CUSTOMER INTIMACY - 1

At the height of the dot-com boom, predictions about the outright demise of the brick-and-mortar store were floated about in the retail industry. However, it seems that one of the lasting effects of the Internet revolution has been to make the store an even more central part of the shopping experience. Whether it’s the place where customers go to actually touch an apparel item they’ve seen in a catalog or researched online, or where customers pick up the grocery order they updated via a cell phone text message, the store has become the center for the new multi-channel, multiple touch point shopping experience. If you notice many single brand retailers are now launching flagship stores as a destination to promote their brand and display their entire range to the customers in a real environment. This is also driven by the retailer’s desire to build customer intimacy. The physical store still represents an optimal environment for such efforts, because building customer intimacy involves much more than just collecting data from customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
“Customer intimacy is defined differently by each customer and retailers need to interact with them in the ways the consumer wants,” says Rob Garf, Retail Research Director at AMR Research. “Some customers want an almost purely self-service environment—they don’t want to talk to anyone, they just want to select their products and check out quickly. These people might be more apt to use technology such as kiosks or self-checkout systems. “Other customers might want a store associate to help them, especially in a
‘high-touch’ environment such as apparel,” Garf adds. “That store associate needs to be empowered with the same information that’s available to consumers online, such as product information, availability and shipping options.”