Orange-San Francisco kept the conversations on “Conversational Commerce” very lively by holding a “Spotlight on The Future of Shopping” on March 8. The format of the gathering encouraged lively discussion among all attendees. As Orange’s Mark Plakias explained, “We’re all presenters here,” but discussions were kicked off by (and grounded in brief presentations from executives from Groupon, Yelp, Coupons.com and Billing Revolution.

While the future of shopping may not be televised, it is already significantly mobilized. Even though “Coupons” (meaning promotional offers from the likes of Groupon and Coupons.com) was ostensibly the first topic under discussion, mobile commerce immediately reared its head. As Paul Kultgen from Nielsen pointed out, the use of wireless devices for search or consultation occurs in almost 50% of local shopping instances. This is not surprising. In the past, we had seen that nearly 3/4 of calls to wireless directory assistance culminated in a visit to a local business.

Today, arriving at that business is often just the beginning of the process of using resources on the other end of the phone connection to help choose the right product, figure out “the best” price, determine whether to buy it then and there or treat the local retailer as a “show room” for items that are ultimately purchased on the Web. Meanwhile, it also presents an opportunity for the phone’s owner to check-in, make a comment, provide a review, earn recognition or rewards, which are all becoming routine shopping-related activities.

But therein lies the rub. I’m going to conflate several of the subsequent topics, which included “curation,” “customers,” “the close” (meaning billing & transaction processing” and “the cloud,” and make it into a seamless take-away about the current state of “curated” customer conversations. If I were to assign a single “c” word to the current state of C3, it would have to be “chaos.” While there was general consensus that the discounts arising from the group-purchase and other promotional programs (like Groupon, LivingSocial, Coupons.com), several people noted that there are hundreds of such companies around and the result is a cacophony of offers with little rhyme or reason.

One early suggestion for a new business would be to act as a third-party that aggregates offers, makes them searchable and presents the ones that are tailored to a specific user (ideally with relevant reviews and suggestions from like-minded peers). Such “personalization” amounts to the sort of “empowerment” that leads to the ideal user experience and, ultimately, customer engagement. These are only the first baby steps toward providing a compelling user experience that leverage some of the other topics under discussion at this Spotlight session and future C3-oriented events. Topping the list would be the tools and platforms that help individuals to manage the scads of personal data and metadata that permeates the e-commerce landscape (this is the Personal Data Ecosystem). In addition it will be important to add “game dynamics” to the user experience to provide a pleasant experience and incentives to be more active in bringing order to the chaos.

In this context, “chaos” is not such a bad word. Although its most common definition is a state of extreme disorder, I prefer its more cosmic definition, (which is #1 according to ) “a state of things in which chance is supreme; especially : the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.” This connotes both the casino-like nature of making investments in C3 at this point (would you put your own $6 billion in Groupon?) as well as the unquestioned growth potential for business endeavors that bring us out of this “confused unorganized state.”

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Tags: Orange, CRM, VRM, conversational commerce, socialCRM