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Retail of the future: Five insights from SXSW Interactive

In the case of retail tech, the biggest question wasn’t around the technology itself, but how to use it.

March 24, 2015 by Jeannie Walters — Chief Customer Experience Investigator, 360Connext

South By Southwest Interactive 2015 is officially in the rear view mirror. Several days of exploration of new technologies, trends and tacos never disappoint.

Trends at South By Southwest (SXSW) tend to reveal themselves in clusters. You can tell when something is important by the sheer number of questions being asked. In the case of retail tech, the biggest question wasn’t around the technology itself, but how to use it.

1. Privacy matters: Creepy or considerate?

Technology like in-store beacons and virtual reality dominated the discussions about retail. Appealing benefits for retailers like contextual offers for customers have to be considered against the cautions of intruding on customer privacy.

2. Expectations are set

A big part of utilizing mobile technology like apps that use geofencing to ping customers as they walk by the store, for example, is about setting that expectation. If a user understands the benefits to opting into an app like that, they tend to be happy about the monetary benefit of using it. If they don’t understand that expectation, receiving alerts based on physical location can be alarming and upsetting. It’s a recipe for uninstalling the app.

3. Cross-device seamless experience is the goal

The personalization revolution continues, but most retailers are still missing the mark.

Amazon is held up as the standard for passive personalization, meaning they make suggestions based on viewing/browsing history, not just buying. But what happens when a customer uses their mobile browser to understand a product more, like get dimensions, in a store, but ends up buying the product right there? The browsing history continues to mislead the typical algorithms and the customers will still see ads online for that product for months, even after owning the product.

4. Sometimes personalization is simply too much

While the term personalization is thrown around as the ultimate goal, customers don’t necessarily want or need a total one-to-one experience. Curating products or content can serve just as well as true personalization in some cases. Consider Etsy, the online marketplace, which does a great job of bringing the best things to the “top” of the experience. There are hundreds of pages of products to dig through, but the Etsy experience helps the majority of customers find what they need.

5. Technology in-store will have to support mobile

The stats are impressive. Target posted that Black Friday had 10 percent of online revenue via shopping on phone while in store. The way we shop is different today, and many retailers are simply not prepared.

Allowing customers to choose how they want to view and receive information is a major challenge and opportunity for retailers today.

(Image credit: Atos International via Creative Commons license.)