When clicks almost meet bricks
Retailers are obsessed with building an overarching view of the customer, and they're scrambling to find ways to integrate behaviour on the retailer's website with behaviour in their physical stores, and even behaviour around their brand out on the open Web.
The vision is - broadly - sound, and the benefits for both retailer and prospective customer are large. But integrating real-world processes on the ground can be tricky. Some of those difficulties are behind the scenes headaches for the retailer, whilst others directly impinge upon the customer experience.
One of those challenges is in dealing with delivery and return of goods. It can be difficult to integrate delivery with stock management systems designed to send large numbers of identical items to large numbers of (almost) identical stores, but it can - demonstrably - be done. Many retailers now offer free delivery to local stores for items ordered online. Returns appear to create a whole additional level of complexity and expense, with which retailers struggle to cope.
We can collect orders placed online at our local branch of Marks & Spencer, for example. But we can't return anything there. Instead, we have to visit a larger store... or the Post Office. Not the end of the world, but a jarring disconnect in an otherwise customer-centric process.
And today, another oddity. I collected some clothes (not for me!) from New Look last week. Some were kept, some were to go back. One item was to be kept but it was faulty, so a replacement was needed. I took the faulty item and the returns back to the store this morning. They happily accepted - and refunded - the returns... but wanted to charge for the replacement item to be delivered, "because the order would be less than £20." The mind boggles. The manager in the store agreed (or said she did, anyway) that this was crazy... but claimed to be powerless in the face of a computerised stock control system with no understanding of 'replacing' items from an online order. If the item had been bought in the shop (rather than delivered to it for collection), it would have been replaced immediately. The disconnect is jarring, bizarre, and (surely?) verging on the illegal?
Brands want one view of the customer. But customers also want one view of - and one experience with - the brand. In the disconnects that infuse the online/offline delivery experience, we're not getting it.
