Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
Right before the Labor Day weekend, I caught an article on the Ad Age website, a motherhood and flying cars piece about how digital will magically transform the store experience and, even better, how digital agencies will be the leaders in making this transformation happen.
Pie in the sky statements about tectonic changes in stores don't help the industry. And it's not agencies that are going to affect these changes, but retailers. They are the people who understand stores and customers (and hopefully technology), and with that knowledge figure out how to keep the store relevant.
Yet all these efforts to put tech into stores continue to fail for a few simple reasons.
First, stores aren't designed for technology.
In the Ad Age article, the author mentions his own company's work at a store in Edmonton Mall, where the retailer implemented "interactive experiences across 470 digital screens." Great. How much did that cost? How much work needed to be done in basic cabling to power those screens? How much bandwidth had to be added? Now multiply that across a hundred or a thousand stores. It's not that the tech itself is so expensive — that seems to get cheaper every day. It's the provisioning and the zoning and the permits and the jackhammering that make that store multiplier number so scary.
Photo: Honeywell
Further, technology changes too fast for stores to keep up. Those beautiful large format touch screens in the Edmonton Mall that look so high tech today will be obsoleted by 4k or 3D or holograms, for all I know — and all in the next three years.
Finally, store employees are in-store tech's weakest link. Upon rollout, the whiz-bang hardware turns out to be not ergonomically designed for employee use, doesn't fit quite right into the customer buying process, or the response time is slow. Employee feedback isn't heard. Trained employees leave.
To make in-store technology successful, stores need to solve specific problems and fill in gaps in the in-store part of the customer journey.
For instance, why not hand associates tablets to have them be on par with mobile-wielding shoppers? What if store associates had more information, such as when the next shipment arrives, if the reviews have been trending up or down over the last couple of weeks, or the top three products that customers buy along with that item.
Technology in stores has often felt like a "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" exercise, which has led to the bad reputation that in-store technology now has. But we surely know enough about how to define needs and requirements to do better by stores than we have so far.