By Mark Kersteen - August 20th, 2014
Customer experience is critical for marketers, no matter where they're located. Learn all about it from professionals in London and in New York at Incite Summit: Europe and Incite Summit: East.
I’m an American, but I lived in Britain for four years. Coming back to the States, I realized there were all sorts of tiny differences when I went shopping. Prices, store layouts, how staff behave; these are the sorts of things you notice without noticing. There’s more to customer experience that is imperceptible than perceptible. All these details add up to something that, while we might not even be fully aware of it, has a massive influence over our purchasing behavior.
In the small town in which I lived overseas, there were two mid-sized grocery stores in the town center. They were placed right across the street from one another. You could stand at the back of one store’s aisle and see the freezer section of the other’s. After a year, there was only one grocery store downtown. There was only room for one, and it won out for one reason: customer experience.
I’ve been researching marketing trends in Europe, and I’ve read about some changes in the approach to delivering customer experience throughout the UK. They reminded me of the differences I noticed between the UK and the US, and I believe these changes themselves can teach marketers on both sides of the pond about the nuances of their retail markets, and their customers’ experiences.
First I’ll outline the trends I’ve seen surfacing in the UK, then I’ll explain why I think they’re arising, how they’re unique, and what they tell us about customer experience at large.
More Ways to Buy, More Ways to Pay
The way customers can pay for products, in-store or otherwise, is going to change retail everywhere at a fundamental level. In a piece entitled “From Omni Channel to Omni Payments” Jasper Bell makes the point that,
“Already in 2014, we have seen Waitrose and Tesco introduce ‘proximity’ messaging to customer smart phones to support click-and-collect customers arriving in store and deliver aisle-based messages to shoppers comparing goods. Payment is a natural extension to all these activities, perhaps the ultimate convenience if we do not even need to retrieve our plastic cards.”
The first half of Bell’s comment might be surprising to American shoppers. Perhaps I’m not going to the right places, but I’ve never received any proximity-based messages from a supermarket, nor have I heard of anyone regularly using “click and collect”. Kieran McBride, in a piece called “Click and Collect: Basic Hygiene for Multichannel”, notes,
“Click & collect has fast become a matter of basic hygiene for retailers. It makes sense. The stats support it, some in the sector are seeing up to 40% increase in uptake since January 2014. It’s a great service of convenience for the consumer.”
That’s a far faster growth than I’ve seen or heard about in the States. However, their appraisals match my experience of shopping in the UK. The retail experience was far more comprehensive and streamlined than any I’ve had in the US.
This is purely based on my personal observations, but here’s what I noticed:
In-store technology is ahead. For example, self-checkout machines actually worked, and were widely used by customers. Rather than the finicky versions in the US that feel like they take double the time to check out on compared to a store associate, the UK experience was faster, the user-interfaces better, and the machines more reliable.
Home-delivery is always an option. Now there are plenty of options to have groceries delivered to you in the US, either by your local store, or through a service like Fresh Direct. However, before every large shopping trip, I always heard discussions over whether it would be easier to just order online, whether it would be more convenient to have bags brought to ones door instead of having the luxury to browse shelves, etc.
Shopping online was just on people’s minds. Paul Galpin, in his piece “Are You Delivering”, writes:
“The mass uptake of e-commerce in the UK is down to the efficiency online shopping can potentially offer.”
It seemed like the adoption rates were just much higher than the US, and home delivery was something shoppers from every walk of life were considering, not just families or people who live prohibitively far from a store. Part of this is down to efficiency, but there are other factors I’ll be elaborating on below.
Changing Markets, Changing Experiences
Now, these changes aren’t out of line with the developments we’re seeing in every region all over the world. For example, Bell drops this statistic:
“WorldPay estimate that by 2017, alternative payments will account for 59% of all online transactions globally and this will change the landscape of how we shop, pay and manage our money.”
Clearly we’re all moving towards widespread ecommerce and mobile payment.
Zbynek Loebl’s observation in “Customer Loyalty is Changing” that,
“The days of consumers solely going into a shop to buy products is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and ecommerce is becoming the new way consumers interact with retailers. Since the mobility explosion of the past few years, brick and mortar stores are a lot less influential than their online counterparts. Another impact of ecommerce has been the change in consumers’ habits – whether that’s the way they consume, the way they purchase or the way they engage with retailers.”
Is applicable anywhere. However, I believe these developments are more pronounced and urgent in the UK market (all of the articles cited above are from Great Britain and were written within the last two weeks) for a number of tiny, fundamental, cultural reasons.
For example, “the High Street” still exists in small-to-midsize cities and towns across the UK. There is a street where people across the country can walk or take public transport to and simply go from individual store to individual store and get everything they need. Groceries, clothing, books, electronics and more, as opposed to the US, where many might have to drive to a Walmart or Costco to have their needs met end-to-end. This small difference in the way cities and people are organized has huge effects.
It means many UK shoppers are accustomed to shopping more frequently—taking smaller trips to grab a few things from different places—rather than doing one massive shop and hitting every possible store, then walking back or taking the bus with dozens of bags.
Customer experience is being disrupted on a greater scale in Britain by the same changes that are occurring everywhere. I believe this is because shoppers in Great Britain have more frequent retail experiences in general, and were previously more reliant on shopping in multiple stores in person. Kieran McBride recently published an entire article illustrating this phenomenon from the perspective of a holiday consumer picking out Christmas gifts downtown. It demonstrates how fundamentally ecommerce, in-store pickup, and online price comparisons have changed shopping habits, but in the context of a particularly English retail market. They represent a greater fundamental shift in customer behavior compared to someone in the US, who is likely more accustomed to shopping in bulk once a week, or avoiding stores entirely during the holidays. This is partially why UK stores have better technology and work harder to stay ahead of these developments. They need to stand out from their many close-by competitors. They need to woo buyers who are either looking to shop more online, or are more accustomed to an in-store experience.They need be sure their customers will return to their brand, both in-store and online, or they’ll end up at the shop across the street.
This example is important for any marketer, wherever they’re located. Customer experience is crucial, but it’s heavily dependent on the market and the customers themselves. Everywhere has it’s own definition of a good experience, and it’s up to marketers to figure that out before they even start thinking about crafting their own.
No matter which side of the pond you're on, we've got you covered. Learn more about customer experience at Incite Summit: Europe and Incite Summit: East.