Lead Change, Empower People, Create Buy-in
Commune is a home-grown furniture and lifestyle retailer that crafts artisanal furniture tailored to home owners’ needs. The brand has established a strong regional presence with over 70 stores across China, 3 in Malaysia and 1 in the Philippines.
The company has steadily embraced technology in recent years. It has tapped on tech like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to help customers better visualise how their furniture will look like in their homes. Additionally, its “Commune: In Motion” platform offers a seamless shopping experience for customers through its omni-channel approach. Shoppers can use the store’s app to make purchases, even while they are in-store, by scanning an item’s QR code. They can also browse products and add them to their cart or wishlist before visiting the store. Once there, a salesperson will scan their in-app QR code and bring them to view the wishlisted products. Commune understands that with the current work-from-home experience, customers would invest more in their homes more now then they did in the past.
Commune CEO, Joshua Koh, highlighted that he has experienced plenty of resistance when it comes to implementing new digital solutions to the business like the Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) system. It is difficult to persuade all of his employees that these digital means would help them in the long run even at the expense of short-term drawbacks. With little to no extra manpower especially for SMEs, there was not enough focus to shift resources and effort to apply these changes.
To overcome the issue, Joshua involved his employees early at the start. He creates buy-in with people very early by letting them participate in discussions before the project kickstarts. With this, he gets valuable feedback and suggestions from his team. He remarks that business owners need to lead the change and empower the rest. Also, they need to see it as a priority and give themselves the time and resources to implement such change. Without a leader to organise the change needed, communication issues and resistance would arise.
Commune’s Advice for Other Retailers
Everything is an investment and business owners need to see the future and potential impact a project has. This is something they need to realise themselves to take the step towards digitalization. In Commune’s case, Joshua stated that he had an idea of what he wanted to achieve, and took action to search for vendors. With strong leadership and its position of being at the forefront of adopting new technologies, Commune is able to be differentiated from its competitors and manage change within.
“I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve, and then I went out there to search for other vendors. I was always quite in the forefront in terms of tech adoption.”
Additionally, Joshua suggests owning a customer-focused approach that solves customers’ pain points and improving their lives. Companies should prioritise how customers are impacted first and afterwards focus on improving efficiency by leveraging tools that would raise the staff productivity.
