Last month the Retail Systems Conference and Expo hosted a panel titled, “Store Innovation: Customer Service Technologies.” Brickstream, along with leaders from IBM, Retaligent, and Ecometry participated in the panel to explore new approaches to enhance the customer experience with automated tools. Technologies that differentiate retailers, support customer-centric initiatives, and build a single view of the customer through multiple channels was the focus of the session.
 
Following is a recap of select topics covered.
 
Questions:

1. What are some of the things you are seeing retailers do to differentiate the store experience?

 
Panel Response
Retailers recognize that a differentiated in-store experience is a critical component in gaining and retaining customers. Customers have more choices than ever before and it is critical that the in-store experience is tailored to meet customers’ rising expectations. To address these rising expectations, retailers are investing in technologies such as mobile devices, self-service, and customer behavior measurement systems. Mobile devices allow enhancement in areas such as customer service via queue line-busting and real-time product availability. Self-service is being utilized to reduce labor costs and provide the customer with more control within their in-store service experience. Customer behavior measurement systems, including traffic counting, provide retailers with critical information for measuring, managing and improving the in-store experience.
 
 

2. We mentioned two examples of brands (Best Buy, Publix) that are using the store itself as a point of differentiation. Is this trend likely to catch on, or is this just something that we see in a few isolated cases that makes for analyst fodder?

 
Panel Response
Collectively, the panel believes that this is a sign of things to come. The store remains a critical component in the retailer-customer relationship. Research has shown that 70% of purchasing decisions are still made within traditional retail settings; thus, it is critical that retailers continue to invest in understanding and improving the in-store customer experience. Retailers that fail to understand and improve the in-store customer experience will find themselves lagging behind their competitors.
 
 

3. If you look into your crystal ball, what will be the killer store applications 5 years from now? 10 years from now?

 
Panel Response
Systems such as smart phones, self-service and customer behavior systems will be present within the store of the future. These are intelligent, mobile systems providing real-time information and decision-making capabilities at the store-level. These applications allow retailers to improve the in-store customer experience via their ability to provide targeted advertising, to enhance customer-employee interactions, to reduce customer wait times and service times, and to understand the true customer sales opportunity within their store.
 
 

4. We also seem to see an increasing proliferation of traffic counting systems, systems which monitor shopper density and can be correlated to POS data and related to conversions. What are some other ways that traffic counting data is being used? What are core metrics that retailers need to be looking at? Are retailers starting to use data from these systems to impact future store design?

 
Panel Response
Traffic counting system data has been applied in areas such as labor scheduling and management, advertising and promotion effectiveness, visual merchandising strategies, merchandise assortment and stock levels, store location analysis, comparable store analysis and other areas. Conversion rate, the ratio of buyers to browsers has been and continues to be a critical metric for retailers to monitor and manage. Conversion rate is critical to multi-level performance ratings, customer satisfaction measurement, strategic and operational benchmarking and incentive programs. Retailers continue to gain valuable insight from customer behavior measurement systems such as traffic counting to understand the customer in-store experience and to understand the true customer opportunity that comes into their stores on a daily basis.
 
 

5. What are some things that retailers can do to develop a single view of the customer, their shopping patterns and preferences across channels, most notably online and in the store?

 
Panel Response
The panel mentioned the need for a chief customer experience officer. This role would spearhead this single customer view across the multiple groups within a retail organization. An example of the underlying technology would include SOA and its ability to tie together disparate system data. Customer behavior measurement systems enable an objective and continuous means of gathering in-store customer shopping experience data such as traffic flow, shopping patterns, and service experience. Likewise, this in-store customer data can be easily integrated with other customer data (online, call center) to provide a holistic view of the retailer-customer relationship.
 
 
In summary, this panel of experts sees a definite trend to create seamless customer interaction. The challenge for retailers today is to learn how customer-facing technologies can improve store performance and, perhaps more importantly, how to implement them without disrupting the culture they aim to create.