50
Future of Retail — In-Store Technology
issue 06
“In whichever way retailers decide to pursue automation, it is worth reflecting that in the last two years many of the big news stories have been about people.”
the customer is not content with their purchase and they want to re-engage with the brand to return or change an item. While this is not ‘unpredictable’ behaviour across the customer base, how each and every customer will begin this particular customer journey is less clear and therefore it isn’t so easy to apply an automated solution. From the moment the heat and anticipation
of ‘ownership’ cools to disappointment, the customer journey and experience is now much more important to the lifetime value of that customer while worth much less to the accounts department, and will quite possibly produce a negative cost to the business. Yet here too automation in various iterations has a part to play. First a comprehensive journey mapping
exercise is required to identify where the majority of ‘failure demand’ stems from. Failure demand simply refers to a demand made on the operation as a consequence of a failure elsewhere in the customer experience and associated touch points or processes. For example, a website that has web chat only on the basket page creates an expectation that this functionality exists elsewhere, on the FAQ page for instance. When customers are unable to get the information they need from a particular source and then find they are unable to use the channel they expected to be available to them, they will most likely seek the most direct route of communication which is the telephone. This requires that sufficient resources are available to connect with the customer when they make that call – or does it? Using Pareto Law, by identifying where the 20% of complex customer communications
originate that take up 80% of your operations time and effort, it can uncover opportunities for the use of automation in channels like web chat as well as automated call answering that can direct callers to best qualified teams to address those common issues. Many organisations discover the cost to serve repetitive issues like late or lost orders and refund enquiries comprise a significant and often unbudgeted expense for the business. In whichever way retailers decide to pursue
automation, it is worth reflecting that in the last two years many of the big news stories have been about people. For some time, the awards programmes and the excitement in retail surrounded the use of technology to slipstream customer engagement with brands. More recently, the real stars have been those that have created the best work place environments for their staff and empowerment models to reflect how they are valued and trusted partners in the business. We can expect automation and AI in
particular to run the hype cycle for another year or so but by then the likes of Amazon and Google will have already moved on. When considering these platforms for your business, don’t forget the input of the front line and the back office team. They will know best where the pain points are, what drives them and must be part of any investigation into understanding the impact on cost. Looking forward, the real winners will be
the ‘aggregators of ideas’ to which any new technology can be applied and it is in this context that we should remember where the real intelligence in your business lies – your human employee population.
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