What retailers like Reliance Market should learn from Flipkart & Amazon
Before starting with the article. Let me first guide you through my persona. So, I’m a 29 yr old guy working as an analyst with a consulting firm. I live in Gurgaon with my wife whereas my parents live in a town called Patiala which is a few hours away from Gurgaon. I usually come over to Patiala over the weekend and help my parents with some of the tasks like taking them to doctor,bank (yes, they have accounts in PSU bank), Kisan Mandi, visiting other relatives, family functions etc etc. So my goal is to make full use of the weekend and wrap us as much as I can so that they are not worried at least for a couple of weeks. My frustrations are that I have to do a lot of manual work that I do not personally like eg. visiting Kisan Mandi ( no Big Basket, Grofers), waiting period while visiting doctors, waiting at the PSU banks, waiting while my mother is shopping. In short, there is a lot of waiting time in my life when I’m at my hometown.
Last week I had to do some grocery shopping and I chose to go to Reliance Market, a new Hypermarket that is not very far from my house.
If you are unaware of Reliance Market then this is what there website says “Reliance Market enjoys strong patronage of its registered member partners by offering them a wide assortment of groceries, home and personal care products, consumables, general merchandise, apparel, footwear and home appliances. By sharing benefits of strong sourcing capabilities and relationships with a large network of vendors, Reliance Market offers regional, national and international brands to its partners and help them prosper”.
Customer journey in Reliance Market Store
Shopping in Reliance Market is different than other supermarkets. It is compulsory for all customers to get a membership ID before they can purchase any item. Below is a very simple Customer Journey Map in any Reliance Store.
What is interesting to know that unlike Amazon or Flipkart there is no option to get your id via SMS on your phone at the checkout. It is compulsory for users to carry membership id during the checkout process. In case you are not carrying it or lost it you need to get your membership ID regenerated at a special counter. The worst case scenario is that you wait in a long queue at the checkout counter then only to know it is compulsory to have a membership id for the checkout. To make it even worse their membership creation system might be having an outage and you are handed over a dummy id to complete your transaction. You again have figure out which checkout counter has smallest queue, present the membership ID, make the payment and leave that place.
It is disheartening that offline players are still lacking the insight by not focusing on customer centricity. The customers have now got used to one click checkout process be it for booking flight tickets, taxi or hotel rooms. The checkout process is extremely critical. As the Peak-End Rule suggests, a customer remembers the peak and end of an experience in greater detail. Companies like Reliance Market are miserably failing at this because the end experience i.e checkout leaves a bad impression on the consumer.
KPIs that Reliance Market should monitor
In the tussle between online and offline retailers the brick and mortar shops need to innovate on customer delight by adopting measures to reduce the Membership creation process, shopping experience and most importantly the checkout process. Not sure what are the key metrics that Reliance Market keeps a track of. But they should definitely capture metrics like No.of Membership IDs regenerated/Existing Membership IDs, Avg Shopping time per customer, Avg Waiting time in queue per customer, Avg time taken to scan a product at the cash counter, Max and Min time taken to scan a products. An organization that is fond of Design Thinking would even measure Avg time taken to enter the store from parking, avg time taken to leave the store premises. With advancements in video analytics and cloud platforms these KPIs can be measured almost real-time.
Exclusive memberships like Amazon Prime
Last but not the least they should copy the concept of Amazon Prime Membership something they can call “Reliance Super Customer”. With a yearly subscription fee these customers can get exclusive access to exclusive “Super Customer” ONLY Checkout Counters, assistance in transferring products from shopping cart to the car boot. As suggested by Kano Model, which is a is a theory for product development and customer satisfaction, features that are lesser expected by the consumer even if nominally executed can significantly increase customer satisfaction.
Supermarkets and Hypermarkets add a physical world experience that cannot be achieved on eCommerce websites. People are comfortable in buying a new product when presented physically in front of them vs seeing them online. eCommerce companies have figured out that people seek convenience as a major driver in making purchasing decisions features like placing orders in a single click, easy returns, bills that could be retrieved even after years of purchasing the product, order tracking, leaving order with a neighbor in your absence etc. I feel it is high time that brick and mortar stores start keeping the customer in the center before creating the service design for their stores.
