Webrooming, the next big thing in All-Channel Retailing

Webrooming is the new showrooming, meaning customers will do their research online but ultimately buy products offline or in-store (ROPO). The ability of retailers to identify customers in their offline environment based on their behaviour and information online is crucial in order to close deals and provide a connected customer experience.

Today traditional retailers reportedly suffer from a phenomenon called showrooming. The core issue of showrooming is that retailers lack information about their potential customers and the offers their competitors have currently either on or offline. Or if they have the information, they do not have the ability to properly use it in their offerings on the spot for customers who are visiting their store.
Now a new phenomenon enters the stage: Webrooming. Obviously a reaction from customers who are fed up with some bad experiences of buying a product online, which, once delivered, did not meet the expectations or at least did not fulfil the expectations that were set online.
Webrooming is the behaviour of customers doing analysis or research online (RO) but ultimately buying or purchasing offline (PO); therefore the term used for webrooming as well is ROPO. As with showrooming, one of the required capabilities to deal with webrooming is knowing exactly what information a customer has been looking for online. It is also necessary to be able to attract your customer to come to your store and finally to make him or her an offer they cannot refuse.

Marketing, Clienteling and Mobile
Capabilities that are crucial in this respect are relevant direct marketing to this customer, having agood insight into customer information in the store and “controlling" the mobile space in your store.

First of all, as mentioned earlier, it’s key to attract customers who are researching online but do not seem to have the intention to buy online to visit your store locally to buy the product. It’s important to have individual and personalised targeted offers that will attract customers to come to your store with the intention to buy. To accomplish this, it is necessary to have a marketing capability that is able to give either real-time feedback to the customer or in a later stage is able to refer again to the customer to trigger him to come to the store.
Once the customer is in the store the staff in the store should be able to easily identify the customer and pull up all relevant information. This includes information like browsing history, wish list, buying history and,probably even most important, possible non-refusable offers! These capabilities are often referred to as clienteling applications and can run either on desktop systems available at the point of sale or on a tablet, so staff can easily walk around and interact with customers.
Customers are of course easily distracted, so it is good to pay attention to the mobile devices they might have with them once they enter your store or mall. Maybe with a technique like geo-fencing, maybe by pushing offers or information directly to customers through existing mobile apps or NFC. The main point is to always keep your customer’s attention on the offers you provide him.

So you can see that if you really want to address showrooming as well as webrooming, which are actually quite similar phenomenons, there are ways to address it. The solutions however must be interconnected and should be part of an overall Digital strategy and not one-off initiatives.

As webrooming is here to stay, you, as a true all-channel retailer, should make sure to have a solution in place that can help you address it. 

With NRF’s Retail Big Show 2014 coming up a couple of blogs will be posted around the event. Next in the series will be Fulfilling the Dream.

Originally posted on Capping IT Off

Profile As A Currency

If the product is free, then you are the product. And the more data you provide, the easier it is to market you. The 'freemium’ model is now supported by consumers providing their profile data. This data can then be used by organizations to target their consumers better or simply by selling it to other organizations. This raises the question about whom consumers trust when sharing their profile data and what is acceptable to them in terms of how that data is being used. To organizations, it is a matter of understanding whether to hold profile data themselves or get it from the best external source.

The title of this blog might fool you a bit, as it seems to be just another one in the ‘as a Service’ category. Rest assured, it’s not. It is about you as a user and consumer of social media services and how much money you are really worth.

In the last couple of years, the amount of information people share through social media has increased dramatically. And not only the amount of data, but in a lot of cases also the ‘quality’ of the data. Admittedly, there are still people who think the outside world is interested in what is going on inside their homes and what they are feeding the dog, but in general people share information about what they really care about.

The same goes for the information that people put in their online profile, accounts and avatar: It’s more accurate and usable to determine the true ‘values’ of people - valuable data once you can dig in to it and really make sense of relationships between different elements.

Of course, the best and by far the most widely applied approach is to search and scan social media for input about the organization’s products or services and being able to react to that; let’s call this proactive customer service.

What I want to describe, however, is a step beyond this: actually making money  with your personal profile and with what you share, either as an organization or as an individual.

Let’s take a LinkedIn profile. There are several ways to benefit from a LinkedIn profile:

1. For an individual, a good profile – one that really sets you apart from the others - will help you find a great new job, maybe even without doing anything for it. Recruiters might automatically be attracted to your profile and ask you to apply for a job instead of the other way around.

2. For an organization, if its employees have set up compelling, convincing external profiles - which show how skilled they are and how passionate they are about working for the company - they may create new business as the entire company is perceived as more knowledgeable, more experienced, more energetic. Furthermore, professionals in the market who are considering changing jobs may see these profiles and will become better informed about the company and the people who work for it.

The product is you!

So profiles are valuable. Some companies rely solely on this fact. Did you ever wonder what Facebook is selling, what the products or services are it offers? Many will argue it’s the platform, but it’s actually something else. Facebook’s product is you. What you put in your profile, what you share with your friends, your friend’s friends and with the world, is what Facebook has to offer. And in the slipstream of that, it makes money with placed ads. But solely the fact that you share your life is what makes advertisers pay money for Facebook.

Think about how McDonald's or Starbucks build local social communities around a particular store, city or region. They target individuals in these communities with specific, even local offers, based on what they share in the community. And what about special offers you get in your local supermarket based on, for instance, the fact that you tweet about a BBQ you are putting up for your friends or that kids' party that you announce on Facebook?

It’s a currency

Yes, profile is definitely a currency. Consumers are learning how to benefit from their social media profiles. And they’re learning fast, as they come to appreciate the real value that is contained in them. For organizations, vast opportunities exist in harvesting and analyzing profile data from their customers and their communities. But it’s all a matter of supply and demand, mutual trust and understanding about who sells to whom.

When a currency becomes scarce, the stakes become high. So better place your bets, the ball is already rolling!

Originally posted on the Capgemini CTO-blog