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.
For shoppers, self-service has historically been perceived as better than waiting around for an employee to show up — and certainly better than waiting for an uninformed, untrained associate who doesn't know what they're doing.
As consumers turn to their own technology (smartphones) to gain access to whatever self-service information they need, they are increasingly asking themselves why they bothered to come to the store in the first place.
A lot of retailers appear to be embracing the old perspective that consumers want more self-service. And yet that perspective is getting dated. If I can get the same experience (or better) from my laptop at home, or even from my phone in the parking lot, why do I need to go to the store at all? In essence, self-service, in the sense of forcing the consumer to do all the work themselves, has no future.
I see a new bar for store experience manifesting into two main areas in 2016:
Differentiated self-service. If retailers are going to offer self-service, it will need to be an experience that goes beyond what a consumer can get for themselves with their mobile phone. Interaction with larger screens and with physical products in digital spaces — almost as if the consumer's mobile phone is a remote control — will be the kinds of "differentiated" self-service we'll start to see.
Moreover, as online content reaches parity with store content, the store experience will need to compensate by providing information that you can't get easily by shopping strictly online.
Employee services needs to be more differentiated. Employees are the one thing online clearly does not have. If a retailer has high turnover, low motivation, no-training employees, it's a pretty sure bet they are adding little to the customer experience that a shopper can't already do for herself — thanks to her mobile phone.
The trend toward assisted selling and clienteling seen at high-end stores may reach pretty far down into general merchandise, especially if a company like Walmart is feeling the pinch.