0:17 Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining. I'm Kristine Lee as the vice president of our network counts here. As our voice, I get the distinct pleasure of working with fantastic brands and retailers. 0:27 And I'm thrilled to be hosting our retail talk with Walmart today. Rachel talk is a bizarre voice hosted series where we invite key leaders from our vast network of retail clients to join us for an exclusive interview to provide you with relevant thought leadership. 0:43 Each episode features a key topic in retail, such as trends, user generated content strategies, omnichannel marketing, technology and more. 0:52 Today, I'm joined by Melissa Thomas, who is the director of product management of content as commerce at Walmart. Alyssa has over a decade of experience in retail and e-commerce and has worked and has a distinct passion for improving end to end customer experience through technology. 1:09 She has worked for Walmart for over 9 years. And has seen firsthand its evolution from brick and mortar to e-commerce and ultimately to a true omnichannel experience. 1:20 And Elizabeth, current role, she is leading the content as commerce product team, connecting customers with innovative and relevant content at every step of the shopping journey. 1:30 Our teams have the pleasure of working together to specifically better the UGC content on walmart.com. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us today and welcome. 1:40 Thank you, and thank you so much for having me content and user generated content is definitely a passion of mine. Really helping customers have the information they need, as you mentioned kind of at every step of their journey. 1:52 So excited to be here. Awesome I want to mention for our attendees today that we'll also be answering some questions at the end of the discussion, so please feel free to submit those questions through the GoToWebinar control panel. 2:05 Melissa, I'm super excited to learn more from you today. So are you ready to get started? Let's do it. Awesome OK, so question number one, you've been with Walmart for a while now. 2:17 I'd love to learn a little bit more about your experience thus far and what led you to the role that you're in now. Yeah, as you kind of mentioned, I have done a number of areas here at Walmart and I really feel like I've been able to follow the customer journey. 2:34 So started with our store team, moved over to our e-commerce team and then really helped stand up our online grocery initiative, which turned out to be our pickup and delivery initiative from the store. 2:46 So really, following the customer in terms of bringing the two experiences together and creating a true omnichannel opportunity. 2:55 Yeah the e-commerce evolution has really been amazing, but I guess related specifically to you, you see, how do you feel that's impacted E at walmart? 3:07 Absolutely as we kind of invested in e! Commerce, you know, over 20 years ago now, it became increasingly important for customers to have the information they needed to make purchase decisions as more and more customers were shifting from shopping in-store and being able to talk to associates and touch and feel products. 3:28 We needed to bring more content to life and content that customers could trust in terms of other people's opinion of those products. So we really look to invest in user generated content. 3:41 User generated content can really live in a lot of different places, so it's very important to our merchandising. Marketing is highly involved, customer journey and, of course, technology. 3:54 And so I'm really excited that last year, we stood up a new product technology team that really focuses on user generated content and the technology behind it that brings it to life. 4:06 And that's the team that I'm helping with, and we have a lot of opportunity in this coming year that we'll talk a little bit about. That's great, I really love how you reference like consumer experience, merchandising, marketing, technology, all working together. 4:20 It seems like there's so much internal alignment and benefit with these cross-functional teams working together and that all of these teams are benefiting from the rich user generated content that your team is producing. 4:30 So that's really fantastic. Um, segway, I wanted to congratulate you on the recent launch of reviews for Walmart grocery, that's a huge accomplishment, and I also think honestly, grocery has been one of the most accelerated digital shopping experiences in the past two years. 4:46 So can you share a little bit more about the grocery strategy specifically and how you see has been a part of that? Yeah, as I mentioned, kind of another passion point for me. 4:57 I was on the team when we were in just a handful of stores with our online grocery pickup and delivery proposition and saw that grow significantly over my time on that team. 5:09 And since then, and I think the launching of ratings and reviews in that space is kind of that natural evolution. So again, as people are shopping for their groceries and their home staples online, whether or not they're being fulfilled by a store, they're really looking for that additional information. 5:28 We know grocery shopping is pretty habitual. Most people buy similar items week, week to week, but it always is that opportunity to add something new and exciting to your cart. 5:38 And I especially think that's where ratings and reviews can help highlight some of those new and exciting items that either customers just haven't tried themselves or are new to Walmart. 5:50 And our brands really are excited about to get it in front of customers. So ratings and reviews kind of really augments that experience as well. 5:58 Yeah, I was just listening to a podcast recently that talked about grocery importance and how that's the share of stomach is the new land grab there, which I thought was a cute description, but you talked about it. 6:10 But grocery is just an inherently different shopping behavior. But I love the way you talk about reviews validating that purchase, and we like to think about it as having that content that can help you like a discoverable shopping moment in a digital platform. 6:23 So it's really cool how you can replicate that in-store experience. So I guess moving on from grocery, another exciting project was project glass. 6:34 Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is first and the innovation and development behind it? And kind of similar to what I was asking before about what was the e-commerce and UGC impact? 6:47 Yeah, absolutely. So project glass, for those who might not have heard of it, is really our idea of bringing together both our traditionally online shopping experience and then the digital store shopping experience into one place. 7:05 So previously we develop these experiences with two different sites and two different apps. And project glass actually is named after David glass, which is our CEO that developed the supercenter and really brought together. 7:19 You can see the theme here, the general merchandise experience and the more traditional grocery shopping experience. So we did that from a technology and system side, and we're really it's a great opportunity to reduce the friction for customers who are shopping. 7:34 Now they can shop one app for all of their needs, be it their weekly grocery shop or maybe a more high consideration general merchandise item all at one time. 7:45 And they can really see all of their fulfillment options and make decisions that are best for them at that moment in time and how they'd like to shop. 7:54 And similarly to what I was kind of mentioning before, this really has allowed us in a UGC space to one look at grocery. 8:05 But the other thing is, it kind of provides a bit of a blank slate. So we not just copy and paste every feature and functionality that we had on our walmart.com page over to the new glass experience. 8:18 We really want to take a deliberate approach in terms of what is that content both from a UGC spot space as well as an overall space that's going to be the most helpful to our customers. 8:32 And so we're really being deliberate about how we rebuild that experience in a very meaningful way. I mean, it really sounds like this will allow Walmart ideally to be all things for all people, to all customers at all time, which is amazing. 8:49 The new experience is just so seamless, so it's awesome to hear about. And then I learned some new trivia facts. I didn't know all the details of the name. 8:58 That's kind of fun. And then kind of on your last point there. I love to hear how you guys are continuing to evolve and think about how it can be more robust in a really thoughtful manner for the customer experience. 9:10 That's fantastic. All right, so now that project gloss has concluded, what are some of the biggest priorities that you're focused on for your team and are there bigger developments that we should be expecting going into 2028 to? 9:27 Yeah, great question. We're really excited to lean in this year, especially into the UGC space. So we have a couple of work streams, both on the front end and the back end that we will continue to invest in on the back end. 9:42 It's really about building our platforms both to handle capacity and be as stable as possible, but also to handle new types of content that we may see in the coming years. 9:55 So visual content will be very important. Potentially video content. As you can imagine, all these new content types, we need to have a platform that can really bend and flex to deliver that content to our customers on the front end. 10:12 There's a couple of projects, so I kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, but one of our big bets for this next year is how do we continue getting increase in native reviews? 10:24 So these are the reviews that customers who buy something from walmart.com, they leave the review on walmart.com and then it's published to our site. 10:32 We really take kind of a broad approach right now where we're asking most customers for reviews on most items, and we think there's a way to be a lot more specific about the types of items that we are asking for reviews on and the ones that'll help. 10:48 Future customers make really good buying decisions. And we also want to be thoughtful about how and when we're asking customers for those reviews, so at what point does the customer journey? 10:58 Is it intuitive but not intrusive to ask the customer to help other customers making shopping decisions? 11:07 And then last but certainly not least, and this is in no specific order. How do we really make sure that the content and the tools that we're putting on the site are very impactful? 11:19 So how do we bring incremental value both to our customers who are shopping? Also, Walmart and of course, our brands? 11:28 And how do we really make sure, let's say, if we are publishing user generated images, where and how we're doing that is the most impactful? 11:39 Yeah, that's what's interesting is and you know, we're strategic partner of yours, so that's one of the things that when we're thinking about where a bizarre voice is focusing our technology efforts and our route map, it's very much aligned to that where we're trying to make sure we're getting the content that's most impactful for our partners. 11:56 And so it sounds like really for your roadmap content and richness of content and that coverage of content is really key. And honestly, from a consumer perspective, everything that you're talking about is how I would want to make a purchase decision. 12:09 And what I look for in a shopping experience. So that ultimately makes a ton of sense. So aside from those kind of. 12:19 Directional areas, I'd love to hear your perspective on any sort of big e-commerce trends that you're seeing or predictions that you see for your next year. 12:28 Is there anything that stands out, particularly to you? Yeah you know, we at Walmart are constantly looking at New trends and there's a ton out there. 12:41 I know you and I have talked about metaverse and what will that mean for the far reaching trends and maybe a little bit more near term. But some of the near-term things that I'm really seeing from my feet right now is kind of that, that growth from online shopping. 12:58 So I mentioned that I was with the online grocery pickup and delivery team, which now covers all the inventory in our store. 13:06 So I think it might have been rebranded, but we saw the growth a couple of years ago. We saw that how much convenience it brought to our customers lives, whether you are a busy mom or dad or you just a lot of us are in that boat or for whatever reason, it's not convenient to go into the store. 13:31 And we saw that growing, you know, exponentially over the next three to five years. And then the little thing called COVID hit and all of our growth predictions happen within a month time frame. 13:41 So I can I see that continuing to grow and us continuing to lean into that space? One of the things that Walmart has, as we all know, is a lot of stores and we can really customers leverage those stores, but also do it from the convenience of their computer or their mobile device. 13:59 So I think that will be an ongoing trend and that one that will support our customers in the other one is really around social media. So we know that customers spend about 3.7 hours on their phone and we can all reflect on what that number means for us. 14:15 But a lot of that time is spent on social media, and we really call it the infinite scroll. It's content that is always being new because other creators are making it. 14:27 So you can think the TikToks of the world, the Facebook, Instagram, whatever your favorite social media app is. 14:36 And so for Walmart really thinking through, how do we make that an easy shopping journey and how do we be a part of those journeys, especially maybe early on in discovery and be where they are and really help streamline that customer if they want to make a purchase decision to easily do it with us? 14:56 On the other side of that is there's with all this content being created in social media, how can we bring some of those valuable nuggets back onto the site? 15:05 So whether it be a Instagram image of a new couch someone bought or someone talking about the latest and greatest hairdryer, how can we put that also where the customer shopping on our site, so they continue to understand how this tool is used and how it looks like in real spaces? 15:25 So really a lot of opportunity in that space. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're seeing so many major players invest in these full funnel shopping experience, it's really seems like it's the future of e-commerce growth. 15:39 I mean, you kind of talked to some of the different platforms, but even within the last year, we've seen Google, Facebook, tiktok, Instagram, all of these platforms announcing pretty substantial improvements to adding more of a native shopping capability into their platform. 15:53 And it's kind of transforming what we think about the differentiation between these platforms and truly a retailer, and it's bleeding the lines of what we would consider like what a social platform can do and what a retailer can do. Right you guys are kind of both edging into these similar spaces. 16:08 And so it seems like every internet platform has recognized that shopping is really now the battleground for the hearts and minds of our consumers and needing to be at the right spot in the right place with the right piece of content to engage is paramount. 16:24 And what we're really seeing on our side is engaging in these shopping discovery moments with visual content as a key to win. 16:32 And so I think it's super exciting that you guys are being innovative enough to think about how can I go outside of my four walls into other experiences to engage with those customers. 16:43 And then also making sure that when they're in those digital properties that you guys have, how to bring similar content to meet them where they are? 16:51 Because ultimately, bazaar voice is wanting to invest in these similar type of full funnel content solutions to enable brands and retailers to go on that journey. 17:00 And leveraging that content can be a great way to do so. And at the end of the day, you've already touched on it and I couldn't agree more. 17:08 It's about delivering that great customer experience that ultimately is going to influence, inspire and provide a better, more confident shopping experience in a digital environment. 17:20 Yeah, I think wal-mart's really well positioned in this space because of the breadth of products that we carry, the trust that we have with our customers as a brand as well as, you know, we have a lot of different ways to get items to customers. 17:36 And so, you know, we really enjoy partnering with our brands and looking across where are those opportunities to be a part of that journey wherever the customer is at? 17:49 You can kind of look at China and see how retail has evolved and talk about blurred lines. Socially and retail are the same, you know, they really are all fully intersected. 18:01 We're not quite there, but I do think there's a lot of opportunity to be where the customer is at and to lessen the cognitive load when customers are making buying decisions, bringing it down to more like priorities this year. 18:15 What are some of the things that you guys your team specifically are focusing on this year? And are there any goals that you can share that are kind of more within the next couple of months journey? 18:27 Yeah, absolutely. There is so much opportunity in this space, so we really wanted to hit a couple of those goals that you mentioned and lean in. 18:38 So the first one, and we've alluded to this, but is breadth and depth, but breadth and depth in the places that it matters. So making sure we have as much coverage on the items in our catalog, both first party and third party items, because it is such an important moment in the buying decision making, but also depth in terms of if you only have a couple of reviews on certain items, how can we round that out? 19:02 So you're getting a full picture of how customers feel about that product, Neda reviews. I talked to this a little bit before. What are those key moments in the shopping journey? 19:13 And then also looking at how can we maybe be proactive in reaching out? So we all know Amazon is a leader in many ways in the space, although they also have areas of opportunity. 19:26 But they have like an early reviewer program. So one of the things that we can do that, our Walmart. Centric, but really empower the customer to help leave content and help other customers on their shopping journey. 19:40 And then last but not least, and again kind of talked about this, but a goal of the impact of UGC. So how do we make whatever we put on the site really valuable for our customers and not just information overload? 19:55 We're also looking at bringing back and new types of content. So visual content, I think, is going to be especially powerful in the coming years. 20:07 As people get information overload, it's a lot easier to look at a picture and get a quick sense of an item versus scrolling through 500 reviews and making up your own mind. 20:18 Especially you can think in the fashion world or the home decor, but it has applications in a lot of other spaces as well. So that's another area in terms of the impact of UDC that we would like to lean into. 20:32 Awesome So for any brands that are joining us today, it sounds like prioritizing quality content on that item page is going to be crucial. 20:40 And I one of the kind of best practices there, particularly on that second bullet point, Melissa is leveraging the spark reviewer program, so certainly a good takeaway for those thinking about what's next. 20:52 Um, so kind of a further step deeper. How do you envision a Walmart product page evolving over the next year and beyond? 21:00 Can you give us a bit of insight into what you think that might look like? Yeah so, you know, there's a full team that owns the item page, and it's such an important point in the customer journey that. 21:17 We're working alongside our user experience team and our design team really being thoughtful about how do we evolve that page? There is new types of content coming out left, right and center. 21:29 But we want to make sure what we're putting on there provides incremental value. So we all know that there are times that you want more information, but there's also times that you might be on a page and it just scrolls forever. 21:42 And you don't know. There's brand messages, there's user generated content, there's questions and answers, and it just goes and goes and goes. How do you be really thoughtful about providing the content that consumers want, but also allowing them to navigate it in a very intuitive way? 21:58 So there's just a lot of opportunity here. We also think that looking at those omnichannel purchases, so how do we enable customers when they're in the store to quickly get the information they need if they're kind of deciding between items or thinking about that purchase decision? 22:17 And last but not least, the one thing I do want to touch on is while we want to continue to build our breadth and depth across our catalog. 22:25 One of the things that we are not willing to sacrifice is authenticity. So one of the really important parts of customers reading ratings and reviews is that they trust them and that they're authentic to the item and to the customer. 22:42 Otherwise, we potentially lose that trust that customers are looking for in the first place from reading their reviews. And so that's one of the big areas that we're leaning into as well. 22:55 I'd love to dive into that last point deeper, because this is really an area that hits home for us, a bizarre voice like we consider ourselves authenticity, authenticity nerds or experts, so to speak, in that space. 23:07 The way that our moderation and data flows work today use the same tools that stop payment fraud. So like, we've invested a ton of technology and people and resources into that process, and we actually ran a survey and found that once a consumer suspects a product have fake reviews, that 36% would not buy the product. 23:28 28% wouldn't trust the brand. 27% wouldn't trust other reviews on your site, and 18% of those respondents said all of the above. 23:37 And so it's really not just that one purchase moment of the trust deficit, but it's really paramount that you prioritize that authentic content to have a good customer experience that can come back and be relied upon. 23:50 If people, if consumers start to question the validity of what's supposed to be represented as the customer word of mouth and the voice of the consumer, you're kind of disintegrating some kind of core foundations of how they're shopping on your site. 24:06 So we're really invested in our moderation process and authenticity tools to enable us to invite those methods to continue to provide your site with that robust content. 24:18 We're continually rejecting anything that's coming up as spam or fraudulent to keep both yourselves safe and your consumers safe and having a great experience. 24:28 So we are equally bullish on that. Yeah and you know, we work very closely and I know you guys are putting a lot of emphasis in the space, which we appreciate we are too. 24:39 So we're adding layers of protection. You guys get a lot of information. We have other information. So between the two of us, I think we're continuing to improve this process and we have to continue to improve it because the bad actors are going to continue to try to thwart the system. 24:57 So it's an ever evolving process. And as we mentioned, we just brought reviews to grocery and that opened up a whole new area of opportunity for us to making sure that the reviews are specific to the item and that they're relevant for our customers. 25:12 So it's definitely an ongoing process and an ongoing partnership. Agreed we could be mutual authenticity nerds together, love it. 25:22 Also, thank you so much for providing kind of a deeper diving glimpse into your world and what Walmart is focused on this year. There's kind of four bullet points that we wanted to recap from our conversation today. 25:33 So first and foremost was the focus on breadth and depth. So coverage here and quality of content is going to be key and really making sure that you're having that be extremely robust. 25:45 The second bullet point here is visual and social. You see, we heard you loud and clear. That's coming soon. You guys are really excited to take that test and learn approach. But just the idea of actually connecting that inspirational shopping experience and a digital platform is really something that you guys seem inspired and excited about and really excited that also will have an opportunity for brands to syndicate that content as well as part of the testing capability. 26:10 So look for that in the coming months. Number three kind of touched on it just before, but that test and learn approach to the roadmap. So you guys are really looking to push the envelope and see what's going to be most beneficial from the content that you're providing the customer to make those informed decisions and trial trial a lot. 26:27 And then last, it sounds like it's really important for your brand to be playing a key role in their own success. And so you guys have a pretty robust roadmap of what you're wanting for content. 26:39 And it sounds like UGC strategy. If brands are kind of showing up and owning that strategy, they can really have a bigger influence on how they can be successful at Walmart. 26:47 Alissa, is there anything that I've missed here or that you'd want to kind of add on to? I think this is a great recap, and as I look at this, I just kind of gets me more excited for the year to come and how much opportunity and how excited our team is to kind of lean into this space. 27:06 So um, yeah, looking for it? Absolutely, that's fantastic. Well, do you have a couple more minutes for questions from the audience today? 27:15 Yeah, absolutely. Awesome So we already have some really great questions submitted, but for those who are participating, if you haven't already submitted your question, please do so now in the control panel below. 27:27 And let's so let's go ahead and get started.
