What if we think Retail as Service…
Laxmi wants her grocery to be delivered only after she reaches home in the evening and not before that. She along with her husband are working professionals and they hardly have time on weekdays to either stock up or stay at home just to get their stuff delivered.
They are somehow also convinced that visiting a store on weekends are not for the faint hearted.
This is not an out of the ordinary case but it somehow resonates with the prevailing urban dilemma.
The challenge for the traditional retailer is, how to stay relevant for these new kind of customers and do not end up as the Walking Dead. The choice is either to cling onto old models, making token gestures to e-commerce around the edges or to bring about radical changes to redefine the term ‘retail’ itself.
Sometimes the flow of technology is so powerful it neither gives you time to contemplate nor to strategies at all. You need to take decisions on the fly and execute them without the fear of future. If you succeed, you are rewarded with the First Movers’ Advantage, if not, you get the learning so that you huddle back and rework on the product you want to ship, all over again.
Our world was never this complex …!
Retailers cannot stay hung up on price alone. We have already milked this strategy too much. Looks like this downward spiral has no end to it and there will always be someone selling cheaper than you.
Moreover, it is also not just about what you sell and how much it costs, it is how accessible you are and how convenient.
It was never so relevant to make the setting (Online or Offline) so simple that it is always easy to deal with you and it feels good too. Make sure this service-level pervades all customer touch-points whether she shops online, comes to your store or calls the customer service to order.
As retailers, we need to get involved in a conversation with the customers like Laxmi to understand their problems and focus on services more than selling. We need to be quick to upgrade and onboard ourselves with whatever new and emerging channels our customers are engaging on.
There’s no jumping off the digital train anymore and the sooner we realize this the better it is. Online and offline both are here to stay and we need to be used to this new normal. Lip-service to digital and multi-channel retail just buys us a little time before the inevitable break-down in relations happen between us and the customers.
Good service can save the retail.
Retail is the new service.