Customer Service
Navigating the new retail experience: Operating at scale
Chris Hogue, head of strategy and product at LiveArea, explains that as customer experience expectations have leapt forward nearly four years in the past three months it has inaugurated a period of unprecedented retail innovation in stores and online. Retailers must now wrestle with which advancements to keep, and thus scale, and which to jettison.
August 10, 2020 by Chris Hogue — Head of Strategy and Product, LiveArea
As of this writing, there are more states with minor or no COVID restrictions (26) than at any other stage. Only three states, California, New York, and New Jersey, still have major restrictions and even these may be lessened soon.
As retailers begin to scale up their stores and operations, the focus of my final post in the "Navigating the New Retail Experience" series turns to operational scale.
As discussed previously, customer experience expectations have leapt forward nearly four years in the past three months. This change has inaugurated a period of unprecedented retail innovation in stores and online.
However, much of this innovation has been implemented with brute force due to a lack of time and operational maturity. Retailers must now wrestle with which advancements to keep, and thus scale, and which they will jettison.
We see three critical areas retailers should include as they implement change at scale: data, logistics, and training.
Making data actionable
Data should be the priority on every retailer's "to do" list. It is fundamental to providing a personalized experience, managing inventory across stores and distribution centers, driving product innovation, marketing, and merchandising.
For many retailers, personalized experiences come from store associates knowing their local customer base very well. However, this familiarity is not scalable beyond a few stores. Knowing your customers at scale requires solutions like a customer data platform (CDP). A good starting point is to create a central customer record from data merged between a brand's systems as well as data purchased from third party vendors. The platform should also have integrations into POS, customer service, advertising, email marketing and analytics tools. Once in place the data can be used to better understand a customer's buying habits, product preferences, and preferred communication channels. As data accumulates, it can be used to recommend products with greater accuracy, identify your best customers, calculate discount or pricing sensitivity and much more.
As customer data grows it can turbocharge marketing efforts. Matching customer segments with past purchase behavior, product preferences, fashion sense and stage of the customer journey makes predicting their needs more precise and enables the delivery of more personalized content.
Finally, rich customer preference and segmentation data, combined with national and regional inventory, sales, purchase method and return data enables retailers to manage product lifecycle at scale. Additionally, consumer attitudes and purchase behavior can inform sampling programs so retailers can customize distribution regionally, making product sample production more cost effective.
Scaling logistics for economies of scale
In the same way that a CDP helps a brand understand customers at scale, a modern order management system (OMS) helps retailers understand and manage product distribution and sales at scale. E-commerce growth continues to outpace overall retail growth. The coronavirus pandemic has not only accelerated this trend but also introduced many shoppers to new buying behaviors like curbside pickup.
Scaling this operation past a single store requires an OMS with fulfillment capabilities like order orchestration, real-time inventory visibility and stock levels in stores and warehouses, returns management, split order shipping and advanced order consolidation. In addition to enabling these emerging shopping preferences, a scalable OMS can also help larger retailers lower the timeframe and cost of delivery by enabling ship from store.
Shoppers are also looking for stores to be more than a place to browse for and buy products. Retailers should re-evaluate how they utilize their storeroom and, at the same time, reimagine what the overall store footprint of the store looks like. Fulfilling curbside orders, one at a time by taking customer-focused associates off the floor is not cost efficient or scalable. Incorporating solutions that add warehouse-like bin systems to the storeroom and integrate with existing omnichannel order solutions can bring efficiency in cost and operations.
Training employees to wear multiple hats
The addition of new client experiences means associate jobs are changing. New processes and operating procedures need to be crafted and employees must be trained in how to use new tools and technologies. For example, back office platforms that allow stores to fulfill orders means associates must be trained to use everything from the system that presents the order, to scanners and bins that identify and track products in the order, to boxing, weighing and printing shipping labels.
Offering more personalized shop-by-appointment options requires stores and, ideally, associates to book appointment times, send calendar invitations, provide reminders about appointments and spend time preparing for the customer's visit. Minimally they should have an idea of the shoppers past interactions and purchases with the brand as well as any specific shopping needs they have for the pending visit. Scaling this requires email and calendar services, SMS notifications tied to events and apps that can access customer data. All of these services require associate training.
This can seem daunting for retailers at the beginning or mid-way through the transition to a digitally oriented customer experience. At the outset, we suggest focusing on initiatives that will help your business scale and grow efficiently, without sacrificing the customer service quality.
About Chris Hogue
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