I recently visited an upscale store in NYC early mid-morning as I began a shopping trip that would take me to a number of different stores. I chose this store because it was located in a prime retail center with a strong reputation and just the kind of specialty merchandise I was looking for.

What I found when I entered the store was attractive and well-designed displays, but when it came to service personnel, they were MIA, unemotional, unengaged sales staff that were literally imposters of normal people when it came to sales. They were “pod people” salespeople reminiscent of the 1956 cult classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” No emotion, no connection, just filling space on the floor.

There was no excuse. The store wasn’t busy. I was about the only shopper there, but the sales staffer behind the desk only gave me a shout out upon arriving, too busy with her important work at the computer to bother with me.

As I strolled deeper into the store, I passed a few other employees, only one of whom acknowledged me but then couldn’t be bothered. In the back I found another salesperson, also deeply involved with her computer. I asked a question, she answered from behind her screen. I basically had to drag her away from her desk to take me to onto the floor to show me something. Then she ended our discussion with a recommendation that I could go to the company website to learn more about that item and others like it. Back she went to her more important work.

The sales staff were effectively using their computer screens as protective shields, rather than seeing a live customer on the sales floor as the tremendous opportunity to make a sale.

I was thoroughly disgusted and went off to the next store on my list only to find the same thing – Another store filled with pod people staffers that needed to be brought back from the living dead. It was inexcusable, but all to prevalent in retail today.

One Strike, You’re Out!

My recent shopping experience was reinforced by a new study from Medallia Institute conducted by Ipsos, surveying some 8,000 consumers, 2,000 each in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, about the customer experience in various service industries — including retail. The survey found that nearly two-thirds of consumers (64 percent) claim to avoid a brand because of a bad experience they had within the last year.

Given my experience, you can bet I will never have gone back to those stores again. These retailers, and too many others out there are made vulnerable by understaffed stores, both those with obvious staff vacancies as well as those with non-present staffers, who are even more frustrating to customers.

The study cites, “Today’s customers have more choices, and more power over brands they interact with, than ever before,” the report states. “It is no longer enough to simply provide a high-quality product or a competitive price. Instead, in the ‘Age of The Customer,’ brands are built – or broken – on customer experience.”

The problem of having too few or not the right retail staffers can have devastating consequences for retail businesses, Rachel Lane, Medallia digital solution principal stresses, “The high employee turnover that plagues the retail industry is particularly threatening to a brand because frontline employees have direct access to the end consumer.

“When stores aren’t staffed properly, customers may not have the experience they expect when entering a store. They may be unable to find their size, unable to flag down a salesperson to ask about ordering a different color, or be deterred by long lines at checkout. Any one of these experiences might result in a customer deciding not to make a purchase, or worse – to write off the brand altogether,” Lane continues.

The Medallia/Ipsos report is called “The Customer Experience Tipping Point,” and I couldn’t agree more with the idea that retail is at a tipping point. While retailers argue amongst themselves about the “retail apocalypse” narrative, they face another apocalypse caused not by too few customers, but too few qualified, trained and motivated retail employees to deliver the personalized customer service on which their future depends.

Lane adds, “We can buy almost anything online these days, so when a customer chooses to shop in-store, it’s typically because they’re looking for something they can only get in person — an interaction with the product and a helpful employee.”

Fumbling in the last 100 Yards of Retail

For too many years, retailers have focused on getting the right product and the right price into the right locations to meet customers’ needs when they show up at the store. But those supply-chain operational efficiencies aren’t going to get retailers to the next level, says Rogelio Oliva, professor in the department of information and operations management at the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. They must deliver a superior customer experience to complete the journey.

“Retailing is the critical last 100 yards of the supply chain. Completing those last 100 yards takes a combination of logistics and service,” Oliva explains. “To be a successful retailer not only do you have to have the stuff at the right price and right time, you need to manage the whole customer experience. The employees are going to be the ones delivering that experience. Of course, everything can go wrong in the last 100 yards.”

Delivering a customer experience in those last 100 yards is more critical for specialized categories in retail, like fashion, home furnishings, department stores and luxury, than for other retailers like fast food or grocery where a new employee can master 90 percent of their job in a week of hands-on training. In the latter case, keeping the shelves stocked, helping the customer find what he or she wants and getting them in and out of the store smoothly is the expected utilitarian customer experience.

For more specialized areas of retail, like fashion or other high-end categories, a well-trained and motivated employee is worth their weight in gold. They provide the level of personalized service that is critical to creating customer loyalty. “The way to achieve customer loyalty is to provide excellent service. The way to provide excellent service is to have a loyal employee,” Oliva stresses. “The loyal employee knows the customer and develops the relationship with the customer. The focus for retailers is to develop and invest in your employees. If your differentiating position is service, as it must be in so many areas of retail, then service is going to be provided by that personal touch.”

Retail Staff Vacancies Reaching Critical Proportions

It is not just training retail staff that is a problem for retailers. With record low unemployment, it is getting harder to find the right people to fill open slots. Today retail is the labor market ghetto, where its denizens are often low-paid, overworked, undervalued.

The lack of retail employees is reaching critical proportions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, JOLT for short, reports that through the first five months of 2018, retail job openings averaged 704,000 open positions, which is 25 percent more than the 561,000 jobs available in the same time period in 2017. Further the pace of retail job vacancies picked up during the remaining seven months of 2017.

More Americans who had been forced to slog away in retail’s confines are now taking the opportunity to break out and find a more financially and personally rewarding job. Those retail workers fleeing in search of greener pastures are leaving their retail employers in the lurch.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Observing that retailers have long been under staffing their stores to save money, Oliva argues that they are actually losing sales and profits by not providing the kind of customer service that will build customer loyalty. “The value of the employee is much higher than minimum wage. If you are going to keep well qualified service staff, it is going to come down to developing them and giving them a career path,” Oliva says. “Without providing a long-term career path, retailers are at risk of losing them to the store next door that offers 50 cents more an hour.”

While technology can fill some of the gaps traditionally provided by sales staff, it cannot provide the personalized human touch on which in-store retail’s future depends. “My research on retail and service operations proves how important the human component is on those sales floor. A retailer might be doing right for the customers, but they might not be doing right for the employee. But they need to do both. Happy employees make happy customers and retailers make money on the process,” Oliva concludes.

This year is shaping up to be the year of the shopper experience, and that experience is, in large part, being driven by what is happening in stores. Retailers have realized omnichannel is about more than inventory efficiency and availability (although the importance of sound inventory strategies cannot be minimized), and the shopper experience is key to growth strategy.

Discover, Destination, Distribution and Disruption

The role of retail stores is changing, and there is no one-size-fits-all model. Retailers look at their stores as places of discovery, destination or points of distribution, and more and more, we see new retail concepts created as disruptors. Within each of these models there lie endless opportunities to differentiate and to create a real connection with shoppers that guides their experiences. One key to success, irrespective of your format, is your ability to connect with your shoppers to ensure you are fulfilling their varying needs as they engage with your concept or brand.

In creating this engagement, one area of opportunity that has not been fully optimized by most retailers is how shoppers in the store are engaged in a similar manner to those online. Of course, it is infinitely easier to engage with shoppers digitally and thus a lot of the innovation around shopper engagement has gone after the low-hanging fruit available online. It’s pretty easy as a marketer to deploy a product that helps you get more clicks on Facebook or digitally retarget a customer in a way that drives engagement and, hopefully, sales. But with all of this innovation, the ability to connect that digital journey to the physical experience has remained elusive. Thankfully, retailers, technologists, and even shoppers are understanding the importance of connections, and the model is changing.

Systems Solutions

We’ve seen more retailers break down silos internally and combine digital and physical store functions. Inventory, operations and yes, even marketing, are starting to meld into teams focused on the shopper experience. Part of that, of course, is making sure that coveted Size 6 sweater is available in the store where the interested customer is shopping. Companies like Celect, a Boston-based predictive analytics company, are taking online shopper behavior and driving assortment in-store with tremendous results. Similarly, San Francisco-based Brickwork is taking friction out of the shopping journey with its ability to drive online customers into stores through a platform that allows a digital to physical store locator, and local-activation solutions around store services, appointments, events, and promotions. These types of companies are fantastic, but the question remains: How do I know a) who is in my store, b) what their preferences are, and c) what offers or promotions will convert browsers to buyers?

Over the past few years, many technologies have come to market with the promise of giving retailers tools to drive personal messaging and engagement in-store. Guest wi-fi helps you know who is in your store and how they are engaging both digitally and physically but gives you limited ability to communicate personally to those consumers. While it’s helpful for retailers, there’s little reward for the shopper (apart from the data plan). Similarly, beacons came to market as a tool to push specific messages about products or offers within stores. As a retailer, how do you make it personal, and how do you manage the replacement of all of those beacon batteries?

In mobile apps, the investment has been staggering—but if you aren’t Starbucks, you are probably questioning the return on investment. Add to this the consumer engagement with Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and you are probably also struggling to aggregate and best use the data to drive a unified communication strategy.

So where do you go from here? You want to communicate personal messages, but are burnt out on trials and pilots, and you’ve probably destroyed any goodwill you had with IT with all of those dead end pilots.

What if you could find a concept that helps you amplify what is working for you digitally and continues that experience in-store with offers and promotions tailored to the shopper based on their preferences and behaviors, all with little or no IT involvement? Sound too good to be true? It doesn’t have to be. The technology exists to leverage all of that rich data in-store. The blindfolds are off!

A Personalized, Data Driven Approach to In-Store Marketing

The ability to drive shopper experiences with personalized recommendations is the holy grail of retail marketing. Imagine if you could take everything you know about a shopper (demographics, previous purchase patterns, category preferences, etc.) and marry that information with what is happening in-store (new products, promotions, merchandising, etc.) to trigger content delivery to specific shoppers based on this information when they visit the store. Pretty cool, huh? Take that one step further and imagine being able to integrate real-time location information like weather, inventory availability, etc., into the same algorithms. Beyond cool!

To stand out in today’s crowded landscape, your messaging must be personalized, relevant and it must look and feel like your company.

Through the use of machine-learning algorithms, RetailNext’s Mobil Engage platform delivers personalized offers in an app-like experience, based on everything the retailer knows about its shoppers, all in the context of what is happening in-store and all in real time.

So What Does This Accomplish? Four Things:

1. Personalized experience for the shopper. How many times have you walked out of a store with a handful of coupons that you a) received at the end of your shopping experience and b) have zero relevance to you personally? It happens to me all of the time and it drives me crazy. I realize the retailer is trying to drive me back into the store, but really, I would probably spend more time in the store—and spend more money—if those offers reached me at the start of my journey. I am not the shopper that is going to keep those coupons and return with them a few days later, but I am a shopper that can be influenced on the spot.
2. ROI, ROI, ROI. It’s what we are all looking for, right? Retailers who use machine learning to personalize offers to their consumers realize up to 400 percent higher engagement and over 1,100 percent increase in redemption rates when compared to hard coded landing pages.
3. Drive local performance without compromising enterprise margin. Imagine that you have a subset of stores that are particularly challenged to meet monthly targets. Maybe it’s a new assortment that doesn’t resonate with the local customer, unseasonable heat or cold weather patterns, or something else. Wouldn’t you love to drive a local promotion without the need to activate it across the entire enterprise? And, wouldn’t it be better if you could turn the promo off when its targets were achieved? stores that are particularly challenged to meet monthly targets. Maybe it’s a new assortment that doesn’t resonate with the local customer, unseasonable heat or cold weather patterns, or something else. Wouldn’t you love to drive a local promotion without the need to activate it across the entire enterprise? And, wouldn’t it be better if you could turn the promo off when its targets were achieved?
4. Agility. In today’s crowded market the ability to react quickly is a critical ingredient for success. With the Mobile Engage platform, retailers provide an on-brand, app-like experience without heavy IT involvement, or the need to investment in building out an app.

Where Is This Headed?

Today’s shopper journey is immersed within the digital ecosystem, even when shoppers are in-mall or in-store. In a manner of speaking, mobile has become the new front door of the store. Shoppers are increasingly beginning their missions online, on their phones. An effective mobile engagement strategy is the glue that holds retail’s digital and physical channels together. Engagement with your brand is literally in the hands of today’s shoppers.

As such, the importance of mobile continues to rise in importance for retailers. As the wealth of available data sources soar, the need for integration and application will continue to be critical priorities. Mobile engagement with shoppers is essential for extending customized, personalized shopping experiences. While mobile messaging has been around for years, what’s been missing from promotions and offers is relevance. There is no question that marketers will need to find ways to integrate those digital and physical touchpoints in a way that feels value-added, personal and authentic, while respecting the boundaries of shoppers, one by one.