Retailers Need to Offer Consumers Connected, Omnichannel Experience, Event Told

Out of necessity, consumers became more “channel agnostic” and “digital savvy” during the COVID-19 era, and they got used to it, a Retail TouchPoints virtual webinar was told Monday. Now, retailers have to think about how to continue to engage them differently, said Forrester Research analyst Brendan Witcher.

People got more comfortable doing things online that they hadn’t done previously, including having doctor visits, attending religious services and grocery shopping, Witcher said. Just over 20% of consumers in the past two years shopped online for groceries for the first time. Other first-time digital behaviors were banking (14%), telehealth visits (13%), digital payments (11%) and ordering a streaming music or video service (9%), Forrester data showed.

Consumers are now so comfortable interacting in the digital world that 61% are “unlikely to return” to a website that doesn’t provide a satisfactory customer experience,” Witcher said. With in-store shopping back to more normal levels, customers expect to have the choice of how and where they want to shop, and a one-size-fits-all solution won’t work anymore, he said. Retailers should use personalization features and transition from multichannel to omnichannel strategies.

It’s important that retailers have consistent communication and deep engagement with customers in the omnichannel experience, Witcher said. “The challenge is to have these systems talk to each other” to understand what’s going on with a customer, he said. “If I go to a website and I talk to a virtual agent about a product I’m interested in buying,” he said, “what are the odds that the product recommendation engine starts talking to me" about the product after closing the virtual agent, he asked. It likely won’t because two different systems from different vendors aren't exchanging information, he said. A Forrester survey showed only 29% of retailers give product recommendations based on shopping behavior.

The goal should be to create a seamless shopping experience. “If we show the customer we’re not really listening, they’ll pick up on that,” Witcher said, saying the ideal is to have a "100% contextually relevant experience." He cited Neiman Marcus, saying customers can take a picture of an item with the Neiman app and the app finds it in a local store, where the customer can speak with a local store associate via call, chat or FaceTime.

Being able to share what they like and don’t like via app is important to customers, Witcher said, along with the ability to save an item they see in store, show it to friends or family later in a consultation, and then make a purchase via the app when they decide to buy. Only 6% of surveyed retailers reported having a unified shopping wish list across mobile, web and in-store point-of-sale experiences, he said, and 4% offer a unified shopping cart.

Witcher highlighted Home Depot as an omnichannel retail leader, breaking out areas where the retailer makes shopping easier for customers. The website shows "pick up," "in store" and "ship to home" equally as fulfillment options, but 30%-40% of customers buy more when they come into a store than they would online, he said. Home Depot also shows the number of items in stock, which is useful for someone buying in bulk. If the item isn’t in stock in the customer’s local store, customers can have it shipped to that store from the webpage, which lets the customer know when it will be at that location. The experience is mirrored in the app. “If I’m doing this online all the time and then I go to the app and it’s not the same, I could get confused” and go elsewhere, he said. The more options retailers show customers for how to buy and fulfill items, the more customers feel the store is “customer-centric,” he said.

Pitching her company’s omnichannel retail solutions, Rachel Henwood, Oracle senior sales consulting director, said 40% of consumers prefer to use a store with mobile shopping capability, and 35% are less likely to shop at a retailer with a slow checkout experience. When shoppers interact with retail associates, transactions are 81% higher than when there’s no interaction, and when a retailer has access to prior purchase history, basket size increases by 20%, Henwood said. About a third of consumers who get an “out of stock” message are less likely to shop the retailer in the future, she said.