Exploring new ways of shopping, click and collect

Click and collect speeds up the innovation cycle.

Over the last 1? months, many stores have been closed, except super/hypermarkets here in Denmark. 

It means that companies must find a better way to handle how they interact with customers. It is not all that have been able to do it equally well. 

We have a small house project to shine a little up at home, so we have been trying some different retailers that had some offline part. 

1) Painting store 

Call them and pay via mobile. It required two calls, and then I could come and pick up the painting 10 minutes later and was mixed, so I did not have to wait. 

It was a super-easy way to make setup one phone number pr store. I guess the overhead was not that great. It may be more difficult if I needed some particular color or wanted some advice. I'm not sure if they had a phone queue to simultaneously handle multiple calls. 

2) Building market 

We had to buy some boxes from the building market. Via their webshop, we could order the boxes and then got a notification 30 minutes later when the order was completed. 

Then it was to walk into the store and present the order number. Then I got a cart with the boxes. 

It also worked well, and it was easy to pick up the goods. 

3) Building market 2

We needed a new sleigh to explore the snow. We placed an order and got information about a pickup time. When I had to pick up the, there was a huge line, because it was the time all other parents could pick up their sleighs. It was cold. 

They had a lot of effort to find the order in a paper binder and then give me my sleigh. 

It was quite strange there was no electronic order handling of the orders. They just had the printouts. I was just at the beginning of the process, so i do hope they have updated the process.

4) Funiture store. 

We had to get a shoe cabinet in a furniture store plus some boxes. We placed an online order and needed to say when we would pick it up. The first time I got there, they had not picked the cabinet, and the truck driver was not there. So I needed to go there the next day. We should have called before to plan a time for pickup. 

The next day they had not picked the order, so I needed to wait 10 minutes for them to collect the items. 

I was the only customer both times I was there, and there were three employees. 

5) Electronics retailer

I needed a new espresso machine for my office to get good coffee. They had an offer on what looked like an excellent machine. I was expecting that I could chat with them. But then it turned into a video call. I could not be connected to an agent the first time, but 1 minute later, I could. It was an excellent experience to order via him. The payment was made via a website link sent to my mobile. 

It would be delivered as a package because they did not have it in the stores. 

My guess is it is not that difficult to set up such an agent system where you can perform a video chat with a clerk. I guess it would also work, somewhat ok to give advice about TVs etc. You would not be able to get a good feeling about which TV is better, but you also rely on the salesperson in the store. 

Conclusion

It has been interesting to see how fast companies can innovate and bring out the customer experience even in challenging times. The challenge is also how long this will be extended because it just extended three weeks. For that matter, they could open tomorrow. 

Except in Building market 2, there was no line of people to pick up goods. I'm not sure how good of a business idea it is, but it does give some extra way to get to your customers.

The mixed experiences do make it easier for some businesses. If you can go around with the clerk and pick the items that you want. But it may be something that we will have to look for different ways to innovate with over the next period.

I'm not sure how much they do of business compared to having customers in the store.