How would you improve the experience of a customer visiting your physical retail store?

Clarifying questions

1. What kind of physical store are we talking about? Grocery store? Apparels store? Computer store? Big box stores (Best Buy, etc) ….
   1. Make assumptions or Let’s say Grocery store in US
2. Store is part of the chain, if so do we improve customer experience across all stores that are part of the chain?
   1. It doesn’t matter. Let’s focus on one physical (grocery) store
3. Any Government regulations to be considered?
   1. Make assumptions as necessary
4. Any specifics about the staff running the store (who also help visiting customers)?
   1. Make assumptions as necessary
5. Is it a self service store? Or limited service store? Nope
6. As we are focussing on the visiting customers, let’s also include pickup services such as Instacart or Shipt. In case of these pickup services the shopper (on the pickup service side) is a proxy to the actual customer.

Assumptions

Grocery stores are ubiquitous and serves wide variety of customers

Current locations of the store is not factored into considerations - scenarios such as - “up on the hill so difficult to reach”, “not location at the better part of the town”, etc.

A typical size of a Grocery stores are assumed - 10+aisles; 

The store sells - Dairy, poultry, vegetables, etc. For this exercise, let’s skip cigarets and liquor. 

Accepts CC, Cash, Check, etc for payment

Having a web presence and empowers customers with online shopping.

Mostly local customers and some out of town customers - 80% local & 20% out of town

The grocery needs are recurring.

Visiting customers include physically challenged individuals (eyes, ears, limbs having limited functionality;  having speech and language issues).

Average grocery shopping time = 45mins (in the shop: shopping + checkout), In addition to that to-and-fro driving time to the store.

Store visits include stepping into the store and store pickups.

Store has an app and customers use smart phones

Customers’ pain points

Preparing the grocery list.

Driving and Parking.

Shopping carts dirty and not useful for physically challenged.

Items on the list are difficult to discover for first time visitor.

Unable to trust whether the groceries are kept/stored at the right temperature.

Customers do not know the promotions available. Promotional campaigns are not reaching to customers.

Labels of grocery items are not legible

Customers are not educated on return policies related to grocery items.

If a few items on the shopping list is not available, there are no suggestions when it comes to substitutes or alternate shopping options

Bagging or packaging grocery items are not satisfactory - leading to broken packages, spill over

Cleanliness and hiegene

Brainstorming and prioritization

Try to improve overall shopping experience.

Segments of visitors the store

• Head of house holds (Ages 25 to 65) = 60% (Customers? Yes)
• Elderly  (65+) = 20% (Customers? Yes, requiring additional help)
• Teens and Young Adults = 10% (Customers? Yes)
• Kids of all ages = 10% (Customers? No; But they accompany adults) 

Let’s prioritize a few pain points to improve.

1. Items discoverability
   1. Why? To reduce time spent searching the items.
2. List items available/not-available and substitute/alternative suggestions
   1. Why? To avoid shopping cycles. Optimize shopping time.
3. Accessibility to physically challenged customer (who are visiting the physical store)
   1. Help
4. Quick check out experience

Solution

The Metrics

Number of Paying customer/shopper visits / day /week /month

Average order value per customer (or Average revenue per customer)

Average number of items per shopper

Min/Max customer spent

Average time spent in the shop

Clarifying Questions:

Where is this targeted?  particular region or worldwide? worldwide

We are targeting any particular retail store or general? General

Is there any particular reason customer visit to another retail store? Depend upon you

Do we have any limitations/constraints in terms of Monetary limit or technology? No  

Goal: improve user experience

User groups:

Young professionals: new working professionals keeping updated with latest trends and want to spend minimal time.

Family people: who purchase items for his family and see quality in the product  

Small Business owners:  who purchase order on their customer’s demand and looking for cheapest price

I would like to choose young professionals as target group as they adapt to new technologies quickly and experiment with latest trends

Pain points:

1.      They want to complete their shopping at retail store as fast as possible. It includes finding the product as well as payment.

2.      They are newer in terms of shopping and product’s knowledge.

3.      They want to try new design/latest trend items once in a while.

Here I will focus on 1st pain point for young professionals because efficiently solving this will create a new experience and will influence a lot.

Brainstorming Solution:

1.      A device like kiosk can be installed that uses AI/Machine learning to show best/random combination of latest trend/brand product along with the chosen products. The device will have QR code reader which upon reading the product’s QR code gives information about the product and its price.

2.      The product category can be integrated with IOT technology that can be read by the retail store’s app installed in the customer’s phone. Weight sensor detect when items are taken, the product gets added to bill and the user can pay for the bill through phone/credit card payment itself.

3.      Retail store can provide an app in which chat bots can guide in shopping and beacon technology would detect the customer after entering the store and send personalize message through proactive chat which will give information about product’s location within store map guiding customer to the exact spot.

Prioritizing solutions

From the above analysis, I would prioritize solution 1(kiosk) because it can increase product purchasing interest. Solution 2 (IOT) might cause bad customer experience due to wrong billing.   

Metrics

·         No. of customer visited online store per week

·         No. of customer visited physical store per week

·         No. of customer uses kiosk per week

·         No. of time QR code reader used per week

·         Maximum click on product per week

Trade-off:

Customer can avoid Kiosk due to queue and privacy invasion.

Summary:

·         The objective was to improve customer experience of physical retail store.

·         On choosing the young professionals as the target customers, their pain point was analysed and the chosen point was to finding the product in physical store from exploring online store with minimum possible shopping time.

·         I identified three solutions and came up with a solution like device kiosk that could list out best/random collection of latest trend/brand items with searched product thus improving the user experience.

·         I will measure the customer experience success by looking at following metrics:

1.       No. of customer visited online store per week

2.      No. of customer visited physical store per week

3.      No. of customer uses kiosk per week

4.      No. of time QR code reader used per week

5.     Maximum click on product per week