Porsche, Porno, Upholstery: a look back at the ECC-Forum 2015

An all-round successful event is how you could sum up the ECC-Forum “Experience and Service in (Online)Trade”, which took place in Cologne yesterday. The weather gods must be soccer fans, because the sun only shone on the concrete block building. This made the terrace, and of course the view of Cologne, all the more tempting. But the varied and class-studded program made time fly.

After Dr. Kai Hudetz’ greeting, Dr. Eva Stüber started the event the with latest statistics from a study on the cross-channel behaviour of customers, published at the beginning of May. The exciting thing here was that pure blooded stationary purchasers are dying out quicker than anyone thought. Cross-channel shopping is the mainstream, but the purely online shopper is rarer in comparison to the last survey. So shopping on all channels is the future, which is further supported by the networked behaviour of “smart natives”.

Eva Stüber is giving an exclusive introduction to the first results from the new cross-channel study with@hybris_software. #eccforum pic.twitter.com/lxaFjMXWUR

— ECC Cologne (@ECCCologne) 21st of April 2015 «

// Other program highlights for me, included the talks by Kay Ahnsel (Möbel Mahler) and Dr. Ralf Jung (Globus SB-Warenhaus). Both showed that even in Germany, a country still developing cross-channel, a lot is actually happening in this area. So Kay Ahnsel, who summarises his CV as “Porsche, Porno, Upholstery”, introduced Möbel Mahler’s strategy. He hit the nail on the head when he criticised the fact that low IT costs still warm the hearts of many board members even in this age of digital transformation.

“Cross-channel works”, says Kay Ahnsel of @moebelmahler at the #eccforum

— ECC Cologne (@ECCCologne) 21st of April 2015 «

In his function as departmental head of innovation F&E at Globus, Dr. Ralf Jung provided insights into the initiatives which are currently being tested at their Koblenz location. These ranges from WLAN, and store navigation, through to “Goodster-Automaten” which gives away matching goodies for the products purchased.

#eccforum – #Multichannel heißt nicht nur online/offline – Globus zeigt innovative Ansätze aus dem#IFL pic.twitter.com/1svfVSvmDl

— Aleri Solutions GmbH (@AleriSolutions) 21. April 2015 «

WLAN in allen Globus-Ladengeschäften als Kundenservice. Interessante Diskussion zum Vortrag von Dr. Ralf Jung beim #eccforum in Köln.

— ECC Köln (@ECCKoeln) 21. April 2015 «

At the end, Torsten Waack van Wasen (Alvarez & Marsal) presented numerous examples of cross-channel approaches he observed during his time in the USA, showing just how much there is to catch up on in Germany.

The day’s presentation will soon be available at eccforum.de. Apart from this, Adrian Hotz was also out and about with his camera and you can find the videos here.

We are already looking forward to the next ECC-Forum on the topic of B2B, which will take place on the 1st of October.
More tweets of the day:

Täglich werden 3x mehr Smartphones aktiviert als Kinder geboren – Sïmon Saneback auf dem #eccforum

— Cornelia Weiss (@Handelskraft) 21. April 2015 «

Stöger und ich reden vom Uefa-Cup und besprechen die Taktik gegen Leverkusen. #läuft #eccforum pic.twitter.com/SvZU40T3fO

— Adrian Hotz (@a_hotz) 21. April 2015 «

“Die gesamte Customer Journey ist entscheidend. Auch Rechnungen sind Brand-Kontaktpunkte” – Andreas Unger, Stabilo, beim #eccforum.

— ECC Köln (@ECCKoeln) 21. April 2015 «