During the session, A Fork In The Digital Road; Restructure Your Organization Today To Be More Efficient, Agile & Customer Centric, the executive discussed the organizational challenges with mobile, which impacts so many different areas. Crate & Barrel?s first steps to address these challenges included creating a mobile excellence group and an innovation lab, but the retailer?s strategy really its stride once the customer journey became the focus. 

?We had a mobile excellence group that could meet weekly and we started a mobile labs team to test innovation,? said Shehaan Flot, product manager, mobile and gift registry, at Crate & Barrel. ?That never quite worked that well.

?Once we moved toward putting the customer journey first and broke everything into the customer experience, we were able to rally the whole organization around the customer and everybody was moving in the same direction,? she said. ?As a result of that, relationships were formed across the organization and now collaboration is happening organically. 

?So, that, over time, seems to have worked for us.?

Crate & Barrel is starting to work more on developing omnichannel tools for use inside the store by customers and associates. 

For example, the chain brought its gift registry app in-house last year and has made some investments to replace existing in-store kiosks and scanners. 

In the near future, these devices will be removed from stores and replaced with iPods for store associates with a gift registry app. The app will play two roles, enabling customers to scan items in-store to add them to the registry and to manage the registry as needed. 

At Ancestry.com, the company originally set up a product marketing group focused on the mobile Web and apps that acts as the conduit between the product and the rest of the marketing organization. While this enabled the company to balance its efforts in display and to advertise inside other apps to bring people back to Ancestry.com, the company felt it was not enough. 

More recently, Ancestry.com created a mobile center of excellence.  

?The group is focused just on mobile and we have distributed it the across product, across marketing,? said Laura Dansbury, director of product management AT Ancestry.com. 

?One of our mantras is that mobile is a feature, and you can?t roll out a new feature or a new offer if you haven?t addressed how it will go on a mobile app,? she said. 

?It is really making sure that nothing gets launched if it hasn?t gone through a checklist with mobile experts.?

As consumers increasingly shop across a number of channels before making a purchase, mobile can be the focal point that integrates all of these experiences. However, marketers are still trying to figure out what is the most effective organizational structure for producing successful mobile-focused omnichannel strategies. 

?What we are challenged with at Crate and Barrel is figuring out how to bring all these digital touch points and the physical world together in a beautiful seamless way,? Ms. Flot said. 

Final Take
?Chantal Tode is senior editor on Mobile Marketer, New York