In today’s customer-focussed retail environment, understanding the price you’ll pay for not building experiential value into every point on the path to purchase is one of the most important lessons.
If a cynic was once defined as someone who ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’, then by the same token, today’s retail realists could be described as those who know that when it comes to customers ‘there’s no value left in winning on price’.
Bargains aren’t always cheap
In a retail world laden with discounters, shoppers now expect competitive pricing as a matter of course, and being the cheapest in your sector no longer guarantees the broadening base of return custom necessary to successfully build and maintain a business on the narrowest possible margins.
With the breadth of choice and comparisons now available through online channels, shoppers are changing their habits, redefining retail bargains as not merely the least expensive item, but rather, the best deal they can find at every price-point.
More than ever before, retailers need to engage a suite of solutions to create purchasing journeys that seamlessly span channels, stimulate and engage at a personal level, then deliver products with a greater breadth of convenience and choice.
The cost of waiting
Consumers place premium value on their time, and seek a swift and seamless purchasing experience online. As a result, they now expect a similar speed of process and standard of service to be echoed within stores.
Our recent research demonstrated this to startling effect. Customers who are used to buying online, resent queuing more than ever before. Today it has become the modern, multi-channel shoppers’ biggest bugbear, and it’s surprising to realise that an average shopping trip still involves over 20 minutes of queueing time, with supermarkets, DIY stores and fashion outlets singled out as having the longest.
Once in a queue, a third of customers admitted to getting annoyed by others also queueing. Most said they abandon a purchase after waiting more than nine minutes, and 86% will permanently avoid a store if they deem the queues to be too long.
Step away from the till
Customer loyalty was once something retailers earned – today it needs to be nurtured and continuously, proactively maintained.
This isn’t just because consumers are becoming more easily distracted, but because competitors are also employing similar strategies for winning them over, as retailers collectively understand that long-term customer loyalty is the key to maintaining future business.
To this end, mobile point of sale (mPOS) is rapidly becoming one of the most effective methods for not only delivering online standards of convenience in-store, but for encouraging more personal customer relationships.
Via tablet or other hand-held devices, mPOS can remove friction on the store floor, busting queues by creating additional sales points with Chip and PIN payments that can be taken anywhere in store.
Simultaneously these systems improve customer service by equipping staff with order data and access to product catalogues, enabling staff to deliver personalised services tailored to each customer, and enhancing customer interactions while increasing conversions.
Self-service satisfaction
In support of this, a new generation of innovative and intuitive custom kiosks provide further levels of convenience, allowing shoppers who prefer an independent and autonomous in-store experience to access in-depth product information pre-purchase, while also providing support to in-store ordering or click-and-collect.
Applying systems and services such as custom kiosks and mobile POS, not only enhances the in-store experience, they also allow retailers to build the profiles of each customer to deliver evermore personalised and relevant assistance, creating the levels of service that engender long-lasting customer loyalty.
