Store Visits - Business Capability View

Ever wondered, in the age of digital communication and ubiquitous online shopping experience available to customers, why do customers (at least few!) still visit brick-n-mortar stores?

If we think in?Jobs To Be Done?(JTBD) style, apart from the obvious?Functional Aspect i.e.?"buying a product", there are number of other?Emotional Aspects,?like the few listed below:

1. Get a feel of product
2. Need faster fulfilment
3. Need help to make decision on which product to buy

While it is important to think through each of these aspects from overall customer journey perspective, marketing perspective or operational perspective, I would like to explain how we can support these from?Business Capabilities?perspective.

(For this blog I'll focus on just a couple of aspects, but the same line of thinking can very well be extended to all the aspects)

So, how do we satisfy the emotional needs of the customer visiting stores?

Before we can identify which capabilities to focus on, the very first question we need to answer is, "What?Business Services?do we offer to our customer at our stores to satisfy their needs (both functional as well as emotional)?"

In this case we surely need following services:

1. Help to Buy?- A service where the store executives provide required guidance and support to customers to decide which product will help them do their job better
2. Assorted Product Selection?- This service enables customers to easily see variety of products which will potentially to meet their needs
3. Click-n-Collect?- Through this service customers can buy the products of their choice through online channel and collect them in store to satisfy their need for faster fulfilment

How do we ensure we have necessary capabilities to provide those business services?

Now, when I talk about capabilities here I'm talking about Business Capabilities. And it is essential to distinguish them from supporting IT capabilities.

Business capability in essence means any ability of business to provide "value" to customer / stakeholders (internal / external).

When we think through Business Capability lens, we can easily see that each of the business services which we need to offer customers has different capability needs - some of them are?People?focused capabilities (e.g. Staff skills), some are?Process?focused (e.g. Own Brand Strategy, Product Assortment) while few are?Technology?focused (e.g. Order Management, Inventory Management).

So the main point I want to make here is, in order to realize the true Value to the customer, we have to appropriately adjust the corresponding Business Capability. If we focus only on IT, we may not meet the desired business outcome!

We can summarise this using ArchiMate modelling notations as follows:

Disclaimer:

I've published this article in purely my personal capacity and my employers (present / past) have no relation to this