What are the opportunities of apps in clothing store retailing?

By Tom Weaver on March 1, 2013

We’re currently working on an interesting piece of work for a UK retailer looking at the possibilities of using mobiles in-store to enhance various customer experiences, but particularly those around buying clothes.

Our friends at BRAND + COMMERCIAL told us about this app by US retailer Neiman Marcus.

In short, customers can use the app to engage with specific sales assistants, knowing which assistants are in-store at what time, communicating their favourite products (and providing staff – who have their own app – with purchase history, and a facebook photo of the customer), and making appointments where staff will have already pulled out specific clothes for customers to try on, making the experience more efficient.

Combined with a range of in-store features, such as pop up notifications by location (using in-store sensors) and QR codes to unlock trends and fashion information, there is a variety of things to keep customers happy and engaged.

More importantly, NM have managed to do something quite unusual: create a digital touchpoint that creates and facilities better personal interaction between staff and customers.

That’s true omnichannel retailing.

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Dear Lloyds TSB and Coop: Customers bank with brands, not branches

By Chris Evans on January 25, 2013

Lloyds TSB are in the process of writing to 4.6 million customers who will be “transferred” to the Co-operative Bank as part of the forced sale of 632 branches by the EU. This has been deemed as a “great deal” for the consumer, as it will create more competition in the banking sector, but so far it just looks like a very large consumer headache.

The reason for this is simple: in the 21st Century, customers don’t bank with a branch any more, they bank with a brand.

I have been a Lloyds TSB customer for the last 8 years. I have five solo and joint accounts with them (yes, more than the average person, but most people I have spoken to have more than one account).

Those five accounts actually ‘belong’ to four different branches. I set the accounts up in-branch for various reasons, and then never went in again. One is in Moorgate, another in Nottingham, a third still in Piccadilly. Doesn’t matter, I thought: after all, it is all the same brand.

I don’t see myself as a Lloyds TSB Moorgate customer. I am a Lloyds TSB customer. I don’t want accounts for certain branches transferred to a new bank, I want all my accounts in one place: online.

Forcing the sale of branches and customers in those branches will create headaches for customers and assumes a very mid-20th Century perspective of the banking system. Customers don’t associate with a branch because the benefits of banking in one physical location have been deliberately eroded over time (do you know the name of your branch manager?) and have vanished with the onset of the digital era.

I am waiting for my letter notifying me that some of my accounts will be moved with baited breath and hope they at least make the process to be able to choose to move my accounts back to Lloyds to be an easy process.

Let us know your Lloyds TSB situation and what you think of these changes.

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Why Paying & Waving is great, but only if the process is thought through

By Chris Evans on November 21, 2012

Anyone living in London at the moment will have noticed the sharp increase in shops offering Pay and Wave technology, from Pret a Manger to M&S. This allows users to scan their card against a reader, avoiding inserting it and having to enter a pin. With a quick beep, you are on your way.

Paying by waving

And it is amazing: fast and potentially revolutionary for bars and clubs, where waiting in a queue to get drinks is more than half the nights experience, a fortune in lost revenue.

Credit card companies have finally created a great piece of technology that will have a massive positive impact on waiting times. What they haven’t thought of is the process, however.

How much did I spend, anyway?

Some places, like McDonalds, have got it right, and the system works great, as the amount you are going to pay is displayed on screen and the touch pad is positioned conveniently in front of you.

Where the technology does not work, I’ve found, is at small cafes, who have handheld terminals with the touch pad and display together. In this process (which has happened to me at four locations now), the staff member says the amount – £5.60, for example – and you hand your card over. They then enter the amount into the keypad, wave your card, hand it back and say thanks. You get no receipt, and no way of seeing what amount they have put into the machine. At my local café, this isn’t too bad a situation, but I had the same thing at a dodgy corner store I went to. Why should I trust a stranger with my bank account?

Has anyone else had the same experience? Looking at the design, I don’t think handheld machines work for this technology, and actually having the wave pad fixed to the counter or bar is actually the best design, with the display pad facing the customer at all times.

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The average customer isn’t dead yet (unfortunately)

By Tom Weaver on November 15, 2012

The Average Human, by photographer David Trood.

Above: The Average Human, by photographer David Trood.

As always, we read the excellent IBM Global CEO Survey with interest, especially given the last years have demonstrated the importance of understanding customers needs and designing experiences in the eyes of top CEOs.

The 2012 study shows the increasing focus on gaining insights into their customers. In a section titled Individualisation: Death of the average”, the report picks up heavily on language author Joseph Pine (and co-author James Gilmore) pioneered in the early 90s:

73% of CEOs are making significant investments in their organisations ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data… “Knowing the customer” is no longer confined to segmentation, statistical averages and historical inferences. After more than a decade of talking about “markets of one” and “mass customisation”, the means are finally catching up with the rhetoric. Technological advances are making it feasible to understand customers – based on actual, real-time behaviour – and engage them as individuals.

However, engaging customers as individuals involves far more than responding in a singular fashion; it is about knowing a customer as a whole human being – with interests, attitudes and life circumstances that colour preferences and needs. Such knowledge can radically improve how organisations respond to customers, but can also lead to entirely new products and services.
- IBM Global CEO Study 2012

What’s the reality on the ground?

With 72% of the CEOs aiming to improve understanding of individual customer needs, it would be easy to assume that many organisations are on top of this. Our experience says otherwise: many organisations we talk to have collected data around customer needs that is at best “misinformation”, do not use what they have in a strategic way, do not combine it with in-depth qualitative research like ethnography or interviews to build profiles that help link customer needs to strategy, and do not use any of this to improve or innovate around their customer experience or services, which is still mostly done around the flipchart.

This is most apparent when applied to physical experiences, which increasingly lag behind digital in employing benefits of personalisation (despite increasingly omnichannel possibilities) and in capturing customer insight through predominantly face to face interactions. We can see this clearly, because many bricks and mortar stores have only a marginally improved experience to that of 10 years ago. Is your supermarket shop, for example, really any different yet?

If nothing else, this should offer some relief to many CEOs: they may be more behind than they thought, but so is much of the rest of the market. The average customer, unfortunately, isn’t quite dead yet.

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5 astounding facts on Generation Y – and the challenges ahead

By Tom Weaver on October 18, 2012

Generation Y is a particularly hot topic in the USA, where the 18-34 age group is overtaking the Baby Boomers as the largest demographic in population size and consumer spend. But why should we really be paying attention?

5 facts about Gen Y

  1. By 2025, 75% of the world’s workforce will be from Generation Y. How will this challenge the way organisations are structured and run?

  2. Generation Y will have more spending power (already $2billion in the US alone) than any other generation, giving its members the ability to make or break brands simply by paying attention to them. So what will make them pay attention?

  3. In the USA, there are more professional full time Gen Y employees with an MBA than those with no higher education at all. How will this highly educated workforce change the status quo?

  4. 30% of adults, ages 25 to 34, are still living with their parents. Of those, 78% said they’re happy with it. How will this change the way Gen Y consumers spend their paycheck?

  5. 36% of Gen Y have at least one tattoo. Yes, we struggled to believe that one too.

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The Future of Take Away?

By Chris Evans on August 24, 2012

Velo, a Vietnamese fast food restaurant, have recently opened in London Bridge. We visited to see their new terminal ordering system up close. Velo has taken the interesting step of having four self-service terminals in-store for ordering both food to be eaten-in and take away. If the food needs to be cooked, an order number is given and the customer is asked to wait. If the customer is taking from the pre-made section, there are bags right next to the terminals for customers to take their food, and leave. The whole system works on an honesty policy, with no staff out from behind the counter to police what customers are ordering and taking from the pre-made section and drinks fridge.

The self-service ordering experience

The ordering terminal at Velo

The interface design is good, with the buttons being the right size for a touch screen design, and with everything being easily navigable. The downside is that the touchscreen itself is poor quality, with presses not always responding first time, and customers mashing the screen quite regularly. In addition, the menu does not make use of the fact it is digital, with no idea of most popular orders, or any recommendations for customers who are new to Vietnamese fast food.

The waiting and collection experience

The initial experience feels a little bit different, and fun to do the first time, but after using the terminal, customers have nowhere good to wait for their order to be processed, standing around the tables of seated customers eating and in the way of those collecting (or ordering directly) from the counter.

One positive is that there is a status screen showing which orders are on their way, and which bay they will be collected from. It’s a bit Argos, but it works for giving you a sense that things are happening.

The collection counter at Velo, showing the status screen

Does self-service ordering make it a better experience?

It is possible that in busy times, the queues would be so significant at the counter that the self service terminals speed things up. However, the interface itself does not make things feel faster than it would be ordering through a human server.

It feels that if the same money had been spent on an app that customers could order from directly on their way to the store, Starbucks-style (see our recent whitepaper The Experience Process), customised such that experienced customers could order their “usual”, and newer customers could browse popular choices, the experience could have been made truly efficient and solved customer needs (efficiency), as opposed to being a gimmick.

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