How to incorporate categories, tags, labels, or folders to help users organize and prioritize their tasks effectively.
Here’s mine: upon entering the store, a sales professional is positioned behind the counter, on the point-of-sale computer doing something. Half of the time, the sales professional looks up and provides an acknowledgement in regard to my presence in the store. Next, comes the unsolicited “brand introduction”. You know the drill...
“Have you ever visited _______ before? Well, we’re founded in __________”; We’re very eco-friendly using 80% less water etc…”
You've heard it before. Or it's been "trained". Then there's the promotional approach (used sometimes in tandem with above brand intro):
“Just so you know, this section over here is 50% off today.”
Retailers need to ask themselves if these “snippets” or “canned conversations” fundamentally require a human being to express them on the shop floor? And reflecting further: are we developing front-line team members to be chatbots, or to be true retail sales professionals that have the ability to connect with customers, solve problems, and add value?
Professor Scott Galloway, in his book “The Four”, highlights quite simply one of the primary outcomes of being globally over-retailed combined with the rise of Amazon: “Consumers no longer go to stores for products, which are easier to get from Amazon. They go to stores for people/experts.”
As consumers have little reason to drive to their nearest shopping center to pick up a product that Alexa could fulfill, then why is product or promotional knowledge the primary form of seemingly “training” that front-line retail team members receive? One could argue it’s another form of business school thinking gone bad: products and promotions generate revenue, so “Duh.”.
The problem with that false equivalency, like many others in retail, is that it seeks an outcome without any consideration towards the drivers of said outcome. There’s a reason why developed sales professionals can jump from selling high-end chocolate to fine jewelry, then to high fashion without missing a performance beat. The product is irrelevant.
These sales professionals have either the natural talent (unscalable art) or have been developed over time with the scalable science of selling. This involves connecting interpersonally with a visitor in their store (or now virtual) environment, in addition to having self-awareness over their nonverbal and verbal communication that builds trust and positively influences the customer’s experience and purchase- regardless of channel! Can Alexa or the in-store robot do that? And are these skills on most retailer’s education curriculum or radar?
Borrowing from another Professor Scott coined phrase, the future requires retailers to zig as Amazon zags. There are plenty of examples of retailers zigging: investing in valuable in-store assets (people) that are engaging customers daily, via the deepest engagement channel in retail: the store.
On February 6th, 2019 this article was published on LinkedIn, and a version of this article was picked up by RetailWire on February 8th, 2019.
