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Archive for March, 2010

Cruising for convenience-Are the good ole’ days with drive-throughs coming back?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Apparently, the days of planning shopping trips around weekend circulars are over.   Consumers are using the internet to compare products and prices from the comfort of home at their convenience.   This opportunity to shop 24 hours a day is forcing traditional brick-and-mortar stores to find a new way to compete.   In the bid to keep customers from slipping away new options are always being considered.

Or, in the case of drive-through retail stores, old options are being revived.   In the 1980’s and 1990’s merchants like Montgomery Ward unsuccessfully tried this approach.  However, in the last year, Chicago has become the testing ground for mass merchants such as Sears, Kmart and Wal-Mart to experiment again with drive through shopping.

You reach through your car window to grab a hamburger or latte why not your groceries?

Drive here for the full story.


Posted in Retail Spending | Comments Off

Retailers rate highest when their digital and physical experiences map

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Provided by Chris Rezendes of VDC Research

Last week, Paul Carr wrote on TechCrunch about Amazon’s botched release of Michael Lewis’ latest book — The Big Short:  Inside the Doomsday Machine.

Carr pointed out that the book had 64 one-star reviews, more than the total of 2,  3, 4, or 5 star reviews combined.  Might lead shoppers to the conclusion that the book was trash. 

But Carr looked a little deeper and found that most of the one-star reviews were in fact complaints about the book not being released for Kindle.  The reviews of the book were really reviews of the Amazon launch process. 

Which provides us with a great case in point about the need for retailers to map their customers’ virtual and physical experiences — or suffer the gap.  During the past few months, we have been writing about requirements for success for next-gen retailers in the post-recession consumer economy.  Mapping customers’ virtual and physical experiences — and vice versa, was one of our top five themes. 

We developed these ideas from polling retailers.  We have been sharing our findings with friends at various events, and in some detail with our clients.  Our clients are retail technology solution providers. 

Their clients are the retailers.  Some of whom show up on BusinessWeek’s list of the Customer Service Champs from their March 1, 2010 issue. 

We did a quick dive into some of the entries on the list.  We were looking for evidence linking companies on this list with strategies, and IT investments, that supported our assertion that mapping virtual and physical worlds is a key to success in this environment. 

Here is what we found in a quick and dirty investigation:  At least 5 of the top 10 ranked companies on the list rolled out solutions and/or programs that integrated customers’ physical and digital experiences in 2009. 

If you and your teams are developing, marketing, selling, installing and/or supporting traditional or next-gen retail solutions inside your, or your partners’ b-to-c enterprises, you might consider making sure that your investments support the need to balance and integrate customers’ digital and physical experiences.

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Endless-Aisle Kiosks. Endless Opportunities?

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
The concept of “endless aisle” is not new. Retailers have been using e-commerce Web sites to expand product availability for years, and continue to do so. However, the use of kiosks to bring the online experience into the store—providing in-store access to online inventory or inventory stored at another location—is gaining momentum. Borders offers an early, proven example of using endless-aisle in-store kiosks to expand inventory choice beyond the limited space of a brick-and-mortar store. In 2000, the store instituted itsBorder's Title Sleuth Kiosk “Title Sleuth” kiosks, enabling customers not only to find the location of one of the hundreds of thousands titles contained within the store, but to search an online database of millions of books, movies and CDs for later delivery. Kohl’s provides a brand-spanking-new example of kiosks serving in an endless aisle application. Using in-store kiosks that Kohl’s plans to extend chain-wide this year, customers can easily order something that’s out of stock in a particular store, or select from a much wider array of inventory housed outside the store, and have it shipped to them. Of course, endless aisle shopping is not there just for customer convenience—although customer satisfaction and loyalty are key benefits. The bottom line is that endless aisle kiosks expand not just available inventory, but store revenue as well. For instance, when a major retailer of outdoor equipment installed endless aisle kiosks in each of its stores, it found that the stores annually generated incremental revenue equaling that from an average 25,000-square-foot store. Learn about this and other innovative self-service applications retailers are using to increase same-store sales in this on-demand webinar. Do you foresee potential endless-aisle kiosks in your store? What area of the store would you use them?

Posted in Kiosk, Self Service, customer experience | Comments Off

Shoppers Bid Farewell to Old Man Winter

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Spring has sprung and Easter Holiday celebrants are expected to spend slightly more this year. The NRF 2010 Easter Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey gauges that people will spend an average of $118.60, up from $116.59 last year.

More marshmallow Peeps this year

Retailers and lucky children alike are excited that the Easter Bunny will be delivering more jelly beans, marshmallows and gifts this year.  The NRF Survey was designed to gauge consumer behavior and shopping trends related to the Easter holiday. You can check out all the sugary goodness in the story here.


Posted in Retail Spending, retail | Comments Off

Leave Me Alone, I Can do it Myself! The Preference for Self-Service Shopping

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

An 8-Step Plan to a Successful Self-Service Deployment

Tech-savvy consumers expect self-service where they shop. And by implementing self-service, stores stand to increase same-store sales and reduce operating costs. According to RIS News publisher Dave Weinand in a recent joint webinar with Zebra, IBM and St. Clair Interactive, self-service is an initiative gaining noticeable momentum in retail. Sounds tempting, right? But before you rush into implementation, keep in mind that proper planning is key. Following are eight considerations to help ensure your success:

  1. Begin with a clear corporate strategy. Identify your business pain points; how do you see self-service addressing them? Talk to customers, too. Solving their pain points could turn them into advocates whose word of mouth will attract new customers.
  2. Involve all internal departments. That means not just IT, but store operations, (which has first-hand experience with many of the pain points), marketing, and an executive sponsor who sees the value of self-service.
  3. Plan upfront for an overall, multiplatform strategy that extends beyond kiosks. Even if you’re not ready yet for Web and mobile applications, these are trends you’ll need to consider at some point. Why not plan for a system with centralized content from the start?
  4. Optimize the kiosk user interface technology. Unlike a store Web site—where the user has a keyboard, a mouse and time to browse—you need to get in-store kiosk users on and off the kiosk quickly. Make sure navigation is intuitive and the interface is clean—not cluttered with too much information.
  5. Carefully consider kiosk placement in the store. Put it in a conspicuous spot so customers will use it.
  6. Develop metrics to define success, and monitor them during your pilot. You may want to hurry into a project because you’re excited about an application, but after a few months, how will you know you’re successful if you haven’t established metrics?
  7. Encourage employee participation, so associates aren’t intimidated by the technology, or fear it will replace their jobs. In fact, some stores develop kiosk “champions” who help educate fellow employees as well as customers on the technology.
  8. Select purpose-built kiosk components. Every element needs to be rugged and reliable to withstand the tough and unattended self-service environment.

Are you undergoing or have you been through kiosk deployment? What helped you deploy successfully? Anything you might have done differently?

Click here to view the webinar “Increase Same-Store Sales with Next-Gen Self Service.”


Posted in Kiosk, Self Service, retail | Comments Off

Kohl’s Unleashes the Kiosk Initiative

Monday, March 8th, 2010

After a very successful test period in select stores, Kohl’s recently announced plans to expand their kiosk to all of their stores later this fall. This news is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first of which is that Kohl’s saw the impact the kiosks made to their customer service, inventory management and marketing impact scores as a result of the kiosks.  The news is also interesting because the company has a huge Facebook fan base that helps them drive these kind of in-store decisions. Customer insight before and after. No wonder they continue to fair well in a slow retail recovery.

If you could only choose one function to put in a kiosk, what would it be?

Read the complete story here


Posted in Kiosk, Self Service | Comments Off

Avoiding Retail Nightmares – Provided by Chris Rezendes at VDC Research

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The retail Chief Marketing Officer’s nightmare …

Continuing our discussion(s) about how the economy, consumers, retail operators and business-to-busniess operators in the retail supply chain are changing.  We offer a fable of sorts. 

A short time ago in a retail promotional campaign in a land just next door …

  1. Buyers from the retailer’s organization identify and secure some on the hottest and hardest to find items for the season …
  2. Suppliers are eager to please the retailer, but require the retailer to make a larger, potentially riskier commitment to some new, less proven items …
  3. The retailer agrees and the marketing teams from the retailer and the supplier design brilliant campaigns … so strong, even the media partners are excited … so excited that they offer the campaign some attractive bonus placements …
  4. Preliminary quantity orders are placed … and distributed according to forecast among a number of distribution centers and stores …
  5. Stores stock and merchandise according to an agreed-upon plan …

And … only 25% of the stores met or exceeded plan …

What happened with the stores that missed the mark? 

  1. 1 in 4 store managers over-allocated their resources to inventory cost management.  As such, they suffered more out of stock than predicted, expected or acceptable.  Frustrated customers bolted.  Confused prospects turned on their heels and walked out.   These stores missed their revenue, customer satisfaction and retention, and prospect.
  2. 1 in 4 store managers over-allocated their resources to out of stock mitigation.  Customers were pleasantly surprised that the store had their color and size, in stock.  Prospects were converted.  But, the inventory carrying cost to do this core out margin. 
  3. 1 in 4 stores managers repeated the mistakes of those above, but, then, made matters worse.  Customer satisfaction, so high at first, plummeted … toward the end of the promotional period, the over-stock issue drive the store manager to slash prices to move the inventory over-commit, and while the inventory went down, so too did margin, and customer satisfaction as customers came back looking for the sale pricing and were denied.  

The stores that met plan had a distinct advantage over those that did not:

  1. An enterprise mobility solution that included a small, dense, mobile computing/ communications platform.
  2. And enterprise mobility software suite that included connectivity to retailer and supplier supply chains to track inventory on the floor, in the stock room and in the chain
  3. Training programs for associates that had them focusing on all three key elements of the campaign:  customers first, merchandising second, inventory management third

Whose mobile solutions are you running?

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