
So we were kind of the youngest team in the earliest stage idea
at the time to go through. But we left nine months later
with a contract with O2 and also won their kind of global tender
as well and it all just kind of Snowball from there.
We just kept kind of working with more and more.
And as clients in the retail space on, how do we improve
customers who are coming into their store or month service?
To kind of give them updates. While they're waiting, creating
kind of a host out to the kind of more professionally, greet
and manage customers. And a lot of them who are using
just clipboard and pain at the time.
And from there, we also, then started building appointment
booking in, which was something a lot of clients were asking for
sending be customers, kind of pre-book the time.
Day visits there was, if we could just go back to.
Because one of the things that I'm conscious of and the whole
purpose of doing this is through different experiences.
I'm, I have the great Fortune of meeting very early in career
people and obviously, a lot of experienced professionals as
well. So your mindset about that I
want to, you know, I'd love to get into business or be an
entrepreneur and have my own thing.
How much of that did you? How much of that?
I mean, where did it come from? Where What was the spark for you
that made? You want to do this?
Did you always feel that you could be the CEO and founder?
We like on the playground? Just you knew that you could be
the CEO found the how, how, what was the journey?
What was the, whether the belief come from?
No, I don't know. That one.
Actually I wanted to initially go into advertising and then I
also, when I kind of was always one of the ideas people.
Yeah. So I wanted to do creative
advertising, then there's really boring.
So I just you just sit there all day and think of ideas and I
like to kind of the execution sign and strategy side.
So I kind of wanted to try coming up with a business
because it enables you to be creative but also execute.
But yeah I mean I guess I was always thinking of like weird
ideas when I was at University I was like inventing things that
already existed really like greatest things, I mean maybe it
was natural. Do you have any words of wisdom?
Wisdom for someone who maybe who has an idea that, you know, they
need to act on. Yeah no definitely.
I mean I think like leaving University age or even instead
of University starting a business is one of the best
routes you can go down in terms of if you want to learn skills,
come up with ideas and execute things.
And at that age you can't really lose like you don't have any
like kind of strong responsibilities, so it's
actually a really good time to start a business.
If that's something that you want to do, and I Just say go
for it and I also think it's something that education
providers should really look at because when you're you have to
figure stuff out for yourself like for example I was pretty.
I couldn't really use Excel to start out with and now I'm
pretty Advanced all just remember kind of searching
online. It just shows that like the way
education makes learning things is really boring and actually,
it's really interesting to learn something.
When you have, when you have to practically apply it to your own
eye. Ideas.
Yeah, and I think most of people in business would say, sometimes
your success is the success of the people around you, the team
and how you build it him. I do know that you did have a
co-founder with you when you, but how have you how have you
got over that hurdle? Because, you know, I don't know.
For example, I can imagine fixing here but I don't have any
coding friends. I don't I can't code or and
how'd you get over that or how difficult was it to get over
that element? Oh, well, I'm not ever that I
have a co-founder who is uh, CT. Oh yeah.
So definitely. That is that, I mean, for
starting a tech company, I think that is pretty fundamental
having someone who understands Tack and is as committed and as
kind of has as much skin in the game, as you do because I can
imagine, if you were kind of hiring a CTO and someone who's
kind of leaves every three years, it would be a lot harder.
Yeah. And having that knowledge is is
really key and there's Lots of ways you can meet people.
So, for example, there's kind of technique UPS as hackathons are
really good way to meet people, as well as I think, for kind of
young Founders, starting out applying to something like
something, like an accelerator, like wire or entrepreneur first,
which actually helps kind of match people and fun.
Businesses is a really good way to start.
Oh, well, cool. In terms of just moving on a
little bit in terms of going back to actually our first
Encounter which was all about buy online, pick up in store and
building efficiency, I just, and that was 2013.
I think so. Yeah.
In 2012, right Eugenie? Yes, yeah, okay.
So so it's been going for a fair while.
I mean, the evolution of buy online, pick up in store, to
Virtual queue management and I also saw on your website, your
also have a sort of a proposition for For luxury in
terms of appointment booking as well.
For people who sort of maybe don't know the area or don't
understand the friction or the challenges specifically during
covid. Can you just talk about the
problem and then potentially how you've sort of tackled solving
those problems? Yeah.
So for sure so I guess when I was kind of roomy when I when we
first met Ali I was kind of trying to explain to people, you
can have customers join the queue from outside of the When
you can message them when, when it's a turn and we had a couple
of retailers up kind of take on that method of the customer
joining in a queue by their phone.
But most of them actually, just letting them join the queue by
host or potentially in Europe by a kiosk, because we've been
very, very wary of queuing systems and whether customers
will use in the like them, but it's covid.
We've just seen this kind of mass adoption, amongst
customers, and retailers of this kind of scanning, a QR code to
join the queue and staying updated.
One in weight as well as for click and collect like, checking
in from your phone, or by scanning, a QR code, from the
car park, so that you can wait in your car and get your order
delivered. And then the appointment booking
is kind of a little bit more mainstream that's been going on
for a while, but it's becoming bigger.
And so when you drive by pickup service, it's something that you
guys are there. Any retailers, are experiment,
specific ones, you can talk about because I find food we've
rolled out with dick our phones, They were actually the first,
and before they even open their stores, fully, they started
opening their stores just for cooking collect.
If you go to Dixon's conference tour, you can check in from your
order confirmation email and you'll get a texting.
Someone's looking for your order, someone finds the order,
and then just drops it in the boot of the boot of your car.
So you can literally kind of drive in and out of store,
without getting out of your car. Wow.
And they did you get any sort of customer to get any stats on?
I don't know the the Improvement on customer Journey or what?
How do you measure the success of these initiatives?
Yeah, so I guess for click and collect, it's more about kind of
loyalty and getting them to, come back to your omni-channel,
whether that's or online. Yeah.
And we've definitely seen kind of increases in loyalty and
amazing feedback from customers saying they will definitely use
the service. Again, they've tweeted about it
online. For example, some of the best
ones we've seen our with the queuing and appointment booking.
The install entry or install Services?
Yeah. Well we reduce some of our
clients walkouts rates by 62% and that's purely just by giving
kind of customers an estimate of how long they're waiting and
wears it to when you're waiting for a tube or bus.
And when they have the information issue in the weight
feels a lot shorter than when you're just sitting there
waiting. And you don't know when the next
bus or train is coming. Absolutely yeah.
Okay frustrating. Yeah.
So yeah. So it's that and And then we've
helped them to. We've helped one retailer to
increase average, spend by 33 percent just because of the
better customer experience. And a lot of our clients also
seeing kind of a 10% store conversion, increase through
queuing and appointments because they're having giving better
service them and customers and one language and it is that
specifically during covid-19 paprika covid, that was pre
covid during covid. I mean it's been pretty much the
same like, much higher retention there.
Anything being that obviously customers have been avoiding
stores in any way. You can drive them to store
through appointment booking is important.
And then also, once if customers do come in to store, making sure
they feel kind of safe and confident throughout their visit
so that they will come back. So, as a couple of really
interesting, stats are also with appointment booking that one of
our clients has found that sixty percent of customers who booked
an appointment have never been to the stores before.
So it's that acquiring new new customers that don't really
interact with that business. And another thing we're seeing
is a massive up taking virtual services, so retailers, bring
kind of remote server so if I want to buy something online but
I'm not quite sure your mean for me it's the buyer or to drop off
the site. But now there's another option
where it's like, okay because you can just click and book an
appointment and speak to someone in a store in a contact center
about that product and this is obviously been cattle are like
covid been a catalyst Yes. But I think it gets them
required the whole time or at least we surveyed people and
Millennials and gen Z customers with three times more likely
than Baby Boomers to want virtual service do.
It's definitely kind of a generational thing rather than
just a covid thing. Yeah, I can.
Well I imagine to, I mean, that in my mind there's like the
Instagram generation that doesn't necessarily need to feel
safe, but just once a digital experience, but then there is a
generation and, you know, that of people myself included You
want to feel a little bit safer when you go in and knowing that
you've got that space and that time I think it absolutely does
help that you you go in and then you feel like, okay, this is my
time, this is my space in this environment or in terms of
booking. I'm glad you mentioned the
research that you did because I did see that on LinkedIn.
Was there any other sort of key findings that you found and was
there any? I can't remember an apologetic
was there one in the US and one in the UK or Did I ever got that
wrong? Yes, that's correct.
So we did a 2000 consumer survey.
Just as Lockdown had started asking people, kind of, which
stores they had been avoiding how they felt that tricky,
collect, and also how they felt about virtual service with
retailers. Yeah.
And the main thing was that the more customers need a store, the
more they wanted virtual service from it.
So like even grocery retailers, a high proportion of customers
wanted virtual service from it. And And yes, it basically one
average. I think it was about 56 or 60%
of people want to Virtual servers from all these different
types of retailers and and we broke it down by different
Capital. Yeah, the other thing was that
56% of people plan to use, click and collect more.
So, even kind of amongst the Baby Boomers were only kind of
7% will use it frequently outside of covid, right?
About sit 56%, were saying that they would be more likely to
use. It during and covid and also
just the different types of stores that people were finding
it harder to avoid was very interested in staying.
So obviously grocery stores, people find it harder to avoid,
but Banks people find it very easy, to avoid mum children and
toy retailers, really, really important to the customers that
use them. And they found them hard to
avoid them, which I thought was very interesting as well.
Yeah, I know our little toy. A shopping.
Turnham green has a has a has a queuing system, which I don't
know if it's yours, but I know they have a queuing system and
have you have you expanded into the u.s. now?
Ask you Deanie Stateside as well or you predominantly uk-based?
Yes, we have actually, so we're working with a number of
retailers across their Us stores and and really like, because
we're working now with a lot of kind of global brand.
So we have the system, Student translated into all sorts of
different parts of the world, like Korea, Japan all over
Europe as well. So, that's very exciting.
Let's just bring it back into again in terms of the journey
that you have gone on as a person.
So, how how do you feel now? Almost, almost 10 years down the
line and the, the next 10 years or five years, where would you
like to be? Well, I guess I'm probably only
really thinking kind of too. Years ahead every-- every year,
every couple of years was kind of have that your big kind of
two to three year growth plan. And we've got some pretty
ambitious targets to me based on kind of how well things have
gone because of covid and how much our technology has been
adopted. So we're really just helping to
hoping to grow from there and I'll main goal right now is to
grow more internationally real. So to convert all the UK
retailers who are now starting to understand what virtual
queuing is. And How it's spent in official
to them. Yeah, I've noticed that you
obviously are focused on luxury. What, how does luxury play into
the QD new world? Yes.
So luxury has become bigger and bigger and of the last year,
even we started working with Aiko stores internationally a
few years ago. So they were getting really,
really high traffic of customers all over the world coming into
by their kind of heated, tobacco devices.
And We've just seen and because you've got kind of Premium
Stones where people want to have a premium waiting experience.
And if there's a queue, it's really not attractive.
And also people want to be able to book time, they're going to
spend a lot of money so they want to be able to have more
detailed service. So we're just seeing one more
tip with retailers that were working with internationally.
Yeah, I noticed I don't know how long back but the word
choreography started to appear. X2 2 in terms of retail
choreography, what does that mean?
Can you expand on? What how, what's your
interpretation or whether what has that being interpreted?
Yes, sir, retail choreography, is this kind of category
concept? We created to better explain
what it is that we do because we built the queuing system in the
booking system. And people kept kind of thinking
we were just a curing system so we wanted to come up with
something, it kind of encapsulated what we were doing
and also where we wanted to take Kitty knee over the coming years
and it's all about, it's all about kind of connecting your
experience, your operations, and your data and holistic Lee
managing those whether that's related to mostly around stores.
But also some of your online offering and we noticed kind of
no one was yet kind of incorporating the concept of
experience of operations and data and how we tell us should
be looking at those holistically and all that one, kind of a
framework. We've been creating my starting
to create a set of Tools around how to use retail choreography
as a concept, not just relating to keaney initiatives, but any
process or any tool that you implement across your business,
I got you and I presume the Data Insights on top of the stuff
that retail is traditionally used to gain.
You know. I do for counters infrared
cameras whatever they are that must be phenomenal.
Like a know what percentage upgrade that they're getting on
data on? Footfall physically coming into
their stores. Yes.
So because obviously retailers a lot of them will have football
and they have sales but what has happened between the door and
the till is not very well known. So we help to bridge that Gap by
showing things like, how long customers are waiting?
Who's speaking to them and how long that service is taking one
of the outcomes? What's the survey feedback?
If they booked an appointment whereabouts in the country?
Did they book their From so we can give the lot more insight.
Yeah. If we just step away from from
the business and go back to your role as a CEO, what I mean this
has been a really tough time for everyone in.
You know I put my hand up for myself as well and it feels like
you know when when you heard about this news of work from
home again you thinking oh my God, are we getting ready for
another lockdown? How has it been managing a team
through? This was there?
I mean, yeah. Yeah, how how did the kid Nene
team managed? And were there any tips and
tricks for keeping morale up during this time?
I think one thing was that we've always been set up virtual
working, because we've always been quite flexible.
Yeah, whereas I've had some friends at companies and they
just weren't set up a virtual working and that was a huge
change, but it's definitely hard to kind of keep up morale.
Like, I think my biggest concern is that you don't know, When
someone's unhappy that you can't just see that you can't get
those visual cues that you would get in an office.
So it's all about kind of just calling people, we implemented
daily stand-up. So every morning kind of our
sales and marketing team will connect in the development team,
have a separate call. And actually, we've found that
we've been able to do, there's a lot more regularly than when we
were in the office. And you've got people kind of
there but not there and as well as kind of on Monday, we do an
all-hands meeting on zoom. And then on Friday we do kind of
What did we achieve this week and drinks?
And we've also started to send people kind of little gifts when
we win deals just said kind of feel kind of loved and also
reward for all the hard work they're doing.
Yeah I think the main thing for us there is we've just been so
busy and that's been really really kind of motivating for
everyone although definitely tiring.
It's also been so exciting. How do you I mean with the covid
research that you It and just sort of looking at the generic
retail Market specifically in the UK, what's your view on the
or what are you seeing in terms of the indications?
Are we? Because there's this been, this
whole view of a bounce-back, people will just go back to
their behaviors, which I think happened in over the summer,
June, July August. But do you have any views on,
you know, the future of I say, the future of the next Six to 12
months and and how you think specifically coming up to
Christmas if we maintain this trajectory of not full lockdown,
but partial lockdown, how do you have a view?
Well, I can talk about how some of our clients to see why, which
is kind of inform the way that I see it is that I guess, cause
like a lot of businesses will be putting in these new systems and
processes to manage customers and to Experience.
I think kind of things like the master and the hand sanitizers
will disappear. Yeah.
When kind of the pandemic ever ends but things like the
processes and managing customers and and some of those kind of
Investments should swing. That's what some of our clients
think, like, a lot of them had things that queuing appointment
booking on the roadmap already. Yeah, it was really just a
catalyst for it. I think the virtual Services
thing will also remain. Maine.
Because our research showed that, that is something that
customers want. So that will be really
interesting to see how that transforms the world.
And then from a kind of working perspective, a lot of business
owners are talking about whether they just have kind of go fully
remote and have one day a week in the office or a base, which,
to be honest, I was quite opposed to initially, but I'm
coming around more and more to it just by seeing how effective
people are. Yeah, when they don't have to
travel, obviously kind It reduces pollution of it which is
great. And I don't know if you saw the
stats that like premature babies had massively reduced this year.
Wow, because people are just common and less stressed.
And from my perspective, I 100% feel less stressed because
you've got so many fewer kind of commitments and ways that you
have to split your time which I found very, very stressful being
like should I go to this event or should I stay at my desk and
work? What's going to be better?
In terms of wrapping up and closing any other words of
wisdom that you would have for female Founders or female CEOs
that are just thinking about starting up, or should I
shouldn't I? Yes.
So I would say, definitely, D to raise kind of money.
I believe there is a 1% increase in funding and yes, you this is
like that. There's more well companies as a
kind of pattern recognition and there's a personal company.
So we need more female Founders to build businesses and sell
them and make them so that there's kind of more money being
invested into female businesses. I'd say definitely kind of asked
but don't be afraid to ask people for help and everyone
actually really does want to help out young founders.
He's a particular female Founders, and that's something
really, really need to be able to leverage when you, when
you're starting out, please go of them.
Yeah. I I agree.
I do believe the world needs more Founders and female
Founders. I think parities always a good
thing to go for and I and specially from an investment
perspective, I think the world would be a better place it
region. Thank you for carving some time
out. I know it's hectic, being a CEO
and running your own. Our own team and running a
business. I really do appreciate you
giving us your time, and I look forward to seeing the growth of
Q Deanie. Thank you so much and it's been
great. Thank you.
A global conversation hosted by Alex, rezze Van being