029 | Margaux Mengebier |

Welcome to Commerce Famous, the biweekly podcast all about ecommerce and retail. In each episode, your host, Ben Marks, cuts through the clutter and takes you straight to the stories and experiences of those who shaped digital commerce as we know it today. While their names and faces might not be recognized on the street, each of Ben's guests are famous for commerce or commerce famous. Without further ado, your host, Ben Marks. Hello, everyone.

Welcome to a live recording, live from Shoptoberfest twenty twenty four here in New York. I am with Margot Mengebier. Margot, welcome to Shoptoberfest. This is the first one we're doing. So, what do you think so far?

I know it hasn't even started yet. Thank you, Ben. Lovely. I think the venue is great. I've seen the outfits, and you guys are hitting all the marks.

Good. Yeah. We're we're we're we go big on the German branding. I'm not wearing my lederhosen just yet as my my, But you have one? Of course.

Of course. I've actually had one for several years even before shopwear. So Oh, that is awesome. But, yeah, we even have vans here on-site with, like, custom embroidered shopwear laderhosen. I saw that.

I'm honestly a little bit jealous now. But, you know, so you are working, you've been in West Monroe for, for a little over five years. But your experience, I think I in the in the in our in our prep just a second ago, I what did I say? I said you you're like, you have a, basically, a working doctorate in digital transformation and customer experience. I mean, you have literally been in and around this space for for decades and in multiple regions.

Just can you give us the the nickel nickel store tour of your of your career so far and how you've ended up, at West Mobile? Sure. Right. So as you mentioned, I've been around a bit. So I'm originally from France.

Started off there, with IBM. To be honest, I really thought I wanted to be in branding. Mhmm. And, because I fell in love during my studies with brand experience and how brand engage folks, for their services, for their identity, for who they are. But the agency word wasn't exactly working out for me.

So Explore IBM, at that point, I was working, in the consulting arm with all the IBM studio and the ways that IBM was trying to bring design thinking in all the different aspects of their project. Yeah. And then about a few years later, I moved to The US, where then I joined, a more niche consultancy firm focused on digital transformation and customer experience. Okay. It was quite a transformation for me.

So moving from Paris to New York was one thing, but there, I was pretty much immediately staffed on, health payer clients. And if you know anything about France, you can imagine the health system is slightly different. So that was definitely a crash course in customer experience and adaptation as I just figured out what what it was even to, talk about health care in in America. So I did that for a few years, in New York, moved to Chicago with that firm to open their office there. Yeah.

And then, joined West Monroe, as you mentioned, about five and a half years ago, really focusing on the intersection of customer experience and digital transformation and how we can help our clients, you know, work with their customer, acquire, grow, retain their customers, and from a West Monroe perspective, from strategy all the way to implementation. Right. So you you all so your approach, I mean, and I appreciate what you were saying a moment ago about the the branding. Just just from a from a consumer side. Like and coming from France, you have iconic, I mean, just iconic trendsetting worldwide brands.

And it's interesting. I mean, my, you know, my wife and I are watching Emily in Paris, right, which is a a fairly reduced, idealized, you know, snapshot of this. But it's it's great. You could throw it on. You don't really even have to keep up with the story, or I don't have to keep up with the story.

But, but I do get the, you know, the basic premise of, like, these these brands, these fascinating moments, these fascinating experiences, how they're very personal and and getting people to identify with them. And in your career, you have seen, you know, the, you know, the customers, customers, both potential customers and existing customers collected under, you know, various there's there's various ways that people interact with brands. Right? But that's very different today than it was twenty years ago. And now, you know, you have so many brands and so many touch points and all these finely tuned, turbocharged ad networks.

Mhmm. The you know, a a person in their given day I was speaking with a consultant recently. He was saying, like, the average person is literally sort of getting receiving impressions about, you know, like, 10,000 or more times per day, maybe even 20,000 times. It's it's a lot. So the the strategy of ex of of helping brands and consumers connect meaningfully and then to continue, that has got to be a very, very different thing today than it was even, you know, five or ten years ago.

What have you seen from your perch, you know, helping helping businesses, navigate these waters and being being a true partner to these businesses in their strategy? Like, what what what does that look like for for you over this last, like, ten years? That's a that's a great question. I'm a firm believer that you can't be everything for everyone. Mhmm.

Right? And strategy is about making choices and making decisions, doing certain things and not doing others. Yeah. And I think ten years ago, it was more forgiving. Brands could get away with just doing a little bit of everything.

But these days, to your point with the multiplication of brands, the multiplication of the touch points, and, you know, customer knowing what good looks like Yeah. It's so much more difficult to miss the mark. Yeah. You pay for it right away. Right?

Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because, what a, you know, a bad impression is I I would assume that that could actually reach beyond just sort of like, okay. Well, this is a brand I'm not gonna like, you can you can truly, it's it's just like NPS. Right? I mean, you you end up with with people, not only, the the immediate consumer who's not going to use your services or promote it, but, like, they might actually be detractors out there in the market.

Right? Do you, you know, I assume you you all are consulting across a number of industries. Right? So how do you does does the strategy does the general approach change from industry to industry, or are there some are there some, like, let's say, experience informed, you know, template or value added basis that that you bring into each of these, consultations? Right.

I think one of the the good thing about consulting and the goal of it is your ability to bring all that experience to the table, both from a specific industry and across the board. Right? I don't think brands have the luxury to say we're only gonna use competitors from our industries true benchmark of what good looks like and what we should do. They have and they must, take into account all the touch points a customer is experiencing. Yeah.

And I'm talking b two c and b two b, alright, like, as well. Yeah. B two b has been historically a bit more insulated. Yep. But now b two b customers as well are feeling, like, they should get b two c quality experience when they're dealing with companies in their professional life.

So I think it has really impacted the way that brands are approaching this. So to answer your questions, yes, we're bringing to the table accelerators because we've seen in the industry. We've seen in across industry, which is another type of layer. However, I always wanna start with as I mentioned, I'm a strong brand identity believer. Yep.

So the brand strategy, the brand personality, who they are, and then the customer insights. So the way that we approach the work that we do is bringing together more of the inside out and an outside in perspective Yeah. So that we can really understand what is truly happening. Because when you're looking at, you know, if let's say your clients are not buying anymore. You will have the version from inside the firm that tells you what's going on.

You'll have the version from the client telling you, well, this is why I'm not buying, But you have a third version that's more of an observation of, okay, what is actually happening and what's happening in the market. So, you know, that's the way I think about helping them identify and focus on the right thing is taking all these inputs and bringing the decision to the table of, okay, what are we gonna focus on? What are we gonna select? What are we not going to be doing? Okay.

So you just covered you just covered a lot of ground, and and there's a there's several things for me to dig into there. I think I love what you had to say about the insular, like, the insular tendencies of, for example, b two b. Right? And and you and I spoke spoke about, like, the French market, which is, as an outsider to me was always fascinating because knowing that there are great solutions out there, but understanding how things have to be, they have to feel local. They have to be primarily in the French language, which I'm far from being able to speak.

And and these, you know, this this is not if we wanna get outside of of, you know, sort of the West. My travels in Japan taught me the same thing. Yeah. Absolutely. Businesses want they want Japanese platforms.

They want Japanese vendors in their tool chain. China, a whole a whole different ball of something Chinese. You know, it's it's not even just, you know, the Chinese market. It's it's 300 different markets with inside China. So breaking out of these these, self imposed silos, I imagine that's that's a little bit of what you all have to do.

I mean, I guess it's lucky if you get a customer that understands that they need to transform and they don't know how. But I imagine for a lot of them, there are blind spots where you all can come in and show them and maybe take them take them on the journey, add data into their perception or lack of perception and say, okay. Well, this is this is right here is the is the imperative to evolve, and, also, this informs us how we need to evolve. I bring up data simply because that's another big thing that has changed dramatically in the last ten years. And, of course, now that we have, the advances that we're seeing, with, with big data, with generative AI, this has to this has to be big, big news in your world.

What does that look like, you know, since since, what, '20 was it '22? October 22 that chat GPT was unleashed onto the world, and all of a sudden, everyone realized that we had made a huge step forward. How have you you all have have have clearly been dealing with with with data and lots of data and making decisions on that data since long before that. But what does it look like today? Well Yeah.

That's a huge question. And AI, to your point, especially this year, is just coming through in all different aspects, and and sometimes rightly so, sometimes not so much. Right? I think, you know, it put a lot of pressure for organization to ask themselves, what are we doing around this? Yeah.

How are we taking advantage of it? But the truth is is that in a lot of cases, the use cases that they need to enable are not AI or Gen AI use cases. Yeah. They're truly more, analytics, you know, data science type Yeah. Of discussions.

Yeah. As far as GenAI is concerned, we help our clients. So West Monroe has developed a specific group that's dedicated to AI to help build those tools. We've developed, a chat GPT version of, well, a chat GPT like tool for ourselves called Nigel that we also, offer to our client as a white label way to accelerate their path to to, to Gen AI. So, you know, kinda going back with a customer focus, we use it in, I would say, two ways.

One, from a customer facing standpoint, what are the use cases that are truly enabling, the customer experience? So think personalization, think customer support, things of that nature. Yeah. And then on the back end, how do they get faster and smarter around doing business? So here, we're talking more about how do you optimize processes and workflow using GenAI to do things faster and better?

How do you, I would say, enhance and augment the power of your sales teams in order to sell better and to not waste time on kinda minute tasks such as everything from note taking to writing emails, and all those things just add up. Yep. And so that's how we work with our clients on it. Trying to take a more down to earth approach, take a step back from the hype, have the true conversation around what are the use cases, how do you enable them, and do you really need AI to do it, or is it more of a, well, basically, the ROI of the old affair? Because AI is still very expensive for organization.

It's not just typing three things in chat g p t and getting a result. Yep. Yes. I like it because that is that is also the that's the classic, I don't know if you call it, like, a rubric or a razor or but this is literally you know, some something new comes along. It certainly looks interesting and appealing.

The promise is off course super cool. The hype the hype is there, but from the lens of ROI, I think it you know, that that can bring it back down to Earth. I know we, in our in our platform, added capabilities Mhmm. Not not long after. I think we were the first platform to do it, but these are not, you know, these aren't like marquee lights blazing like, oh my gosh.

You know, choose us for this, but it's it's more about that iterative improvement on really largely back end processes, like helping the store operators do what they do more efficiently, more efficiently, more easily, and ideally with a better, a better insight into the the available data. And that, I think, gets us back down to the sort of pre chat GPT era when you had the intelligence search and personalization, vendors out there operating in this big data AI machine learning space, you know, doing this work before it was cool, kind of. You know, but but The branding is different. Right? And and and we what we've seen now is that everyone everyone has now just has a window into what what the possibilities are.

Now and already, the the most recent iteration, was it o one or strawberry? The is already doing some phenomenal things in in kind of in the in the technical space. I see it actually writing a lot of really good code from just from plain text prompts. So I know this is gonna be a factor. We know I think we have an intuition that that this will impact not just store operations, but also architecture.

I think I think businesses are gonna have to think less and less about how things are wired together because that will all be hidden behind intelligent prompts. But I think that's coming down down the road a little bit later. I'm certainly not, I'm not sending my resume out anytime soon. My I feel like I feel like what we're doing here is is going to be important in the near future. But it begs a question for me, you know, again, from your chair, where where you see things, you know, how you've seen things change from the last ten years or so.

Do you have any ideas or predictions that you'd wanna throw out there for the next, like, three to five years? What what are what are businesses like, how they're gonna be operating differently or what they might be prioritizing differently, how the their the nature of their relationship with with their consumer changes. Any any thoughts to have there? I think that we are just at the beginning of the era of personalization. We've been talking about it for so long We have.

Yes. Yet we're not quite there yet. And I think there's still a lot of progress to be made. And GenAI AI and GenAI, especially in its ability to be that mediator to experiences and that additional layer of connection Yeah. Is going to change the way that we shop, the way that we do things.

It's funny because I remember when tools like Alexa and, like, all that got launched, we were all thinking, you know, Jarvis style interconnection. Yep. And and it really I mean, don't get me wrong. It's it works, but hasn't quite lived to what it could be doing Yeah. To the hype and the the the imagination of people when these tools were first launched.

And I do think that with GenAI and with these additional, like, natural language processing tools and just the volume of data that we're getting about customers, we can enable such intimate, personal, and relevant experiences. Yeah. I think that, to me, is what's what's very exciting. Yeah. That merge with things like AR and your ability to really get a view into what the products looks like.

Yep. How does it look like on you? Buy it in an embedded way wherever you are, whenever you are, is going to change the way that people shop Yep. And change the way the organization have to approach Yeah. Selling and fulfillment experiences.

Yeah. We've we we actually, we're pretty aligned with that. I know we have, we've added three d, AR capabilities in just as core, core feature set. And and we're not the only ones. I'm not trying to No.

No. You know? You know? Because you do see this. You do see applications where it's great when you can pull out your phone and you can throw that couch into your living room and it's you know, it it looks like it belongs there.

These are gonna become the new normal. They're not going to be the overnight you know? I I'm with you with, like, Alexa. I thought I was gonna change anything. Years later, what do we do with it?

We use it to set timers for the kitchen and turn the lights off at night. That's the majority of these. Main use cases in my asshole. So, let but let's I wanna walk it back to, you know, sort of classic, the discipline of of, you know, of what you do and say, now if you could get on a stage today and say to a wide swath of the merchants brands out there, the like, what are the one or two things that they're either not doing, not paying attention to, or not paying enough attention to that you think they could change today and that will pay off either immediately or in the near future? And I say, you know, in the next two to three years.

Is it just is it is it just about better and more data collection, or is it is it something about just knowing their customer in a different way? I think that a lot of organizations are I guess it depends on the size and the maturity of the organization. Right? Okay. I would say that with West Monroe, we work with all size organization, but a lot of the work that we do is with mid upper midsize organizations.

Yeah. And these these guys are still kinda at the cusp of that maturity. Yeah. So for them, it is, I believe, about intentionality and about the right use cases. The data is what it is.

I will always be a proponent of capturing the right information in the right way and being able to get insights from it. We see it at clients all the time. They're we come in and they say, oh, we know our customers, and then the first thing that we do is segmentation or analysis, quantitative or qualitative about pain points and how what people are actually doing. And they're like, oh, oh, we didn't know that. Like, okay.

Well, that's the core foundation. You know? Don't get lost in it Yep. But be able to capture the insights from it. But then the intentionality of and the discipline of bringing all that data in line to a specific outcome Yep.

That I think where organization, you know, will need to focus. It's really that transformation and not just wanting to do everything. I I think It's not really sexy, to be honest. Yeah. But it it rarely is.

Right? I mean, you can't you can't just, you can't just pick flashy things and and as a strategy. Right? There's some But there's no silver bullet. There's no silver bullet.

Yeah. This the the fundamentals are still the fundamentals is what I'm hearing. And just just get to know them better and, and talk to people Yeah. With the experience. I do think, though, as as to go back to your question with more of a optimistic mindset.

Right? I think that the ability to, get your client to experience your product in different ways Yeah. Making sure the products are where, people are Yeah. Is really critical and and more of that low hanging fruit, really thinking about, you know, how do you enable hyperlocal shopping? How do you enable these different use cases of buy online, pick up in store?

Like, how do you make sure all your channels are connected? I think that's where Yeah. Kinda this two to three year old, like, years kinda timeline change can be. Okay. I can see it coming.

Will we can revisit this topic in a couple years and see, Yes, please. I I have a feeling I've I've my money would be on your prediction though. Given given your experience, and given the, I don't wanna call it a regression to the fundamentals, but the reliance on the fundamentals because, yeah, they're fundamentals for a reason. Well, Margot, thank you so much for taking time for Thank you. For me today, and I am looking forward to hearing what your experience is like here at Shoptoverfest.

Yeah. Absolutely. Looking forward to the event. Thank you so much for having me.