Digital heads at Topps Tiles and Dixons Carphone discuss their cautious, considered approach to in-store technology and how to bridge online and offline.
For a panel entitled “Future Store – Virtual Changing Rooms, Beacons, Augmented Reality… what’s next?”, the tech chat was disappointingly conservative and for understandable reasons: rolling out exciting new technology into nationwide stores sounds like a pain in the bum.
Indeed, many stores don’t even have adequate Internet access, a problem highlighted by the two panelists, each from well-established UK retailers.
Phil D’Souza, Head of Merchandising at Topps Tiles, and Kash Ghedia, Head of Technology, Dixons Carphone told the Internet Retailing Expo audience about their measured experimentation with in-store tech and some of the challenges they’ve faced.
D’Souza described Topps Tiles as a “mature, specialist, traditional business”, aged over 60 years-old. The business’s customers purchase cycle is 7 years-long.
He feels that “integrating tech into the store environment is the key to keeping customers engaged. Knowledge of what we do can be quite limited.
“Technology, for us, is about creating good connectivity, seamlessly, from wherever the customer starts that journey. This can be challenging.”
Dixons Carphone (the result of a 2014 merger) has similarly been grappling with the question “how can we create a seamless experience between online and in-store?”, says Ghedia. A seller of electronic gadgets, its customers start shopping trips online before coming into a store for a tangible experience—playing with the products, speaking to experts.
Digitally-enabled drama
Ghedia is all about bringing “a little bit of theatre in-store, to help consumers get excited about products.”
“Most retailers have massive LCD screens, screaming content. That’s one way to go about it but for us, it goes deeper than that.” Dixons Carphone spent time researching how it can best educate customers about the products on sale and also how to distil that selection.
For their 4K digital imaging walls for instance, they decided to narrow down the range of products to, in the case of cameras, six models, allowing punters to take pictures and change the lenses. “It brings it to life for them.”
What you see is what you get
Topps Tiles’ D’Souza commented: “Visualisation is a key way of moving the customer experience forward.” He enthused about the firm’s visualiser on its website, allowing customers to play with how their room might look. “It gives them confidence about what they’re doing.”
This was a massive benefit and the company decided to bring the visualiser capability into stores. “We sell relatively technical products. This enables them to come in, understand what they’re after, see what the products look like in different environments.”
It also gives staff an opportunity to upsell, making sure the customer hasn’t missed any opportunities and show them what other customers are up to.
Testing, testing, 1…2…3…
D’Souza’s team is considered in the way it develops things for the in-store environment, constantly testing and trialling. “We will roll things forward carefully with an eye to rolling it back [if necessary].”
The company has installed camera tracking systems to help identify whether customers are attracted to where the tech sits in-store; also whether store employees are actively introducing customers to it.
Dixons Carphone starts with its customer insights team, to find out what the pinch points are within stores. “What can we do better for the customer journey in-store? Staff training? Different technology in-store?”
Ghedia’s team also directly asks employees and customers: “If we were going to build something like this, what would you think?” This will inform a careful design and testing process which will see a two- to three-store trial and debrief; a potential further 10 to 15-store rollout; followed by another AB test before a full rollout.
He boasts of the rollout of the company’s 4K distribution system featuring real-life filmed content—the first retailer to do so in the world—so customers could really see what 4K looks like.
Online versus offline
Ghedia points out that online is growing for most retailers; that customers have less time for shopping than they did 10 years ago; that they want answers quickly and therefore that real-world retail can seem like a deceleration. “You’ve got to find the product somewhere on the shop floor, there’s less information about it.”
Empowering store employees to be able to engage with the modern consumer is a major goal of his. Making things like stock checking quicker and more efficient using gadget such as tablets—Dixons Carphone is also trialling smartwatches for staff.
Topps Tiles invested in tablets in 2015 to drive the delivery of its personalisation sales tool. Whilst the company is building on that with various apps, D’Souza is still evaluating what tablets can do for them. Tablets have helped, for instance, as a communications tool to let staff remain at the same point in the journey as the customer.
Timeframes for tech rollouts
Ghedia suggests that an in-store technology deployment can take roughly 12-18 months (24 months tops) with the first year including research and business planning and the second seeing trials and analysis.
D’Souza cites a similar timeframe, adding that the challenge for Topps Tiles is in planning for a technology roll back. The business has 350 stores, after all.
“Getting tech to be fully embraced consistently across the estate [of stores] requires you to engage with people, remove their fears. You need area champions, you need staff to share in the opportunities created and you need to be realistic about the physical environment of different stores.”
Assumption is the mother of all fudge-ups
D’Souza continues: “In some local stores, the broadband speeds aren’t that fast—you can’t just assume that Internet speeds are optimal.”
This is one of his big obstacles and it plays havoc with one of their major tech rollouts: “The 16-camera Prism network installed to understand customer flow in-store is a live system that runs all the time: you need to have enough upload speed to get anything out of it. The sheer cost of installing kit consistently in the various, unique store environments can prove quite challenging.”
Careful testing and not rushing are vital, he says: “It’s one thing to understand a solution and quite another thing to deploy it.”
Consistent Wi-Fi is a challenge for Dixons Carphone as well—imagine stores with aisles and aisles of (potentially) Internet-connected devices. Deciding which devices to connect and which not to is a challenge for staff when demoing products. Ghedia points out that there is a “challenge on a broad scale about connectivity and how we address that long term.”
The real customer: In-store staff
Ghedia says that ultimately, his in-store colleagues are the end users and need to be engaged with. They help his team to understand pain points at a store level.
“HQ can get caught up with grand ideas but it’s a problem when those ideas reach the retail environment and people ask ‘what’s this? This is going to hinder my day job’. We need to make sure we really listen to our colleagues and work out how to assist them, give them tech where they’ve been consulted, they’ve been part of the roadmap.”
Cool tech
Finally the panel turned to talk of jazzier tech, as advertised.
Ghedia sees AR and VR picking up momentum because of the gaming industry and is also excited about smart devices, such as Internet-connected buttons that automate something. Only “semi-cool”, Ghedia and co started looking into smartwatches 12 months ago for simple tasks such as the device being a presence sensor.
D’Souza is interested in personalisation and virtualisation. He points to video games giant Nintendo’s first major foray into mobile apps, Miitomo, a playful social network that makes him wonder about the future of virtual spaces, where businesses might interact with customers without it being soullessly commercialised.
“Could my organisation use a platform like Miitomo to help a customer see a future plan of what their home will look like? In which we can place a TV, a new toaster etc.”
Augmented and virtual reality: Corporate playthings (for now)
Ghedia categorises AR and VR as “emerging tech, for us. We’ve played with them at head office and gone ‘wow, cool!’, but implementing them into stores is still a leap away.
“The key thing is that it has to feel comfortable for the customer. The tech is so new for most people, our view is that once it becomes more mainstream, we might use augmented reality through an app, for instance overlaying a particular TV model onto their living room. Keep things simple so they get it.”
D’Souza finds VR interesting and suggests it could be a natural fit for Topps Tiles. He adds that they’re going to take things carefully. “We have a very stable workforce, we have a lot of people not that tech-savvy. This tech may scratch the customer’s itch but it has got to be viable for our teams to feel comfortable with it. This will take a bit of time.”
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