[THE CONCEPT] In-store CX of the future
The data we collected, how we designed and which choices we made
To Design the new in-store customer experience is mandatory to understand the starting point of our journey.
Leroy Merlin has an internal system to sort the in-store customers.
The type of questions is the value considered to categorize the customers in 3 segments:
The first segment includes all the simple questions such as “Where is a product?” “How much does it cost?”. These questions are very common and most of the sales assistants interrupt their activity to answer these questions;
The second category considers all the questions that need an active role of the sales person who needs to explore the specific customer needs a bit, to be able to answer the question.
The third segment relates with questions like “How can I renew the bathroom?” “I should change the windows of my house. Could you help me?”. This type of questions needs an active role of the sales assistant who has to use his professional and human skills designing a project for the client.
In our interviews, sales assistants admit they are spending the same effort answering questions of every client, without giving importance on which category they belong to. Moreover, while they are pursuing their goal they are continuously interrupted by other customers .
This internal system could be improved with the introduction of a second dimension to the formula. Indeed, if we analyze the quality of questions related to the time spent by the salesperson, we can notice the nowaday trend: as you can see from the graphic, the green line represents the actual effort of the sales.
This analysis helped us to understand where to focus our attention: the human touch.
In our vision of the future in-store CX, customers who need help for low-value activities are autonomous. In order to reduce the sales time spent for activities where their professional skills are not required.
At the same time, technology gives the sales assistants the chance to focus on high-value activities. These are complex projects where customers need their human help. So does engaging them and creating a relationship based on trust.
It’s clear a customer is visiting Leroy Merlin stores for different types of needs. There are those who need a light bulb and those who want a project to renovate their home. Someone has already got some ideas via the web, someone else is an expert, others go to the store to seek inspiration.
Helping the in-store experience with a previous online experience would be great, in order to enhance customers’ consciousness of what they want.
We can hypothesize a step 0. It would start online, before the customer drove to the physical store. The customer will take confidence with the solutions provided by Leroy Merlin.
An example could be Flooring AR, the app we developed few sprints ago. Flooring AR allows users to test a new floor/siding with the augmented reality.
Visiting stores, especially during the weekends, can be often chaotic, confusing and customers can easily feel lost.
Clients are often frustrated because they are not able to find products.
An example? A man spending 30 minutes getting crazy in an aisle looking for the right electric component.
The challenge to evolve the actual in-store customer experience is making more autonomous the customers who need help for simple and standard answers, in order to let the sales assistant do what really makes their job special: the problem solving attitude, the strategic thoughts, the empathy.
The technology will not replace the sales assistants.
The purpose is to elevate their human touch giving them more relevance: with technology a huge part of the customers can become more autonomous, finding simple and standard answers by themselves, avoiding frustration and time wasting. At the same time, the sales assistants role is elevated since they can humanly engage with the customers.
Talking with the Store manager and his sales assistants, we had evidence that:
61% of salespeople considering selling today harder than it was five years ago
Sales is a stressful occupation. In a survey by online career database PayScale, sales account manager was ranked as the second most stressful job, with 73 percent of respondents rating the role as "highly stressful."
Salespeople are under a lot of pressure to meet quota, convert quickly, and keep approval rankings high.
If this is also the case of your sales agents, it could be helpful to give them the possibility to practice some mindfulness session every morning.
Our partner, Inner proposed something very simple and time saving but it could change the life approach.
Here you can find their gift for you, a 4 minutes mindfulness session to relax your sales agents
The journey to realize our concept wasn’t easy at all. Neither clear.
With all the information we collected from our in-store visit we did a crazy brainstorming session with a heterogeneous team
We were able to summarize the solutions in six macro topic:
Finding
Sorting
Connecting people
Learning
Virtual Try On
Compatibility
Every of these topic could need a dedicated sprint. We focused on just two of them: finding and sorting, that are strongly connected and that represent the beginning of the in-store experience.
Helping the customers to easily find what they are looking for by themselves, means to make their experience in store more autonomous. At the same time, sorting the customers will help sales assistants focus more on customers’ projects.
We found interesting concepts through comparative, analogous and inspirational research. These helped us to understand how the store in the future will be -according with our vision.
Nike was one of our main references since this brand has always been a pioneer of the immersive in-store experiences. When they launched the new Nike Yoga series, with the purpose to bring yoga lovers a better exercise experience, they designed and developed a set of mobile yoga interactive experience. In their flagship store in Shanghai, common yoga postures were proposed in a delimited space where the customers could practice. Kinect lens captured the portrait movement to the projection cloth. The program determines the standard level of the movement, and visually presents it as a human skeleton module.
For the launch of NikeLab’s FA18 Tech Pack in Milan, Nike transformed the store into an immersive retail experience and hub for the city’s sharpest creatives. The result was an hyper-responsive environment based on ethos, seamlessly connecting and tracking the different spaces of the store and the people in it.
An other inspiring approach is Prada’s concept store design in New York. Prada proposed a new customer journey: the experience in the shop goes out of the ordinary, exploiting interior design to create a hybrid, real and virtual space. Two worlds that continue and complement each other until they become a sort of projection of the unconscious, in which it is not clear where the dream ends and reality begins.
We found an interesting reference also in the animal world: the beeline and wandering concept, that is a typical bees’ behavior.
“Wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvelous fact of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with our surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place.” https://www.humansandnature.org/finding-our-way-the-science-of-wayfinding
Starting from these inspirations we designed the new in store CX, with a human centric approach.
Customer’s emotions are important in our vision: we designed our concept starting from the customer journey analysis.
Our goal is to turn his initial frustration caused by confusion and lost feeling into a sense of faith and trust.
We use new tech tools to amplify his curiosity and satisfaction.
Technology enhances the trust he has in his capabilities.
Technology consciously used by the sales assistant -with his technical and empathic skills- augments the customer’s trust in the brand.
In our vision technology is the instrument to elevate the human touch making possible the continuation of the customer’s emotional journey.
TECH DETAILS
We defined technologies that could facilitate the customer experience. Here you can find an analysis we did -with some related demo- in order to demonstrate our concept could be real in 2-3 years.
FINAL CONCEPT
Finally after this long buy mandatory introduction: here you can find our final concept of the in-store CX of the future
