Retailers Are Winning by Focusing on Customer-Centric Systems -- Not Whining About the Economy
April retail sales were better than expected, but economic doom-and-gloom is everywhere. A Retail Systems Research report shows why those retailers who think long-term about customer service technologies and employee-facing tools are winning now.
For example, 53 percent of laggards find little to no value in customer-facing self-service options that help describe product features or benefits; 47 percent find little to no value in providing the ability to locate and sell merchandise from anywhere in the company; and 36 percent find little to no value in providing employee selling tools on the sales floor.
But laggards aren't the only one having IT-related problems: 55 percent of all the respondents believed that their existing technology and infrastructure was preventing them from moving forward with new retail solutions.
What Retail Winners Do Better Than the Rest
Every retailer wants to know what other retailers are up to, Rosenblum points out in the report, especially those retailers who outperform their peers. "There are some clear differentiators between winners' use of in-store technologies and those of their peers," she writes.
Specifically, the RSR study discovered that the following technologies had been used for longer than a year by retail winners (as opposed to the rest of the survey population):
Modern POS Hardware and Software: 57 percent of winners have had this in place for more than a year, versus 37 percent of average performers.
Customer Facing Technology Touch Points: In use by 40 percent of winners versus 20 percent of laggards.
Distributed Order Management: In use by 36 percent of winners versus 7 percent of laggards.
Self-Service Price Checks: In use by 28 percent of winners versus 13 percent of laggards.
Contactless Payments: Used by 15 percent of winners versus 6 percent of average performers and no (zero) laggards.
In-store Rewards and Coupons: In use by 46 percent of winners versus 27 percent of laggards.
Cross-channel Customer and inventory Synchronization: Used by 20 percent of winners versus 12 percent of average performers.
Overall, Rosenblum notes, RSR's findings show that retail winners don't merely do the same things better, but they most often do different things with their businesses. "They think differently. They plan differently. They respond differently," she writes.
"There are clear indications that retail winners seek to satisfy their otherwise frustrated customers for the longer term," Rosenblum writes. "It's also clear that former better economic times masked fundamental problems that have come to the forefront as sales have softened."
