Customer Service

Retail’s contactless future is here: How your organization can put the right pieces into place

Clay Walton-House, managing director, integrated loyalty solutions at PK, shares how retail brands, that find themselves trying to catch up to trends accelerated by COVID-19, are facing a big challenge: how to meet customer and employee needs of the momentwhile expanding on proven contactless experiences in a post-pandemic world.

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August 5, 2020 by Clay Walton-House — Managing Director, Integrated Loyalty Solutions, PK

As the U.S. goes through an uneven reopening, customers are returning to an entirely different retail experience. Many retailers require customers to wear masks and keep 6 feet apart.

Some rely on curbside pickup and cashless purchases to promote social distancing. Others are innovating around in-app ordering and mobile payment. While a few of these measures may only be temporary, many of these new ways of shopping are quickly becoming customers' preferred ways to buy.

Contactless engagement, such as buy online and pickup in-store (BOPIS) and in-app purchases, is here to stay. And that's largely because contactless solutions have already been proven in the marketplace and have shown immediate and long-term potential.

Leading brands that invested heavily in contactless experiences pre-pandemic are now making them a centerpiece of their long-term strategy. Starbucks, who pioneered order ahead technology, is restructuring their U.S. stores around digital customer relationships. Target, an innovator in the BOPIS model, is expanding its "Drive Up" program. While Microsoft is getting rid of its retail stories entirely, opting instead to reimagine them as "experience centers." Because of these brands' early investments in forward-looking, innovative technology, they're ahead of competitors who are now trying to rapidly develop and adopt contactless solutions.

For retail brands that find themselves trying to catch up to trends being accelerated by COVID-19, the challenge they face is how to meet the customer and employee needs of the moment while expanding on proven contactless experiences to thrive in a post-pandemic world.

Understanding what customers want during pandemic turmoil

Redesigning customer experiences around self-service and contactless engagement requires brands to get inside the heads of their customers. An automatic sliding door is technically a contactless technology, but is that the form of safety, competence and comfort customers are looking for?

Instead of first brainstorming a solution, start by better understanding the outcomes your customers are seeking. An outcome might be a customer wanting to try on clothes with little to no human contact. Or perhaps they need to replenish products frequently but have a preexisting health condition. While there's numerous ways to understand customer motivation, what's most important is to deliver lasting outcomes.

One way to test and assess whether or not a contactless solution delivers the outcomes customers desire is through prototyping -- for example, if retailers are considering a new brick-and-mortar model, leaders could develop a single test location to gather feedback and sentiment from customers before national roll-out. This approach can be applied to a wide variety of contactless solutions.

To create enduring contactless solutions to these uniquely different customer needs, retailers must meet the customer where they're at. A no or low-touch shopping experience might look like appointment-based shopping or virtual fitting rooms. Whereas, promoting a sense of safety for replenishment could resemble purchasing and returning online and picking up at the curb. Through an attuned understanding of your customers' unique needs, the contactless solutions you develop will work towards solving the actual challenges your customers face.

Personalizing contactless interactions

The long-term perpetuation of contactless, high-impact experiences also means putting in place technology and processes that allow customers to opt-in or opt-out of human interaction. To accomplish this, you'll need a deep understanding of each micro-moment in a service's design. In a contactless world, customers may begin their initial point of interaction online or in-store and complete the purchase at the register, the curb or at home. It requires a rethinking of customer-facing functions and spaces (pickup areas, fitting rooms, holding areas, mobile apps and digital touchpoints) as well as behind-the-scenes pieces that enable these functions (personalization, real-time inventory, geolocation and operational processes).

To reframe customer experience, consider how a variety of organizational pillars will be affected. Unified customer data will be essential to support personalization. The role that customers' mobile devices play in the purchasing journey will likely need to evolve and expand. Operations will be impacted based on store capacity requirements, cleaning protocols and labor models. And communications will be essential to promoting safety and understanding evolving customer and employee needs. Contactless engagement demands more of the infrastructure that supports customer experience, as well as the flexibility of the service model.

Enabling adaptability

As the pandemic ebbs and flows, businesses are going to have to adapt to working in more fluid, organic ways. Stores may need to close and reopen again. While other sectors are already set up to shift employees to a work from home model, most retailers don't currently have that kind of flexibility. Some retailers may need to figure out how to turn their in-store sales force into contactless workers. That might mean in-store employees can self-select a reallocation of their role to pickup and delivery based on daily conditions. We've been in brainstorming sessions on this very topic with a major telecom whose nationwide store footprint needs a dynamic response to sudden changes in the public health policies of an individual county or city. However, what is a constraint today may very well become a competitive advantage tomorrow if they're able to successfully test and build on that unique service model.

The future continues to remain uncertain, but contactless is here to stay in retail. Regardless of the type of contactless experiences they develop, retailers are going to have to rethink their own experience models. By identifying areas of incremental change to existing service models, and in parallel, developing and testing truly new contactless experiences, retailers can develop the resilience they need to thrive.

Clay Walton-House is managing director, integrated loyalty solutions, at PK.