Retail Research Equation

Shopping is one of the experiences that everyone engages in almost on a daily basis. It seems like every other day is “buy a donut” day (for me at least). Whether its online or offline, we shop. We shop for survival and luxury, beauty and boredom. Customers come to each retail experience with emotions, baggage, mental models, expectations, competitor experiences, etc. Those previous experiences and expectations build on top of each other and influence their experience with your brand. We can look at this idea in simple equation form:

(x)+y = customer experience / brand perception

x = customer baggage

y = your retail experience

Solve for Y

Like any algebra equation, to find the evaluation we havet to solve for the unknown quantities. The obvious place to start is with y. Why? (see what I did there)… because thats the stuff you can control. It’s YOUR experience, YOUR store, YOUR app, etc. You might start with questions like, “Where do they look the most? What calls their attention? How are my staff treating my customers? How long does it take them to buy something once they enter the store? What barriers are in their way from making a purchase?” Setting up online analytics and physical customer tracking using ibeacons, Cisco’s Halo, or any one of the growing amount of services and hardware available (check out this little diddy to learn more about it) will provide invaluable data about possible barriers. These tools will provide treasure troves of quantitative data(hard numbers). With this information you’ll know exactly where and what a customer spends their time on. You’ll know more about in-store spending habits, store visits, age of visitor, time of visit both online and in-store if you have the right equipment set-up. With this information you can start to build hypothetical cases about why people make decisions. These cases can be used to make initial changes to online or physical layouts, order process, prices, etc but can also be used to setup more qualitative testing methods or solving for “x.”

Solve for X

Once you’ve gathered your quantitative information and made some initial insights (its an ongoing process) you can then move towards more qualitative, opinion based research methods. These will provide personal insights in to what your data is trying to tell you. Much of the time this “qualitative data” will provide the “why” to many of the patterns your quantitative data has uncovered. Questions like, “why are users dropping off my site at that page?” can be answered with usability tests, a qualitative research method. In fact, all those numbers become a lot more meaningful when you have human insight and emotion to stack them against.

If you’re a retail chain and you aren’t studying how and why people enter and exit your store, you’re already failing. If you’re a mom and pop or a smaller retail location this will give you an immediate edge over your smaller competitors and, at the very least, provide needed perspective for growth and change. With your smaller size you don’t need to employ the large-scale tactics that your competition might need to. In-fact your ability to personally meet and greet your customers gives you a fantastic pulse on their needs and what they’re looking for.

The X Sub-equation

Finding “x” is a bit more complex than merely gathering insights and going through data. There are a lot of variables that might come in to play. For example your search for X might include:

User surveys — targeted questions, photos, etc with the intent to gather useful information regarding digital and physical properties.

User interviews — planned interviews with prepared questions regarding process, habits, emotions, etc. Try to get a good subset of your different customers.

Persona creation — either design or marketing personas. Marketing personas focus a lot more on who your customers are. Design personas focus on what those people are looking for. (I suggest a hybrid)

Ethnographic research methods (diaries, process tracking) — prepared studies with focused goals and objectives. For example, your users use your product in a very specific way and you want to catalogue their day to day use, emotions, reasons for using, etc. You might consider a daily journey. Another one might be, you want to add new colors or options to your product line so you send disposable cameras to your user base and have them take photos of their clothes they wear and their favorite objects in their daily lives. By looking through those photos you can get a sense of what colors your user base responds to.

Contextual inquiry — the act of watching and studying customers (or internal employees) during the moments when they are in the core of their experience.

Secret shoppers — Definitely a form of contextual inquiry in my mind and a unique research method to retail (but should be adopted elsewhere). Send in people to act like normal customers and have them take detailed notes, photo journals, etc of what they find.

Customer journey maps — An intensive study of process, pain points, and touchpoints in order to map out the highs and lows of the journey and find gaps.

Card Sorting — generally used for interactive experiences. This activity can also be used in order to find common patterns among retail items, categories, etc.

and the list can go on and on. Don’t be fooled, even though I come from an interaction design/UX background all of these activites are cross functional and can be used in a myriad of ways to gather insights on and off the web. There are a myriad of different ways to gather insights (good references include the book “Gamestorming” and IDEO’s research methodology cards.

With all of those inputs the equation starts to look like this:

(a+b+c+d+e+f+g) + y = customer experience / brand perception

But we can’t forget the all important and ever so elusive “analysis” portion of the equation.

Synthesizing your research

Once you’ve gathered the qualitative information its time to start putting things together. These can take varied forms of visualizations and or written analysis. The important part is to use your information to piece everything together. Once you’ve organized your information and analyzed it you can add in your quantitative research and compare the two. It doesn’t have to be as waterfall as that however, you can allow one form of research to inform the other.

Your equation should now look something like this:

{(a+b+c+d+e+f+g)} + y/Analysis = customer experience

A little more difficult but if it wasn’t a little hard then everyone would be able to do it. You don’t have to go at it alone, there are people out there who can help(ahem, like me).

To Wrap It All Up

Once you’ve gathered all your information and added it together you’ll have a pretty good look at your current state customer experience. If you’re savvy, you’ll also have identified the different types of people that enter into that experience and what their high and low points are as they go through it. This information will provide action items,focus points, for your team to target as next steps . With each change you should consider ways that will determine its success. Plan out your success metrics and find ways to track that information. Seeing live results once you get a steady stream of data and a process for collecting insights is a great motivator for any team.

Gaurenteed you’ll start to see changes in how people respond to your company and how you do business. If your customers aren’t helping you shape your business then you wont ever deliver the experience they’re looking for. That being said, don’t be afraid to take risks, people don’t always know what they need until you deliver it.

Get out there and do that math!