Q&A: Peter Kristak, Pricing expert & co-founder, Voxwise
Voxwise is a professional services company that helps retailers and consumer brands grow revenue using technology and customer data.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’m a passionate implementor revenue enhancement, price optimization and price-list redesign initiatives in both B2C and B2B settings with more than 15 years of experience. We have helped companies from various industries, mainly retail & e-commerce, software development, leisure & sports, construction materials, and leisure & sports. The most well-known brands among supported clients by me are represented by Brewdog, Yves Rocher, Erste Bank, Bramac, International Diplomatic Supplies, Asseco Solutions, Global Payments, Dennik N, Websupport, and Profesia. I’m currently set on a mission to bring retailers the top software solutions for mastering price and promotions.
What does Voxwise do? What is it’s USP?
We strictly focus on the topics of pricing, customer engagement and loyalty. We deliver both business consultancy and technological services necessary for implementation of a required IT solution.
What’s special about your approach?
In Voxwise we are mad about estimating business cases and measuring the true financial effect of our initiatives. We also regularly agree to be compensated based on the effect we help to create. Therefore, we have a very strong analytical and data science team. Moreover, we don’t partner with and recommend IT solutions of one software vendor only. We work with world-class vendors with proven solutions using the most modern technology.
What might retailers in the UK NOT know about your solution/team that will help them?
Maybe that typically only about 1/3 of all retailers’ price promotions have truly positive financial effect. Or that by using the right technology, a typical retailer may generate +6% revenues and +8% profit, while cutting the work time needed for the price decision making by 50%. And all that without harming the retailer’s price image or customers’ trust in any way. Or that – for selected industries – up to 80% of the stock replenishment process can be completely automated.
What advantage does your team add?
We are experienced implementors of revenue enhancement and price or promotion optimisation initiatives. Thanks to our involvement, our clients can be sure that they will get a working IT solution, aimed at the right business challenges, within a realistic timeframe and eventually reaching financial effect close to the business case estimated upfront. In other words, with us they are insured that their investment won’t “go south”.
How does your implementation look like and how do you measure success?
Implementation takes in total 4-9 months minimum based on the functional scope and size of clients’ business. It has logical phases: Exploration, Planning, Integration, Pilot, Roll-out. Success is measured typically during the Pilot phase, during which the detail business result of the new approach to pricing can be directly compared in real A/B test with the old / existing approach of the retailer.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Here are few links to well described case study representatives of our partners:
Who are some of the companies you partner with?
Software vendor partners we work with the most often are Competera, Logio (with platform called Veritico), Kuona, Omnia Retail and Disivo. Their solutions are not the same and have different strengths and focus on solving a bit different challenge for retailers and brands of different sizes from different industries.
What challenges do you see in UK retail for the rest of 2023 and into 2024?
The first round of general inflation-initiated price increases are probably over but new ones may still occur. Moreover, with an economic recession “looming around the corner” and a cooling labour market in the biggest western economies, consumers’ confidence will most likely gradually deteriorate and their price sensitivity will increase. The share of the direct-to-consumer sales channels will continue to grow rapidly as well as of the new ecommerce formats (marketplaces, price comparators) and aggregators (Amazon, Google, Meta…).
How can you help retailers address these challenges and turn them into successes?
Thanks to the availability of a fast internet and quickly scalable and cheap computational power the engagement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the process of price optimisation is closer “at hand” – even to an ordinary retailer – as it ever was. Thanks to the help of AI and ML the tackling of the challenges above is much easier.
