The Best First Steps To Providing Solutions That Enhance Customer Experience
By Ally Kutz, contributing writer
Your merchant IT clients may want to leverage technology to enhance customer experience, but finding a place to start can be difficult. At BlueStar’s VARTECH 2015, members of the customer experience panel offered advice for beginning a project and keeping it in the proper perspective.
Luke Wilwerding, director of Elo Interactive retail solutions, said the first step a VAR should take is to understand your client’s specific needs. “Often, [VARs] try to come at this with a firm price and try to work their way to the customer and say, ‘What can I sell you?’ without understanding what the customer is really trying to solve,” he said.
For example, a client that sells higher ticket items or large items can benefit from an endless aisle solution — a digital way of providing an extended catalog to customers in the store without stocking items at the store. “Or if a customer wants buy size 10 shoes in a particular color and they aren’t at the store, the merchant might leverage an endless aisle tool that allows them to find that particular item at the distributor’s warehouse, sell it to the customer, and have them either pick it up back at the store, or have it shipped to the customer’s home,” he explained.
“It comes down to understanding your customer and what they’re trying to accomplish in the store. Once you have that good understanding, I think you can start to recommend the right digital solutions to meet the customer’s needs,” Wilwerding said.
Jon Levin, product integration manager at Star Micronics, advised having a discussion with your clients that includes best practices and use cases. “You’re really the general contractor at that point. You’re interjecting expertise and best practices throughout the entire process, and, really, you’re introducing them to change and how to take advantage of different market segments that are out there, without disrupting their main clientele today. It’s an augmenting strategy, or it’s an adjacent strategy, but one they’re very aware that they need to quickly address.”
As you provide and deploy new solutions to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds — “digital touchpoints,” as Levin called them — such as digital signage, point of sale (POS), and beacons, the last piece of the solution is to provide a method of measurement that helps your clients attract, connect, and engage with their customers.
Jay McBain, CEO of Channeleyes, reminds VARs that successful solutions will include the right mix of human customer experience with the digital. “A big part of customer experience today is social interaction. Being part of a community, part of some sort of physical social network, is very important and very intrinsic in people. If our entire lives were replaced with robots and kiosks, it’d be pretty empty,” he commented.
He said, however, enhancing the customer experience with technology could capture a different clientele. “For example, there may be a very social person who needs to get something in five minutes or less and doesn’t want to go through a drawn-out process. Perhaps with some new tools, bringing in a younger generation and being able to segment customers better would be possible. I think it’s crucial and something that’s going to grow significantly, but it’ll never replace — at least not in our lifetimes — the human touch.”
VARTECH 2015 is being held Sept. 14 to 18 on the Royal Caribbean Enchantment of the Seas cruise ship traveling from Port of Cape Canaveral, FL to CocoCay, Bahamas. VARTECH, the annual conference for value-added distributor BlueStar partners, focuses on data collection, point of sale, mobility, digital signage, RFID, and security. For more information on BlueStar and VARTECH, go to www.BSMinfo.com/solution/InsideBlueStar.