Walking into Michael’s today, I was quickly overwhelmed at the selection and overall order of the store. I went in looking for one specific thing, in this case, a whiteboard and wanted to narrow my search to its store location as soon as possible. After walking up to the 3rd floor, I gave up looking and asked an employee who promptly told me to head back to the first floor. Ugh.
As helpful as the employee was, it would have been an even better in-store experience if I could have quickly “searched” for whiteboard on a tablet or similar device, with that device then letting me know exactly where to go. As younger consumers increase their purchasing power in the economy, more of the way brick and mortars operate will have to work with technology as opposed to against it.
When I walked into that store, my mind was essentially trying to compute the way it would when I search in Google. I was basically typing in “big whiteboard” in my brain and looking for the store around me to provide me with the results of that search. Unfortunately, the results took five minutes and 3 stories to load.
This would give you incredible data about what users are looking for when they come to your store and how successful the store was at closing that sale. You would be able to make inferences about the search queries and purchases that occurred matching the two and understanding what your conversion rate on that item was. If you realized that you have a low conversion rate with a particular item, maybe you want to discount it more. Or maybe you want to have more human staff near those items to further educate the customer on why it could be a good fit for them. You could also pair in-store tracking with searches to better identify where customers were moving following their search or even attempt to create customer profiles that could be used by marketing for future campaigns.
There are also opportunities to bring in up-sells. On that screen, there could be items (maybe even available for sale) that match up well with my search. For example, since I was searching whiteboards, whiteboard markers would be a great item to showcase on that display. Or an eraser. With time and the organization’s internal data, you would also be able to correlate other purchases that occurred when someone bought a whiteboard.
Lastly, as mentioned above, I think this would lead to
There are still opportunities to involve humans in this as I don’t see the device being able to provide immediate expertise with the way someone may be able to in person (although educational product videos or augmented reality could be the next step here). I just think we have to re-think the role of the human in this equation and better utilize them for what they are good at, which I think is solving creative problems and emotionally connecting with other humans.
Software startups like Tulip have already been hard at work developing this technology to pair with retail stores and brick and mortars, and I think it will only be a matter of time until we see a whole lot more of it.