How bricks-and-mortar stores struggle with digital service propositions

By Tom Weaver on January 23, 2012

I always like hearing insights from actual employees about company philosophy. A recent forum post, in response to an article about Amazon’s increasing dominance over the publishing industry and a question about why there is no similar warehouse distribution competitor of the same scale, is quite revealing about how one of the most successful “bricks and mortar” companies in the world struggles in managing its multi-channel customer experience when it comes to product pricing and alternative service models to “browse and buy”, such as “reserve and collect”:

Speaking as someone who works for Walmart, I’m not quite sure they “get” online completely just yet. They’re tied to brick and mortar stores, so they are very much ingrained in that mentality.

Take for instance online vs in-store prices. I can find a toaster online for $20, and it probably has the option to buy it “Pick Up Today” so that an employee will shop it for you after you’ve bought it online and you can just come in to pick it up. Even if the in-store price is $25 because there are no toaster retailers besides Walmart in the area of your local store, you still pay the online $20 price.

However, if you go into the actual store and say, “Hey, I don’t want to pay $25! The online price is $20,” they cannot lower the price. You could literally order the toaster on your smartphone and watch the employee pick it up off the shelf and bring it to the back room to save for you, and you’d pay $20, but you cannot just pay $20 without going through the website. – TheEllimist, Reddit.com

The problem is that companies often see different service models and retail channels as silos within the business. However, the customer can increasingly use technology to navigate around those silos to get the best deal, whilst having a somewhat clumsy experience. A better route forward has to be to consider how those boundaries could be blurred so that the customer’s physical and digital shopping baskets are unified, and provide the same financial benefits, from pricing to discounts.

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When in-store technology fails at the first hurdle

By Chris Evans on January 18, 2012

At the new Westfield Stratford last week, I was excited to see an iPad discovery zone within the new Topman store.  It consisted of four iPads, two on each side of a wooden table, with the words “Touch Screen to Start”.

I touched the first iPad, ready to be amazed, and after a short delay was greeted with the following message:

“Destination host unreachable. Please check your server and network settings and try again”

This is not the brand image you were looking for

There was no one around to help me, as there never seems to be in these certain clothing stores.  So I moved onto the next iPad and touched the screen.  This time I got the message:

“Welcome to wi-fi.  Please choose your service provider.”

And that was the end of my experience.  Not really the captivating experience I was expecting, and definitely not much of an advertisement for Topshop.

This type of broken experience happens all the time, particularly when technology is involved, and planning to recover from these types of errors is the difference between being loved by your customers and being labeled as “rubbish”.

When designing experiences or looking at existing processes, it is good to do a disaster recovery workshop where problematic scenarios are thrown at the process, and a recovery manual is built around around the process. 

Failure is an option

For the above, it could be as simple as a backup system: when there is no wireless access, have some parts of the experience stored locally so the user still gets a limited experience.  Also, as part of the process, there should be a notification to staff that the wireless is down so that it can be repaired or the iPads turned off.

Planning for failure is key to creating seamless experiences, and it can be a really useful learning process as a team to try and find all the possible failure points, and plan to blow customers away by how you deal with it.  A seamless recovery is always more impressive than getting it right in the first place.

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