Engaging the New Mobile Consumer: From Couch to Point of Sale

Thoughts

Bricks-and-mortar retail companies don’t have much choice. With 9.4% of respondents scanning products in stores, then purchasing them elsewhere, retailers have to start answering the questions, “What’s compelling about an online shopping experience?” and “What do we offer that digital retailers don’t?”

Looking at customer behaviors when shopping in stores, as shown in Figure 2, 21.7% percent are price-matching and 36.1% are checking product reviews. We can interpret this data as indicating that more than half of the survey respondents’ conducting research of one type or another when in stores. Tablets are providing customers with a convenient way to research products at home. Smartphones are providing the same experience when in stores and extending customers’ ability to touch and interact with products.

Stores must rely on their employees to engage customers. This doesn’t mean walking up and asking if customers need help. It means store employees must have a better understanding of who customers are and what their product interests are and immediately inspire customers’ confidence in their product knowledge, personalizing the information that they convey according to customers’ needs.

Customers will adopt mobile apps to interact with bricks-and-mortar stores if there is a clear return from their experience. For example, Apple stores have been very successful in balancing various aspects of customer engagement, using customer information from the Store app, and being knowledgeable about products that are relevant to customers.

Could stores provide a better experience to customers if each salesperson knew a little bit more about customers’ interests based on where they’re standing in a store through indoor geolocation? For example, if a customer has been staring at two types of headphones for three minutes, a salesperson would know that he’s been standing in that area for a while and may really be interested in purchasing some headphones. As a retailer, the simple solution would commonly be to ask whether that person needs help. However, knowing that the customer has purchased a speaker set, own an iMac, and just walked over from the tablet section of the store, where he also stopped for a few minutes, might be all the information a salesperson would need to conduct a more contextually relevant conversation, preventing a customer’s asking his smartphone for advice or, worse, leaving to make a purchase elsewhere.

Focus on Customer Experience

It’s a given that roughly one out of every ten customers is using a device to interact with product information, then possibly to make a purchase elsewhere. A simple way to attack the issue of showrooming—customers’ looking at merchandise in a bricks-and-mortar store, then buying it online to get a lower price—is to look at the applications your customers are using and see whether you can design an experience that encourages them to shop with you. But considering only the in-store experience is the wrong way to look at this problem. The key to getting in front of showrooming is to learn about the entire customer experience from couch to point of sale. Most retailers have large, sophisticated testing labs that are integral to the way they do business: their stores.

Simple ethnographic studies can be very helpful. Doing research within a store, observing patterns, and learning more about how to better serve customers should be your first goal. Of course, you always run the risk of not having researchers who are skilled enough to avoid bias or to ensure that the data they gather is sufficiently complete. Getting customers to be open and honest about why they were staring at their phone for a few minutes—or even having the luxury of finding them in this situation—can be a challenge. However, you have to start somewhere, and speaking with customers is always more beneficial than staring at data.

Begin by planning your research. Who will interact with customers? Will you hire a professional to conduct research? Will you train your existing salesforce to recognize opportunities for inquiry, to ask the right questions, and to capture data? Including your staff in the research may actually provide the additional benefit of better educating them on an effective sales approach.

Once you’ve gathered your data, convey your findings via journey maps, use cases, video vignettes, or whatever lets you best describe the full customer purchase cycle for a business. It’s one thing for companies to understand your data, but it’s another to connect names and situations to a larger story. One of the most important things a UX professional can do is to present unbiased data to decision makers in a way that clearly conveys a story and informs their decisions. This is one of the best ways to ensure that a company understands and designs for the customer experience.

When you look at mobile applications on their own merit, always come back to this question: How does the success of an individual application fit into the overall customer experience from couch to point of sale? Does it bypass common scenarios? Does it encompass only part of a scenario? Looking at an experience through the couch to point-of-sale lens, what are its weaknesses? Many companies look at a mobile app as a complete solution to the overall problem, but it’s just one piece.