 Hi everyone, thank you for attending this session today. This is Srishti. I'm working as a senior product manager with Amazon. I have six years of product management experience working in different industries and countries. I've worked in e-commerce, I've worked with publishing and now working in logistics. And today I'll be talking about a particular case from my experience with the publishing industry, which was moving of digital transformation of company moving from a B2C model to a B2C model. And how did we do it? What is the importance? And how can you use these learnings in your own company's transformation from a B2B to a B2C model? So first of all, importance of digital transformation and why should a company consider digital transformation? First of all, this is the need of the R. Most of the B2B companies are now targeting B2C customers as well. The particular company that I'm talking about here in my experience was working with isn't to publishing. They're into scientific publishing with approximately 3,500 journals. The company was working on a subscription model where they had their clients were primarily universities and libraries and were moving to an open access model where the clients were now authors sitting across the globe. So a very massive transformation from a B2B model where they were primarily getting their customers and reaching out to them via sales teams to now a B2C transformation which you could think of it as an e-commerce model. So this is where the industry is headed not just a publishing industry, but a lot of them. And that is why it is the need of the R and you should think about digital transformation and also to keep up with the times. Now, the first thing you need to do for digital transformation and if your company is headed in that direction is to do an assessment and have an end goal or the company's vision in mind. You need to understand what is the need for transformation? What is it that you want to do? What is your end goal and define the vision very clearly? There are certain actions that you need to do to achieve this. First, you need to assess the current market trends and customer demands. Understand your customer, who your end customer is, what is that customer looking for? I would also be talking about certain tools that you could use for all of these actions that I'd be listing out. For this particular action to understand your market trends and your customer demands, you could use tools like Statista, Ebisworld, Gartner. There are a couple of consultancies that do this which could give you where your particular industry is headed and what your customer base is going to look like in a few years from now. So I would encourage you to read those reports and leverage those. Identify the gaps in your current B2B model and where you need to become a B2C company. Have a clear vision and a clear plan of transition. Next thing you need to do is stakeholder alignment. I cannot emphasize this enough and all of my fellow product managers would also agree with this, we work with a lot of stakeholders. A lot of times we are not on the same page, we have to prioritize something over somebody's priorities and stakeholder alignment is very, very, very important. So to gain support from your key stakeholders, there are a couple of things you can do. First of all, make a business case for B2C transition. Now, in my case, when I presented the business case to the leadership, it had a very clear plan of where the industry is. Why should we have a B2C transition? Back your data, back this with data, back it with numbers and what support do you need from leadership in terms of headcount, in terms of budget? Have a clear framework and timeline of how would you get to the end goal and very important have KPIs and return on investments. So KPIs and return on investments would make your case much stronger and would get you the required support that you're asking for. Now that you have leadership alignment, now that you have the resources that you need, what you need to do is to do a market and customer research. You need to understand your head customer better because you'll be building a product that has to meet your customer expectations. So we did read the consulting reports, we read the reports from Gartner and now is the time to understand your individual customer, the customer that you'll be targeting like I said. So do a comprehensive market research for B2C trends. I would segregate this into a qualitative research and a quantitative research. Quantitative research, I would cover it in a bit, but for qualitative research, what you could do is you could use several tools like Google Trends, you could use SurveyMonkey, you could use customer feedback tools on in-platform mess, you could use in-platform messaging tools for customer feedbacks like your Usabila, Pendo, ETC, there are several such in the market. Also one thing that I did to understand the end customer when I was working on this project was I made customer groups based on different personas and each persona represented a different demographic. So make sure that you cover as many demographics as possible. This could be age group, this could be their industry experience, their requirements and I interviewed each of them to understand what drives them to make a decision about the product, what are the metrics or the drivers for their decision making, their thought process and also I had them walk through the product so I could actually see how they are working and how they are making the decision to actually purchase this product. So just understand your customer really well, leverage on all the tools that are in the market and also identify your competitors in this landscape that you're planning to enter so you could see what your competitors are doing and have an edge over them. Next thing, you need to have your digital infrastructure upgrade, this could be done in several ways. A lot of companies do have digital infrastructure but a lot of B2B companies do not. So you may need to build from the scratch so you may need to upgrade on the existing infrastructure. So look out for a couple of things, evaluate and upgrade your existing IT structure. You could use tools like AWS, cloud computing, Google cloud or cloud infrastructure. You could invest in scalable and flexible technologies and implement a robust cybersecurity measures now that you'll be capturing customer data you need to have robust cybersecurity measures. Now data management and analytics, this kind of is in continuation with what we talked about. We'll be working with a lot of data because we'll be targeting B2C customers. So make sure you implement advanced data management systems, certain tools you could utilize for this are Informatica, talent and governance. Utilize analytics tools for customer insights. There are several of these. I've used Google analytics, Adobe analytics. You could just pick whatever your company works with and have a robust data governance framework. Now customer-centric product development. Here we need to develop products that are tailored to B2C needs. You're actually building a product for your customer that you've identified, you've identified your customer's needs. You have identified the market landscape where you want your company to be present in. So engage in iterative user research and feedback loops. We talked about qualitative research. You could also do a lot of quantitative research in terms of use Adobe analytics, use Google analytics to understand where your, what does your customer need and how is your customer interacting with the product? When I was working on this, I built several Adobe dashboards to understand where the customer is coming from and how is that customer behaving based on these different avenues that the customer is coming from. If say a customer is coming from an affiliate or an email market or a Google search, how is their behavior different from each other? How is, what are the next steps that they take when they land on the page? So build your customer funnel, build your end-to-end funnel from your customer landing on the page to final checkout. Understand the drop-offs, understand the bounce rate, understand the different behavior from different avenues. And that would give you a lot of information on what your customer is actually looking for and how well are you able to cater to it. So just play around with the data as much as you can. Then you have to refine your existing products and create new offerings based on all these findings that you have now and prioritize user experience and user interface defines. So work with your UX, all of this data that you've gathered from your dashboards, from your analytics, from your quantitative and qualitative research, work with your UX designers to implement all of that in the product. Next is eCommerce platform implementation, establish an effective online presence for your B2C transitions. For a B2C company, every B2C company needs to have an online presence. We talked about how this needs to have data management systems. This needs to have robust cybersecurity practices. You need to gather analytics and data for this eCommerce platform. And finally, how would you build this platform? You could use platforms like Shopify, Magneto, MuCommerce, if your company does not already have one. Now, once we have built the platforms, next comes is marketing and branding these platforms. There are a couple of things that we could do to reach out to the right customer and make sure once we have more customers coming in is when we would optimize them for conversion. But the idea is to get as much people to land on your webpage. So first is to increase brand visibility and attract B2C customers. There's a couple of things you could do. Work on a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Understand where your end customer is. Are they coming via Google search? Are they coming via an affiliate? What works for your company? What are your competitors doing? So again, do a bit of research, use tools like HubSpot, Hootsuit, and also SEO. SEO cannot be emphasized enough. Leverage your SEO. Make sure you have all the right keywords. Make sure your customers land on your page when they're looking for something similar to what you have to offer. And build an engaging and customer focused brand online presence. There are several ways you could do this too. Again, you could do affiliate marketing. You could do email marketing. Just make sure that you reach out to the right customer based on the industry that you're presence in. Sales and customer service transformation, you would be getting a lot more customer requests, feedback queries now with the B2C model. So make sure that you have a way to capture all of that. Have sales teams. If it's a direct to customer interaction, or you could also, I talked about in platform messaging, have some sort of feedback pop up on your web page. You could utilize tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or any customer support platform. Chatbots for that instance. And a very important agile and continuous improvement. Again, in product management, it's never ending. You constantly have to iterate and you constantly have to improve on the product that you have delivered. So make sure you're capturing all of the insights from everywhere. Certain things, if you're doing A-B testing, make sure it's an iterative A-B testing and you're constantly building and improving. Reach out to your stakeholders for feedback and make sure that is also built into your product backlog. Your customers are constantly giving you feedback. You're gathering qualitative data based on how you've made a certain change and you see the customer behavior change. So make sure all of this is built into your product roadmap because it has to be an iterative process. You have to keep working on it. There are a couple of tools which might help with product project management here or just making sure your product roadmap is updated at all times or stakeholder management and expectation management. You could use Gira Trello, Asana. I use Asana, it's plenty intuitive. You could probably give it a thought. And last is performance metrics and evolution. We have talked about how the performance of the page needs to improve as and when all of these steps that we have done so far are completed. But it's an iterative process. Make sure you have your very clear KPIs for success. You monitor them on a daily basis. And if your KPIs are not performing as they should, then what is it that needs to be done? This is where all of the insights that you have gathered would come super handy. Or you could also look at your product roadmap. So any KPI that needs to be improved, it has to be in your product backlog. It has to be on your roadmap on how to improve this particular KPI and have very clear KPIs. There is conversion rate, one of the very important KPIs for a B2C website. Or you could look at things like your bounce rate, your drop-offs, how is the customer journey or customer funnel improving with all of these new implementations that you have put in place. Regularly evaluate and analyze the performance metrics. You could use tools like Tableau, Power BI, Google Data, Adobe Analytics, again, Google Analytics. And lastly, scalability planning. Make sure that you prepare for future growth and changes. So if you're getting in more traffic, you should be able to handle that. So ensure there is a scalability of digital infrastructure. There is a proper growth plan, a next five year plan on how your product needs to improve. Not just in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of what would the market look like in five years' time? What would your customer expectations be in five years' time? You should be able to predict that. You should be able to have a plan to capture the right audience even in five years' time. For scalability in terms of digital infrastructure, you could use tools like AWS and have a plan for increased transaction volumes and stay updated to emerging market trends. Make sure your employees are trained for this change management. It doesn't just have to be a product related or data or infrastructure related change, but also there needs to be a change within the company and the culture. So make sure you're talking to your stakeholders and they are up to date with what is happening and they are on board with the change. So provide training on new technologies and processes, make them aware of where the industry is headed and what your expectations are and communicate with them on the benefits of why this change needs to happen. That's it on the digital transformation from me. Thank you so much. And if we have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send me a chat request and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much.