By Dr. Gary Edwards, Chief Customer Officer, Empathica
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Showrooming has consumed a lot of oxygen in the retail space. Desperate to stop consumers from browsing in-store and buying online (often from a competitor), some retailers have even resorted to $5 “just looking” fees and other tactics that have ultimately failed to curtail the practice.
But here’s something that many retailers may not know: while 73% of shoppers have showroomed in the past six months, 88% have engaged in webrooming — an emerging trend that actually benefits brick-and-mortar retailers.
What Is Webrooming?
Like showrooming, webrooming combines online channels and brick-and-mortar retail opportunities. But instead of viewing products in-store and purchasing them online, webrooming consumers research products online before visiting a brick-and-mortar store for final evaluation and purchase.
Both webrooming and showrooming highlight the new retail reality: consumers expect the ability to shop easily across many different channels, and they allow the web and mobile channels to influence their buying decisions — regardless of how (or where) they eventually purchase the product.
Embracing Webrooming
The takeaway for retailers is that shoppers expect the customer experience to be continuous across all channels. To take advantage of the webrooming trend, leading retail brands are launching initiatives that expand consumers’ access to information online, while retaining control over the customer journey by emphasizing brick-and-mortar as the customer’s final destination.
· Adapt Business Models. Consumers drive today’s retail marketplace. This means that retailers need to adapt their business models to the constantly changing needs of consumers — not vice versa. By adjusting the business model to provide better experiences across all available channels, retailers can tap into the benefits of webrooming, and significantly improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and other key experience metrics.
· Deconstruct Organizational Silos. Organizational silos are kryptonite to seamless customer experiences. Rather than viewing units like eCommerce, marketing and in-store operations as separate divisions within the organization, retailers need to recognize that all touch points and interactions should be working toward a common goal—the delivery of a unified customer experience.
· Capture Data Insights. Every channel and touch point produces data that retailers can leverage to understand customer behaviors and to improve customer experiences. More than ever, retailers need to monitor, measure and analyze multi-channel customer feedback to optimize webrooming opportunities and create customer experiences that meet real marketplace needs.
In many ways, webrooming and showrooming are two sides of the same coin. The line between in-store and online is blurring, and going forward, the most successful retailers will be those that enable consistent and seamless customer experiences across an increasingly diverse array of channels and touch points.
Gary Edwards is Chief Customer Officer at Empathica, a leading global provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions to the world’s most respected multi-unit enterprises in retail, food services, banking, petro and hospitality sectors. Edwards is responsible for oversight of sales, marketing, client strategy, account management, marketing science and retail insights. Gary is involved in solving business challenges with research and technology solutions. He has served a key leadership role during program design, implementation, and ongoing development with clients for the past nine years at Empathica. For more than 15 years prior, Edwards led worldwide and domestic research projects in customer and employee research.
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