Brick-and-mortar retailers aren’t prepared to offer the next generation of consumers the contextual, seamless, and personalized shopping experience they demand, according to EKN’s new research report -- The First Annual Future of Stores Study.
According to the new study, which was sponsored by Epicor, retailers have displayed low maturity regarding their stores' omni-channel integration. Consider that only one third use the store as a delivery hub for online orders; one in four offer smart devices to their sales associates; and only one in 10 have features in their mobile app that are useful in the store.
The EKN report outlines the dynamic industry changes that are driving the need for retailers to reinvent their customer engagement strategies to not only remain competitive, but also to understand the transformative role of the store from a standalone destination to a customer engagement hub.
Some key findings of the report include:
Retailers have low levels of system integration across channels. With the need for stores to be better integrated with emerging digital channels, it becomes important for retailers to tightly integrate their systems across channels. Systems focused on the core tenets of traditional retail -- product, price and inventory -- are the most mature in terms of integration. However, even these systems have a long way to go before tight integration becomes an industry norm. On the other hand, systems focused on the customer -- loyalty, customer information and promotions -- have the lowest integration levels.
Future investments in store technologies will be accompanied by a rationalization of legacy store systems. Retailers view technology as a key differentiator in a number of areas, from helping stores operate more efficiently to increasing digital engagement with shoppers, improving the effectiveness of managers and associates, providing consistent product and price information across channels, and other key areas. Yet, IT spending on store technologies will remain relatively flat over the next three years. To invest in technologies that improve the in-store customer experience, they will need to undertake strategic initiatives to weed out cost from the current operating model.
Store associate mobility is high on the priority list, but low on the maturity curve. One of the few advantages brick-and-mortar retailers have over online competitors is the ability to provide consumers a human touch. Though retailers have aggressive plans to enable their sales associates to spend more, and better, time with customers -- 71% plan to provide a mobile device or tablet to store associates by 2015 -- their maturity as relates to what store associates can do with these mobile devices is low. One in two retailers has no plans to deliver competitive pricing information to their store associates, nor do they have plans to deliver insightful customer profiles at the point of interaction.
"Consumers don't think in terms of channels,” Gaurav Pant, Research Director for EKN, said in a press release. “Retailers still do. The future of the retail store is no different than the future of all retail -- seamlessly integrated, technologically enabled and personal. For retailers to be able to deliver such an experience, they need to align all channels to the lifetime value of customers, empower store associates at the point of interaction, infuse new digital experiences in-store, and aggressively integrate customer data, inventory, and pricing across all channels."