Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Get to know your customers and build your brand; How the VP of E-commerce at Conn's HomePlus takes what he learns from customers to make a better user experience

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

What's up?! -- And happy Tuesday! You're listening to the latest episode from THE RADCAST! This episode tells us business people something we should consider more in our e-commerce strategies -- the user's experience! In this episode, host Ryan Alford talks with VP of E-commerce at Conn's HomePlus, Satya Sivunigunta. Satya entered UX design and management before it was even considered UX designing. He's worked at Nike, Microsoft, JC Penny's, and more.One of the key take-aways from this episode, are the steps to better understand your customers. Ryan and Satya discuss working with big names, navigating e-commerce strategies through the holidays in a Covid world, the important parts of brand management, and more!Follow along for more radical happenings in the business and marketing world... visit us at theradcast.com | Follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast |  Follow our host on Instagram @ryanalford | For more information about Conn's HomePlus, visit their website here | Connect and follow with Satya on his linkedin here | If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

Hey guys, Ryan Offord, your host of the Radcast. Before we get to today's episode, just wanted to drop a quick note. If you've been enjoying our podcast and want to work with us directly, either with Radical or if you'd like for me to be consulting on your business from a marketing perspective, we'd love to help you and you can reach me directly by text message at 803-855-1832. Again, that's 803-855-1832. Text me. We'll get back in touch with you. We'd love to work with you and help your business in any way that we can. You can learn more about Radical at radical.company online. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and we'll talk to you soon. You're listening to the Radcast.

If it's radical radical we cover it here's your host ryan alford hey guys it's ryan alford welcome to the latest episode of the radcast we are in the middle of our e-commerce series it's been going really well and been bringing a lot of great content, a lot of great guests, and we bring yet another one here today. He is the VP of e-commerce at Kahn's Home Plus. A lot of you, I'm sure, have heard of Kahn's Home Plus, but Satya Sivun Igunta, good to have you, man. You got me there on the name. You won the contest. Did I do okay? No, you're spot on. I think you can't go really wrong with that name, Satya, Satya, you know, whatever. But I'm glad to be here. So thank you for having me. Yeah, man. You bring a lot of good experience, which I want to get into here shortly.

Before we just dive into the standard stuff, I mean, you guys have been hanging on through COVID and is cons in a good place? And I know it's somewhat of a new role for you, but generally speaking, things going all right? Things are fantastic. I think COVID surfaces a lot of new challenges that none of us have anticipated. So it's my job to help cons sort of get to the next level on the e-commerce space. And cons as a whole is a great company, right? So how do I bring that level of e-commerce intelligence and e-commerce talent and team and agility and nimbleness and all of those two cons is what I'm here for.

You know, being with the company only for almost six months now. So there's a lot of good stuff that we've done, but there's another 24 months of hopefully phenomenal stuff that's coming down the road. Great. Well, Satya, let's start with maybe, you know, giving everyone that's listening, you know, kind of your, you know, the cliff notes on you and your background and, you know, where you've been and kind of leading up to where you are today. from the product design background. If you look at my career, I started as a designer in the user experience space before it was even called UX. So all we called it was graphic designer or marketing design back then. But the one advantage that I had for me was I came from a product design, like a physical product design. So

touching, feeling something and sort of experiencing the usability of anything that you build was super important, right? So when you're like designing a coffee cup or a mug or a pen or whatever, you tend to build a prototype in foam or clay, and touch it, and feel it, and make sure that that's usable. That's where I was. And then when I got hooked onto the computers, and then 3D modeling, and animation, and that's kind of what pushed me into the computer space. And then once I got into it, I said, well, I don't have to go wear a dirty t-shirt and keep working with foam and clay all day long in a workshop. I could do all that on the computer, right? So that's what triggered me on my digital journey. And, you know, I got my first gig with Nike, you know, as a designer on their marketing team.

And I was part of the team that took Nike.com, which was a marketing site, to shop.nike.com, which was the e-commerce site of Nike. So very grateful to be part of that team. Built out the entire experiences, the taxonomy, navigation, how does the product details page work, how does the transaction work and all that. But that's where I got my bearings and six, seven years of that time. Nike, no big deal. I mean, you know, building out those things. I'm not sure if anyone listening has heard of Nike, but yeah, no sweat. Sounds like it was easy. I know it's, it's, you know, it's, it's one of the most phenomenal companies that I work for. No offense to anybody else. You know, I work for

some great folks like Microsoft, but Nike really grounded me. There are some amazing, talented folks that were there that I had the fortune to work under, get trained under, and learn and grow from, which sort of set the foundation of how I operate even till today. I go back to my days at Nike and say, what did we do back then if we had a problem? So, yeah, I mean, all credit to Nike for where I am today, for sure. That's great. So we started at Nike. Was Microsoft next? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's the chain. You know, every interview that I go to, people ask me, typically the CHRO asks me, oh, why did you move, right? There's a single common element in my

journey of my going from job to job, gig to gig, is I typically have been recruited by somebody or I've followed somebody that I work with, right? That's the same story with Nike. I had a fantastic boss. She moved to Microsoft to lead their e-commerce team. And she said, hey, Satya, we need you to come part of my team. And gratitude, call it gratitude, call it whatever, loyalty, you know, the fantastic team that, you know, she built. I followed her and several others from Nike to join Microsoft to lead their product design team and UX team. I was part of the Microsoft Azure cloud and then also the Microsoft commerce platform. Microsoft was trying to sell stuff online.

They still do today. And my team's responsibility was to sort of build out that entire e-commerce experience, along with that, a few other things. But, yeah, mostly it's just the e-commerce. And then from there, went to Oguwi, which was, again, a phenomenal move. I moved all the way from Seattle to New York City. Again, great role, great team, followed somebody that I had worked for before. Led banking, retail, and healthcare, primarily product teams. So we would typically go solve problems for when a client comes in and says,

hey, we're trying to do X or we have a problem Y, my team would just go in and try to understand the problem, empathize, and quickly come up with some solutions, digital solutions. From there, moved to Chico's White House Black Market in Soma down in Florida, led their e-commerce teams. Then, you know, JCPenney worked for two leaders, two amazing leaders called Mike Amend and Dridi Saha. Mike came from Home Depot, Dridi came from Target. Phenomenal leaders, learned a ton from them. from Target. Phenomenal leaders, learned a ton from them. Then went up to Detroit to work for a private equity firm, which bought Artvan Furniture. And then finally to Kahn's HomePlus back in Texas, I guess. I was with JCPenney when I was in Texas. But back in Texas in Houston with cons leading their e-commerce. That's great. I, a interesting, you know,

being an agency owner and, you know, the time you spent at Ogilvy and anyone that's listening that knows agency world, you know, there's agency world may have started and ended with David Ogilvy, you know, in some way, shape or form. You may have started and ended with David Ogilvie, you know, in some way, shape or form. But interesting perspective being client side as much as you have, but also spending six years agency side. That probably, maybe talk a little bit about that perspective. It probably armed you pretty well, I imagine, on the client side, understanding the agency side. Because I'm sure most of the size companies, understanding the agency side, because I'm

sure most of the size companies you've been working with, you've probably had an agency that worked with you. How's that dynamic? Having myself been the CMO on the client side as well, it's been interesting and eye-op, playing both sides of that fence, but any perspective there? You empathize with your agencies a little more? I do. Actually it's both sides, right? So every time I bring in, I've got multiple agencies today, no matter where I go, but every time you bring in an agency, the internal team feels like the agency doesn't have empathy towards the brand, right? They don't spend enough time knowing the brand. They don't know who we are, what pains we go through. You,

you are high-flying hotshots. You think you can come in and solve all my problems? That's the internal teams uh marketing team or whatever right that's usually the first slide in our deck yeah you know you think you think you can solve a problem in like 12 12 16 18 weeks yeah exactly and you have and you we've been spending 20 years doing it yeah yeah. But on the other side, I think agency, what taught me is the agility factor, right? You move, you know this, you move really, really fast. You've got really, really, you've got a very little time. You've got to understand the problem. You've got to empathize. You've got to, you know, coming from the UX world,

empathize, and then you've got a prototype, and then you've got to test, validate, iterate, and then go back and, you know, build another prototype. And then finally, you're sort of ready to go get in front of the customer. That, you know, typically takes quite a bit of time if you live on the brand side, because brands and companies move very, very, very slow. And given the red tape and all that that sort of exists within an organization, I think that's where the agencies come in and are able to seamlessly navigate and empathize with everybody, but really be mission focused and getting things done. That's what I learned. If I have to distill all my six years with Ogilvy is learned agility, how to move fast, how to be nimble, and then get your message across within the 30 minutes that you have with the client.

Even within 30 minutes, you really got five minutes to make an impact and then that's it. Right. So, yeah, I totally empathize. Yeah. What got you into e-commerce and where is there, you know, obviously doing user experience, customer experience is obviously a national transition from a digital perspective. But was there some natural, innate curiosity in e-com, just a natural progression of the career? I mean, talk to me a little about that. So Nike was the beginning of e-commerce. That gave me the taste of what e-commerce looks like.

But again, this was 2000, 1999, 2000, where e-commerce wasn't e-commerce the way it is today. Microsoft wasn't really e-commerce, just in all candidness. I mean, we were building for, but wasn't there yet. What Ogilvy did was it gave me three choices, really. I've got a path. I can go down the healthcare path because I work with folks like Cardinal Health and some of these bigger healthcare clients. I can go down the banking path or I can go down the retail path. And I work for JPMorgan Chase on some of their products and MX.

What I found about myself was I'm not the type of person that, I mean, I really like the speed and the pace that retail moves. There are days that I absolutely hate it. I regret every single decision that I've made to get into retail. There are some days, but most days I love it. Most days I absolutely love it. The fact that I wake up in the morning at 4 or 5, the first thing that I do is look at the hourly report or the nightly report that comes in from a revenue standpoint.

For my product teams, what are we pushing out? What are we changing? What was the impact? So KPI driven, so the amount of impact that you could potentially have by doing a very, very small change is enormous in retail, given the amount of traffic that we see. And that's where I want it to be. You know, that's what I love. Like I said, 98 days out of 100, I really love being in retail. days out of 100 i really love being in retail is um back to cons and you know the notion of you know being a retailer and a finance bank for lack of better words because a lot of the

financing you know in in your job i mean i would think it would be hard thinking about transactions versus branding, you know, like our customers, because you typically think of banking, you think of transacting, you know, and it's not that you don't, the banks don't have a brand. I don't want to say that at all. They most certainly do. But in your role, is it purely how to drive more transactions or are you charged in any part of the brand lifting? The way I would answer that is in today's world, in the last, I would say in the last two to three to five years, the brand has sort of blended with a transactional relationship, right? A brand that you love and you aspire or you get inspired by versus, oh, this is some, this is some company that I just go buy stuff and I've got no, no relationship, you know, that, that's kind of has come together really, really. I mean, I'm sure you're seeing

this in all the conversation, right? These no longer are two separate marketing metrics, you know, commerce metrics and brand metrics are like, like very, very close. There's quite a bit of overlap. Yeah. With cons, the challenge or the problem we're trying to solve is people know that we, we, we do offer credit and financing. People know that we do sell appliances, electronics, mattresses, and home office. It's about when you come to cons, you know, we've got your back no matter what your credit profile is, right? I think that's the level of messaging that,

you know, from an e-commerce standpoint, that I've got a challenge to conquer that because think about Affirm and Afterpay and Klarna. There's guys that are doing fantastic work. I mean, Affirm is one of my favorite brands. My boss would have liked it if I say that, but they do a phenomenal job, right? To think about how they've transformed themselves. So that's, you know, when you look at a firm or

some of these other guys, it's no longer about, yeah, I'm transacting with you, but I really love the experience, the customer experience that you provide, the end-to-end experience. So that's the biggest challenge that I have is, you know, how do I take these transactional once a year or once every couple of year transactional moments and then sort of, you know, marry that with the brand, you know, on cons.com, through cons.com, because the fact is 95% of the people that transact in store start online you know covid i want to say 100 but it will be 95 plus percent people start online on cons.com and then walk into a store right um so if i can't if i can't leave an impression on them if i can't build the confidence on the brand messaging that we're putting out there, then I've actually essentially set the entire company for failure because they're of years is people think e-commerce as a store.

In most traditional companies, you have store one, two, three, four. We've got 100 plus stores. Cons.com is another store. But you take that and you put the cons.com right in front of every single store. So cons.com becomes sort of your entry to every store, right? And that's a cultural mind shift internally, but that's the reality out there with the customer. So, you know, short answer is,

I think I weared off a little bit from your question. Yeah, but customer experience is brand. I mean, you know. What you feel, from your question. But customer experience is brand. I mean, you know. What you feel, what you see, what you experience is brand, right? You know, it's no longer what we say, what we play for you, the music, the colors. You know, it's just one. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's interesting because, you interesting because we've had a couple other

guests on this, on the e-com side, and they battle the franchisees or the individual stores, depending on the model of the business, thinking of.com as competition., I don't know if you guys battle that, but the reality is, like you said, the customer journey starts there and you can have friction over that, or you can accept it and leverage it to complete the customer journey wherever that ends. So the first time that I experienced the animosity was at pennies a little bit. OK, there was always this friction in stores, but because of the compensation model, they're not compensated based on it's not a commission based business. It's, you know, you're salaried. There are some KPIspis but it's majority of the store folks are salaried but when i moved to the private pe owned art van furniture it's mostly commissioned sales staff

like in store meaning if you don't hit your numbers that you get you you're probably you're going to make minimum wage at the end of the day um And Conce is a little bit of a similar model where employees are, you know, the downside is if you don't sell, you're not going to make any money. But the upside is if you sell a lot, you're a rock star performer. You make a lot of money. So there's been perception in the industry, and I've talked to a lot of people in the furniture industry, and especially in this type of model where they see e-commerce as the enemy. And I've had to go through like several, you know, district manager level meetings with the store folks in my previous life, where we would go in and we'd say, this is what we're trying to do to drive traffic. Here's, you know, I know I can't convert 95% of the people that come to the site,

but if I can send 10% of those 95% that come to the site to a store, you guys win, right? So I think the whole omni-channel concept is a big one at Cons. We're trying to really push that in. I've got a tremendous partner, the president of retail, Rodney. He came from Target. He was there for almost 15, 17 years. But we believe that it's really omni-channel.

I know that word is slightly stale and overused and all that. But it's really at the end of the day. You go into store for us, you go, come online, we're here to sell, you know, build confidence and sell a product for you. You buy online, you buy in store, doesn't matter. I think what we have to do on our side is do a better job of sort of connecting the dots. So you're not starting from scratch. If you go into a store, like a seamless, elegant handoff, you know, you build your credit profile, you build your application online that we do

that by the way, today you build your credit application, then you can go into a store. So you're not having to spend 15, 20 minutes trying to fill up your credit application, but you can do that online, but then you can just take that and go into a store and you're, you can just buy in store. Yeah. And that omni-channel, look, when you put the customer first, a lot of these things tend to fall to the wayside because the customer doesn't care what your internal problems are. Customer doesn't care about what you're arguing about. They want

seamless, frictionless shopping experience from online to in-store. And if your stock better be right online at that exact store, you know, you better be able to start an application and pick it up. You know, the, whether it's Amazon or whether it's Nike 20 years ago, the expectation has been set, you know, for the convenience factor for the customer. I think, you know, somebody, I think five years ago said, if you can make an appointment online, you know, a $10 appointment to, for a haircut, I don't have a problem, but you do. You know, you do it for heck. We got a 50% issue here. I mean, you could do that five years ago, right?

So if you can do that online, you should be able to know, you know, where an item is, a store level inventory, you know, is this item in store or online? Can I get it today? You know, or by today, get it by when, you know, these are becoming, I mean, convenience, but just table stakes for me. Right. And if you can't get to that level of clarity with inventory or, or promise I mean, we had a huge, huge project called promise at Pennies when Mike was still around back then, still with Pennies. The project was just called Promise. And that entailed

buy by X, get by Y, store level inventory, inventory from other stores. Meaning if you go into the store, we had a project called Find More at JCPenney. If you go into the store and you're looking for an Excel shirt, but they only have a large, they're able to tell you, you know what, can you go to this JCPenney at this location? You can get it in the Excel size. That's one option, but you want it shipped home. I can place the order right now, but the, and then you can, you'll just get the delivered to your home address. So I think that's all of that, Ryan is just table stakes now, you know, and if you can't, if you can't level the playing ground,

you're kind of out of the, you know, out of the play. Yeah. What's a good transition point. You know, we've got a big holiday season coming up and a unique to say the least holiday season. What are you guys doing? You know, you know, I keep wanting to say post-COVID world, but it's just like Freudian slip of what I want it to be, but what it's not. In a COVID world, you know, what's the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like, is there anything you can kind of,

you know, share with what that's doing to your planning and what cons is going to try to do to kind of combat that and still make what's a super important time period for any retailer? the COVID rules, the sort of biggest challenges that we're trying to encounter or solve for are the social distancing factor first, because it is COVID, it is still COVID, people are not, you're not going to see lines, you know, hopefully, if you do see lines, hopefully, people are maintaining six feet social distance or at least wearing masks or protecting yourself in some way or the other. It's about the promise is what it is for me this peak. So let me explain. The inventory promise, meaning making sure that if you place an order with cons.com, is meaning making sure that if you place an order with cons.com, getting the item on the day,

on the time that we promised to you. That's one level of promise. Number two, we're doing all these other stuff with driving sense of urgency. You have to do that to be part of the Black Friday game. There are deals. But what we're trying to do is giving that convenience for the customer to be able to actually just buy online. And then we're doing online exclusives, but we're also doing in-store exclusives for people that really want to go into a store. And, given that I'm only here for six months and Kahn's is doing tremendous investment into e-commerce, it's about stability for me. The technologist in me wants a stable peak, a site that doesn't go down, coupons that work. My call center, my e-commerce sales and support team is available 24 by 7 for that week that we're supporting customers placing orders online, getting the items delivered to you quickly. Like it or not, inventory challenges are real across the globe. And we're not, we're not, I mean, it's because of the COVID. It's not,

we're not unique to that situation. Just playing with the inventory and making sure that the customers get the item, you know, keeping the promise per se. That's really my goal, this COVID. If you had asked me last day, it's about driving incremental sales and all that. I think it's just about keeping the promise for me at this COVID. If you had asked me last week, it's about driving incremental sales and all that. I think it's just about keeping the promise for me at this point. That's admirable. I think most are focused on how many sales they can get, but delivering on the promise is the long game and the long game wins. And that's branding in and of itself, because if you start delivering on those promises that you make, and there's going to be a lot of people that probably won't deliver on those promises. Because if you focus just on the urgency

and the sale and the product, which you're going to do, I'm sure you're going to have that as well. Like you said, it's time period specific, but keeping the promises are pretty key. So as we kind of wrap up, I mean, what's, man, you've done a lot. You've worked with some of the biggest and best companies in the world. I mean, what's an accomplishment or two that stick with you as things that you hold out there that you're proud of? I don't know. I would say the best accomplishment that I can truly tell my friends and family, you know, is yet to come. Let me just say that. Right. Is that, is that okay? I mean, is that acceptable? That's how I feel. Okay. We haven't climbed the mountain yet. I like it. Hey, the journey.

It's a journey. Right. right and you know so the best accomplishment yeah i think yeah it's yet to come but i've learned a lot so uh you know i can't discount what i've learned but there's a tremendous amount of learning that i've uh that i've done, but just not, I haven't climbed Mount Everest, retail Mount Everest yet. Well, what's, I mean, what does success look like for you then? Like you've been successful, you are successful. I mean, what does, I mean, is, do you see yourself, I mean, obviously you're just getting started at Khan. I mean, you're six months in and, you know, on your way there, but is, do you see it? Hey, I want to write a book. I want to, you know, I'm going to start my own company one day. Like any aspirations out there that are, or is it just like take every day as you go? So personal aspirations, you know, is I want to finish my – I'm a private pilot,

so I want to finish my pilot certification, my – not commercial, but my instrument rating so that I can actually fly on top of the clouds versus underneath the clouds, right? my instrument rating so that I can actually fly on top of the clouds versus underneath the clouds. Right. So, and then just, I think the biggest goal, let me say this. I think, so that's my personal aspiration, right? Me and my daughter, we've got a six year old, me and my wife have a six year old, you know, focus on, on, on them,

on her. And we want to have a certain lifestyle with the planes and you know just get out there or every every Saturday morning fly to a you know nobody's tiny little airport get some breakfast you know spend a day there and then sort of come back I think that's you know personal it doesn't sound much but again you know covid's kind of questioned a lot of fundamental things for me so that's really what my personal i like it getting away getting away right uh and then but from a from a professional side i think the one thing that i really i'm learning um um is to be a good manager, right? Since 2005, I've led teams, like started with one person, two people, led 150 people, 200 people, large orgs.

I think the biggest accomplishment or the biggest thing accomplishment for me would be to be a great manager, right? Because it takes humility, awareness, compassion, thick skin, firmness, and all of that, right? It's very, very tough to be a manager. That would be, you know, a leader. Let me just say that. A leader of a team, a leader of an organization. That's where I would see, you know, that's where I become a Houston Texans fan or not you know that you're into it Deshaun Watson your quarterback is a beloved Clemson Tiger I've got him on the wall in my office actually here just to my left your right and so take good care of Deshaun there in Houston and really appreciate your time man and where can people keep up with you so uh people uh want to follow you or long uh imagine linkedin but any other places where they can kind of follow your journey and keep up with everything happening at cons yeah i mean linkedin i i tend to be more active

on linkedin just because you can write and all that uh you know, post thoughts. I've done quite a bit of that in the past. With every new job, it takes a hot second to sort of, you know, know your surroundings and get back to yourself. So LinkedIn is a great place. People can follow me. I'm happy to connect with people and all that. I'm on Twitter too, less active than LinkedIn just because the amount of stuff that I want to say is a lot more than what Twitter can let me. So I think LinkedIn is fantastic.

It's become a video platform. So yeah, look me up on LinkedIn on Twitter. It's simple sense, underscore co CEO. That's my Twitter ID. We'll link to all that on the show notes. So everybody can find you. But man, really appreciate your time and appreciate you come on the Radcast. I appreciate your time and, you know, thank you for having me. It's been fantastic chatting with you and thank you for your producer Riley for accommodating my time. Of course. And go shop Kahn's Home Plus this holiday season

and tell them the Radcast sent you. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you. Really enjoyed this sit down with Sadia, the VP of e-commerce at Kahn's Home Plus. We really covered the gamut across e-commerce. And the interesting aspect with this in our e-commerce series is the perspective of customer experience and how that builds brand in times like now, not only with e-commerce growing, but in COVID and the expectations of consumers. Really fascinating hearing his perspective, both at Nike, Microsoft, and now as he transforms cons into a major e-commerce player. Really enjoyed this in our e-commerce series, and I hope you'll continue to listen along.

To listen to full episodes or to contact us, visit us on the web at theradcast.com. Or follow our host at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in.