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