Good old times in retail. Do we want them back?
It seems that nowadays what we crave is good old times. Today’s generation is bringing back the things that their parents or grandparents were accustomed to in their youth. Old is a new new. In terms of food, music, fashion and themes from the past appear to inspire present trends. These fusions of old and new are everywhere: chefs create culinary masterpieces from the old recipes with a new twist; artists re-create classic artworks using new materials, techniques, and medium; couturiers give old patterns and silhouette futuristic spin.
Those signs of good old times are seen more and more often. We give in to obsession du jour, now and then inflicting an irreparable damage. But sometimes we come to our senses and take a step back. Sometimes it’s a step back with a new twist.
Right now we seem to be coming to our senses about the trend of communicating with our thumbs. People are getting tired of typing. Emails, chats, texts, and for what: a few simple questions, that may require a simple yes or no answer? The answers that could be given over the phone in seconds now take minutes if not hours or days of wait. The consumers don’t want to talk to bots anymore, either. They want to communicate with real salespeople.
Remember good old times in retail? Shoppers go to a store and a salesperson attends to their needs, presents them with choices. The stores were small, shoppers sat in lounges and waited for an attendant to help them. The experience back then was custom fit and people liked it. Then, a known department store company in the United Kingdom reinvented that experience. Selfridges came up with an idea where shoppers are free to move around the store freely, reach for the items without any assistance, and check them out or try them on. The only interaction with a store personnel would be at a cash register. Shopping became a form of leisure.
Fast forward to today, technology plays a major role in shaping the world of commerce. We still like to shop and move about the store freely. Only now we have thousands of stores available at our fingertips. We now move about thousands of stores online. The internet made it possible for shoppers to look at and buy products from anywhere on the planet. Major online marketplaces, the giants of e-commerce opened the door to businesses to expand their reach. Mobile phones, faster internet, and faster shipping expanded the e-comers retail space even more.
However, in all that expansion of the retail industry, we lost sight of few things of great importance: a quality of interaction and time. Yes, time. Just think about time and resources involved in returning a product that did not fit. Yes, we can use email or a chat to ask questions, wait for the answer, then realize that the retailer probably has hundreds of more emails to answer, and the bot is too generic, so we buy the wrong size.
How much easier it would be to connect with a real salesperson, and have a live interaction?
But technology has distanced customers from retailers. The human connection was replaced with computers with the advent of automation and bots. We would pick up the phone and call, but the annoying little window with a picture of a gorgeous female keeps popping up:“Hi, my name is Laura. How can I assist you?” And since “Laura” is so insistent and pretty we start typing just to realize minutes later that she is not real and we wasted that time. And with that wasted time we also, even temporarily, wasted a chance to interact with a real person who could probably help us much faster, make us feel better, make us feel human.
In this series, we will talk about key issues in retail space, and focus on how customers’ interaction to businesses can be more human, how businesses can innovate their approach to convert their website visitors into paying clients.
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