Step into my time machine, won’t you? I’m setting the dial for November 5, 1955…October 26, 1985…Ah, here we go: April 3, 1995: Amazon.com sold its first book, and the retail experience was about to be transformed forever. Now, truth be told, while the novelty and convenience of ordering online was immediately apparent, the original customer experience on Amazon was pretty rough around the edges. I doubt the booksellers at Barnes & Noble or Borders gave it much notice. Hindsight’s 20/20, but we know how that turned out.
So, no question that e-commerce changed the game. But neither has it been the extinction event for brick-and-mortar retailers that some predicted during the dot-com era. Consider premium shopping neighborhoods, where luxury stores retain undisputed brand status. The cachet of an Hermès Birkin bag is explained by the experience of securing one as much as by its tangible qualities. And on the other end of the price spectrum, stores like Uniqlo are succeeding by combining value with highly appealing design and in-store experience.
Who’s been left out? A lot of mid-market chains that didn’t develop a distinctive customer experience, but instead grew by dint of being the default choice at shopping malls. But guess what? When it comes to convenience and cost structure, it’s impossible to beat online, and without a compelling customer experience, a number of undistinguishable brands very quickly became also-rans.
The unique ritual of finding a Birkin notwithstanding, another aspect of thriving sellers is that they embrace commerce on their customers' terms. The notion that retailers need to integrate their various online and offline channels is hardly new, but consumers are changing their expectations far faster than many retail businesses realize. For all the industry talk of omni-channel, customers care less about the means—the channel—and more about the end—the experience.
That’s not to say the ability to market and to conduct commerce across channels isn’t critical. Of course it is. But cross-channel coordination is just part of delivering the experience customers expect and reward with their shopping behavior. As Deloitte noted, “winning online is not just about getting e-commerce right. It’s about building a cohesive, consistent, and compelling experience across all touch points in the customer journey, both online and offline.”
I’m going to repeat that last part: the customer experience crosses all the touch points in the customer journey, not just the moments explicitly devoted to shopping. Throughout, there are short-lived opportunities for a business to engage with a customer in just the right place, at just the right time. Maybe it’s in a store, perhaps it’s online, or maybe it’s somewhere well outside the expected retail context.
Those “perishable moments” are fleeting, but they can be a powerful driver of great customer experiences. They’re a chance for a business to deliver a message that’s a nearly pure expression of the classic four Ps of marketing.
The medium of those messages—email, texts, in-app notifications, or some other mechanism—will vary, though implementation details do matter, so that the message that’s sent is optimized for the user’s context. Effective marketing has got to reflect a deep empathy for the customer’s experience, driven by authentic understanding, true one-to-one personalization, and real-time feedback and analytics.
And that’s where we as an industry still have significant room for innovation (and a lot of work to do). But if we get it right, we can enable an entirely new level of responsiveness to customer engagement and empower businesses to deliver truly great customer experiences.
(I originally published this post on LinkedIn.)
