For the last few years the glamour in retail has been firstly with ecommerce and latterly with mobile, however the tide is turning and the focus once more is upon the store. Rather than the 20th century focus on efficiency, sales per square foot and circulation, the emphasis now will be upon the customer’s experience, brand values and bringing marketing promises to life. Ian Jindal considers the next stage in our multichannel maturity: the store dimension and an expanded view of the customer.

SELLING in the digital age is developing and maturing so quickly that we have a problem with words and with channels. ecommerce, etail, internet retailing, multichannel, cross-channel, omnichannel, pan-channel… beyond channels? Indeed, it won’t be long before the discussion about channels and their integration and interaction feels quaint – the sooner the better, since customers show time and again that they are neither interested in, nor care about, our definition of ‘channels’ and touchpoints. Customers simply have expectations of our brand: online, offline, mobile, by voice and by post.

While we’ve spent time (and received significant benefits) from collect-in-store initiatives there’s an argument to say that we’re simply catching up with the customers’ expectations. They see stores as places to see, choose and buy products and the web is an interface that allows them to ‘remotely control’ the selection and payment aspects. We can see these services as simply unlocking latent demands and behaviours. To what extent can the stores reciprocate by being “more multichannel”? There’s more to be done than simply reminding customers via point-of-sale that you also have a website for those lonely, non-store hours.

The first change has been initiated by customers who are bringing ‘the web’ into the store in their hands – mobile retailing. Customers are searching product information, of course, sometimes buying online (if that purchase is from a competitor then it’s a form of ‘digital shoplifting’). However, the enhanced information available to them now challenges our staff to ‘know more’, while in some stores customers can also access real-time stock information. Tesco has led the way with an app from their R&D team that will locate products down to the individual aisle, shelf and location. This is made possible by the fact they have a storeby- store planogram, and – while interesting – was initially little more than novelty. As R turns to D, however, Tesco is looking for beta testers for their “instore sat nav” app that will locate products for you, ensure that you don’t miss products on your shopping list and, no doubt, assist you in spending more with them. The store experience will be changed and augmented by the use of digital in your hands.

The physical store environment is also set to change. Intel’s connected store project illustrates how in-store display has progressed beyond a kioskon- steroids. The “Kraft Food Bot” exemplifies an experience that combines the physical store, the customer’s shopping list from the ‘home’ computer, their mobile device and face-recognition technology, all drawn together by selling algorithms. Cameras and image processing feature highly in some experimental store technology from IBM too. Taking facerecognition and eye-tracking technology (currently seen in digital cameras and in eye-tracking systems), IBM has embedded cameras within mannequins that can tell which customers are circulating in the store and what their eyes are dwelling upon. In conjunction with smart store windows – that act as ‘head up displays’, flat speakers and circulation monitors – our stores will soon be bristling with monitoring, evaluating technology to track and respond to our customers’ behaviours.

A recent development is that the store location is not ‘fixed’. Between the store location and the web interface (wherever that may be) there are some interesting developments in ‘digital popup’ locations. Tesco has an interesting experiment in South Korea – taking their store to busy commuters by creating massive shoppable screens in subway stations. QR codes make the products individually shoppable, so we have a mass individualised offering, taken directly to massed customers.

Ecommerce has played its part by driving businesses to develop digital information, eCRM approaches and behavioural targeting, and this ‘baseline of capability’ is now being injected into the store environment. The store is sensing, evaluating and responsive, but a new challenge of course is to link the digital and physical experiences, and to correctly identify how the cookie at home, the email address, the mobile number and the face in a store with a credit card all connect. In the coming months we’ll be spending time considering both the store and the new CRM challenges as we look to the new frontiers in multichannel, customerfocused retailing.