SVP, Chief Digital Officer, and C-Suite Transformational Leader, Imperial Dade, Jersey City, NJ
With the recent announcement of its astounding 91st acquisition, Imperial Dade continues to grow both through organic initiatives and a disciplined acquisition process. Its’ strategic foundation implemented 15 years ago has enabled the company to serve 120,000 customers across North America.
Since Chairman Robert Tillis and CEO Jason Tillis assumed their roles in 2007, the company has expanded to become a leader in the foodservice packaging, industrial products and janitorial supplies industry. The Tillis approach from the beginning has been to attract and retain top talent.
With that focus, Total Food Service sought out Imperial Dade’s Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Devashish Saxena to share the company’s tech strategy for ecommerce excellence.
Can you please share your background prior to Imperial Dade?
I have grown my career at the intersection of digital and international. With a foundation in technology, I have built and led global digital businesses for firms like Texas Instruments, Premier Farnell, Rexel and PPG.
At Texas Instruments, I was part of a team that revolutionized TI.com from a static brochure-ware site to a dynamic, user-focused design engineering tool that became the go-to destination for TI’s customers.
We built a thriving design engineering community, E2E.TI.com, which remains a driving force today. Our team also created data frameworks that accurately measured the ROI of online conversions, connecting them to offline sales performance.
The impact of our work at TI cannot be overstated – we changed the way TI interacted with its customers and transformed the company’s digital presence.
As digital employee #1 at Rexel and PPG, I was essentially a startup founder within two global powerhouses. At Rexel, we shifted the company’s focus from being a logistics company into a value-added, data-driven omnichannel distributor that saw €2.2B in digital sales in 2018 – all in less than five years.
This transformation was a human-centered effort, where digital technologies were key to driving organic growth. At PPG, we established AI as a core and integral part of our digital strategy, creating an AI factory that identified and scaled use cases across the value chain.
As an example, an AI scaling effort in manufacturing at PPG could drive a few hundred million dollars in EBIT at scale. These milestones will stand out as significant achievements in both companies’ digital journeys.
What attracted you to the opportunity at Imperial Dade?
The team I met, led by our CEO Jason Tillis and our CCO Charles D’Elia Jr. I loved learning about how they have grown the business over the years and was drawn to their passion for how they looked to weave digital into the future of Imperial Dade.
Their enthusiasm was infectious, and it didn’t take long for me to feel excited about joining the team, rolling up my sleeves, and contributing to our shared goals.
For a business that has been built on face-to-face customer relationship with your customers, where does e-commerce fit within that relationship?
Right at the heart of it. Our customers expect to use technology to do their job every day. They expect the use of technology to make things easier to do.
We are not building an e-commerce strategy that replaces our face-to-face interactions, we are building an omnichannel lens on how we interact with our customers.
As we speak with our customers, we seek to understand what their journeys are and where they experience any friction today. With the newly launched Imperialdade and our mobile app, we have reimagined our digital experience to remove those friction points for our customers.
And we have done so with an omnichannel lens, incrementally enhancing our face-to-face relationships and bringing them to the digital age.
Can you please provide an overview of the changing buyer behavior trends that you have observed in the ecommerce industry recently?
Today’s buyers demand the highest standards from their suppliers. They expect clear and actionable information to be readily accessible on their mobile devices, enabling swift, effective decision-making for their enterprises.
These expectations are influenced by their consumer experiences in an AI-driven, mobile-centric world dominated by platforms like Netflix, Google, Facebook, and TikTok.
Constantly connected to the events that matter to them, buyers’ expectations in their professional lives are directly shaped by their personal experiences.
When we engage with our customers, the message is clear: they seek information that is relevant, timely, and effortlessly easy.
How have these changes impacted the way Imperial Dade approaches its ecommerce strategy?
We are not merely building an eCommerce strategy; we are driving an omnichannel evolution in our customer interactions. By understanding our customers’ friction points, we dedicate time to defining how we can eliminate them.
This comprehensive approach involves reevaluating our business processes to ensure they center around the customer. Many of these processes were established years ago, often without the customer in mind.
For instance, on the new imperialdade.com and our mobile app, customers are immediately notified of delivery ETAs for any orders currently being shipped upon logging in.
On their homepage, they can easily view all open orders, recently used shopping lists (including algorithmically generated frequent order lists), and any current open invoices. This streamlined approach allows them to focus on relevant and prioritized items that require immediate attention.
The new imperialdade.com features AI-powered product recommendations, enabling buyers to discover similar and complementary products, as well as products they frequently purchase but haven’t yet reordered.
Our goal is to leverage AI and personalization to create an experience that is highly relevant, timely, and easy to navigate, all while incorporating modern design principles and evolving our business processes.
Let’s define ecommerce excellence.
For us, excellence begins with our customers and their perception of their experience. Since launching the new imperialdade.com and our mobile app earlier this year, we have used NPS as a continuous measure of our customers’ love for the experience.
Ultimately, if our customers cannot efficiently use our digital platforms to do their jobs, we have more work to do. I am pleased to report that even as we release new features to our website and app every two weeks, our NPS score has consistently remained strong.
This critical metric reflects the outstanding efforts of our product and engineering teams.
I believe that maintaining our focus on the customer and NPS will drive us to adopt a holistic and balanced approach across every aspect of our journey.
This includes user experience, personalization, product data quality, product offerings, customer support, business processes, delivery propositions, returns, digital marketing, performance, security, compliance, and analytics.
In what ways do you believe the expectations and demands for ecommerce excellence have evolved in recent years?
The proliferation of AI, particularly generative AI, has unlocked numerous opportunities for firms like ours to push technological boundaries and continually enhance the customer experience.
As mentioned, operating in a B2B environment is no longer an excuse for not embracing emerging technologies to elevate our digital journeys. Customers expect us to leverage these advancements to better serve them and meet their evolving needs.
How does Imperial Dade stay ahead of the curve in meeting these higher expectations and demands for ecommerce excellence?
To stay ahead of the curve and meet rising expectations, we rely on a data-informed, responsive operating model. It begins with understanding customer perception through their NPS scores.
Additionally, we analyze other metrics, regularly engage with our customers, field and support teams, and study best practices both within and outside our sector.
This comprehensive approach helps us prioritize and shape our product capabilities and design. Our teams operate in two-week sprints, consistently delivering incremental value to our customers, ensuring we remain agile and responsive to their needs.
Can you share any specific initiatives or strategies that Imperial Dade has implemented to enhance the online shopping experience for customers?
In addition to the features previously mentioned, let me highlight our newly launched mobile app. It seamlessly integrates all the robust capabilities of imperialdade.com into a user-friendly application on your smartphone.
This empowers our customers with instant access to open orders, current deliveries, invoices (both open and past due), and our comprehensive product catalog enriched with high-quality content including images, videos, and AI-driven product recommendations to facilitate product discovery.
Moreover, the app includes mobile-specific functionalities such as voice search, barcode scanning for quick product ordering, push notifications for delivery updates, and more enhancements on the horizon.
How important is personalization in meeting the evolving demands of online buyers, and how does Imperial Dade incorporate personalization into its ecommerce platform?
Personalization is paramount to our ability to stay “relevant” to our customers. Upon logging into the new imperialdade.com or our mobile app, the entire experience tailors itself to each customer, emphasizing their interactions and presenting products and services that are pertinent to their individual needs.
This customized approach enhances engagement and satisfaction by delivering precisely what each customer values most at their specific point in their journey.
What role does data and analytics play in understanding buyer behavior and improving the ecommerce experience for customers?
A big role. Central to our digital transformation journey is our commitment to being data-driven—relying on facts, not opinions. Data and analytics play a pivotal role in informing our decisions across all facets of our operations.
Whether prioritizing features or gauging customer perceptions, we harness analytics at every level to drive our decision-making process effectively.
How do you ensure seamless integration between online and traditional DSR visits to provide a unified shopping experience for customers?
Achieving a seamless integration across online and offline experiences is the hallmark of a superior omnichannel approach, and it remains a priority area for improvement within Imperial Dade.
Looking forward, our focus is squarely on enhancing integration across three key customer interaction channels: field sales, customer service, and our digital platforms (imperialdade.com and mobile app).
Our initial steps involve advancing in the CRM space, collaborating closely with our field sales and IT teams to make significant strides in the months ahead.
What challenges have you faced in adapting to the changing buyer behavior and higher expectations for ecommerce excellence, and how have you overcome them?
As we move ahead in developing and deploying new capabilities for our customers, our most significant challenges frequently arise internally, particularly in evolving our business processes.
Achieving the desired customer experience often necessitates substantial changes to these processes, especially those core to our operations, which can be particularly challenging.
But we are determined to drive this as we are not looking to just put “lipstick on a pig” by creating a pretty page on top of a suboptimal process!
Where does AI fit as you build out your model?
Everything we do is powered by AI where appropriate. This includes all aspects from advanced analytics to machine learning to emerging generative AI techniques.
We are building out potential use cases to continue to integrate more AI driven capabilities to enhance our digital customer experience.
How do you measure the success of your ecommerce initiatives in meeting the demands of today’s buyers?
First and foremost is customer NPS, a critical metric that serves as a leading indicator for all other customer success measures. While operational metrics like sales, margin, conversion rates, and average order value (AOV) are important, our primary focus is on maximizing our share of wallet with existing customers profitably.
Simultaneously, we aim to establish effective strategies for acquiring new customers and expanding our market share.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the future trends and challenges in buyer behavior and ecommerce excellence, and how is Imperial Dade preparing to address them?
The pace of everything discussed earlier will accelerate significantly in the coming years. Real-time expectations will become the norm, and any lack of seamless integration across channels will be detrimental.
The evolution of voice in commerce will be intriguing to watch, with chatbots and virtual assistants poised to exert greater influence. While augmented and virtual reality have yet to gain substantial traction in commerce, their potential impact could shift dramatically in the foreseeable future.
The foremost challenges will revolve around security, compliance with new regulations, integrating sustainability into ecommerce operations, and keeping abreast of evolving technologies.
At Imperial Dade, our data-driven, responsive operating model and our dedicated team are pivotal to our ability to deliver value and successfully navigate these upcoming challenges.
