We used to say “point of sale”. The term “point of sale” now includes both physical and virtual points: in the store, in your home, via catalogue AND via e-tail – plus any other way a retailer can discover to engage with a customer. Coupled with the locus of the sale is the total emphasis on the experience of the specific customer, one whose expectations of service and delivery are continuously rising. And whatever the “point of engagement” for the channel the customer chooses, the bar rises to the best-performing of the venues; and the other channels must match up or risk the mortal sin of customer dissatisfaction and abandonment. We will not be lesser served – ever! Thus follows the self-perpetuating need for more customer-specific data, more timely analytics, more attuned and collaborative supply chains, more bundled merchandising – and more sales.
Order to Fulfillment
Within this cycle of rising expectations, the more clever retailers use the consumer as a “testimonial” for other consumers – hence the buyer rankings on eBay and almost every other online purchasing site. But the retailer cannot just give lip service to the customer by providing a method for such public feedback. Being able to provide the feedback does more fully engage the consumer in the “engagement” process, true; but having the order to fulfillment process in place to assure only the most positive customer ranking is a pre-requisite. If not, there will be a heavy price to pay both in reputation and replacement goods.
As an example, my holiday shopping was entirely online, and one retailer was able to show and compare multiple delightful gifts, accept an order, run the order through “available to promise” and commit a delivery date. When the delivery date passed with no product, my response was to enter the most negative of customer rankings on the retailer’s web site.
The retailer’s response was immediate and profound: written and verbal apologies, canceling of the charges for the product ordered, a free drop-shipped replacement with another apology included, a free gift in addition to the lost one, and finally a request to remove the public ranking. More power to me, but the danger for retailers is to become too good at responding when the wheels come off rather than ensuring that they stay on. I am willing to try the retailer one more time, but only because of the massive response. A repeat situation would lose me as a customer, and I wonder at the cost of the response when taken across the enterprise?
Customer Cultivation and Reward
Obviously, capturing and leveraging individual customer data is crucial to retail’s customer-facing evolution. Loyalty/value cards, self-checkout, digital screens, kiosks and so on are now merely table-stakes – and God help the virtual venues that don’t surpass the physical in customer cultivation and reward!
So we can expect to see software features and functionality that go after capturing, predicting and positioning for customer activity. The more retail can know and the faster retail can run the data through analytics and convert the analysis into supple supply and merchandising, the better positioned any of the venues may be to capture the engagement through to the purchase, and to have pampered the customer enough to solicit a “cross-or-up” buy, but at the very least a return engagement.
The appetite for data lets us comfortably anticipate multiple years of IT reigning within retail budgets, as in-store computing power and network capacity grows, as every point along the value chain struggles to become smarter, faster and more collaborative. Retailers and their suppliers will inevitably struggle with leveraging “in place” systems and networks and balancing their capabilities against newer niche players who can provide new “best in class functionality.” And all the while, the retail world will continue to evolve drastically, in new and exciting ways.
The “Fourth Dimension”
Some of these ways are shown in a side article in this issue, which explores what areas of emphasis software vendors were demonstrating at the recent NRF Show in New York. Another side article will depict what a retail world could look like in the sensory world – a world powered by RFID, biometrics and what ChainLink is calling the “4th Dimension”.
In any and all cases, though, the driving force in retail for the foreseeable future can be aptly summed up as
“C’est Moi!”