Shopping online gets a face to face makeover
Let me confess I love shopping and I love shopping online. And clearly, I’m not alone – recent research from the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association reveals around 6.7 million Aussies bought something online in the last 12 months alone.
When it comes to online shopping, there are definite benefits over the option of loading the kids into the car or dragging a reluctant partner around the shopping centre. But what about the delivery of your new prized possession? For some, waiting at home or visiting the local post office to collect your order can have its own downside too.
So listening to our customers and taking their feedback on board, we have recently begun offering an innovative new service – Buy Online, Collect in Store – in Telstra CBD stores across Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, and Brisbane.
We designed it to make the online experience as easy and reliable as possible. Our new offering allows customers to buy online at a time that suits them and then pick-up their purchase two to three working days later from a participating Telstra store that’s close and convenient to them.
When it comes to technology, we know that for some of our customers, the set-up process can seem as complex as unlocking the DaVinci code. We understand the frustrations so we’re taking the hassle out of the set-up process by ensuring the device is ready-to-use when our customer arrives in-store.
Plus, customers can even book-in for a complementary one on one demo session with one of our experienced sales staff and get the lowdown on all the cool features their new device has to offer.
We’ll be tracking customer feedback and all going well we’ll look to roll this new offering out to all stores over the coming months.
Do you think people will take up this new option or stick to receiving their online goods by post?
Umart have a very similar model which has proven to be very successful and seen significant growth for them. Slightly different industry in selling telco products, but I think it is a good move by Telstra to mimic the in-store collect process. Particularly if the product is ‘ready-to-go’ when a customer picks it up.
Thanks Tim,
Yes we have seen a number of overseas retailers make this kind of service a key part of their retail differentiation.
I think the numbers were Australians spend over $23 blln online, so are embracing the idea of shopping through the internet. By bringing the best of online convenience with the service difference of the Telstra store we want customers to truly get an experience with a difference.
Online shopping has become very popular in recent years. When you buy online all you need is a bank account to send a check or use a debit / credit card to make an immediate purchase. Online shopping is popular mainly because of its speed and ease of use.
Great to see that Telstra is delivering an integrated customer experience rather than disconnected channel silos because that’s the way the organisation has been structured.
McKinsey recently released a report on exactly this point.
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Four_ways_to_get_more_value_from_digital_marketing_2556
Ian
Thanks That was a great article. It certainly has been our experience that customers do surf across our channels and we need to make that possible and easy for the customer to do if that is the way they want to interact with us. Google research states that over 50% of customers who purchase electronice goods TVs, Digital Cameras, Mobile phones research online before buying in store. If that is the way our customers want to buy then we need to support that!
Karen – I think there is two camps here and my 2 cents are:
1 – Revolution
Where new services, products and customer service is delivered via a electronic channel to market. The consumer accepts and has rightly chosen this channel to market for numerous reasons (yourself as an example said time and family commitments, others maybe time to market, product awareness, stock availability and of course pricing sensitivity)
2 – Evolution
where the engagement of consumers is slowly being deflected to electronic means for customer support and information sourcing. However the purchasing is still done in-store with a face to face engagement.
This is because of the understanding of the “extras” that come with the human engagement, which maybe configuration, specific understanding of requirements or a mini training of the product.
My view and maybe a new discussion topic – is no mater the channel to market (Electronic or Face to Face), the metric of Customer Satisfaction needs to be married to the person or channel of engagement.
I think the key work here is “Flexibility”.
Every customer is going to be different and providing a mechanism of providing the customer the options of delivery/pick-up, training online/in-store, customer service face2face/self-service is going to be the key differentiators in business.
Colin
I agree. That is the true cross channel insight to line up the various strengths and weaknesses of each and every channel against the transaction and customer preference. Hence we aspire to help our customers undertake simple transactions online when it suits them and also understand that the customer may want to start online and finish up talking to Telstra in our call centre or in our retail store getting that personalised experience.
The plan is to help the customer do easily what works for our customers
Karen
Hi Karen,
Interesting concept and definitely the way forward in giving the customer the choice to purchase how they want to. It will only be with experience that we find out how consumers are buying through each different channel. Well done Telstra for making it work.
But the next logical step is to see if you can sell literally face to face over the web via a video link so that the customer can have a direct one to one talk with someone in the store. This would give the customer the opportunity to get a similar (but obviously not quite as good) experience as if they were in the store. Do you see this sort of technology as having a future? I know that there are some companies working on a “Livestore” concept but that would look ideal for Telstra.
Tim
BTW Collect-in-store is huge for Argos in the UK because it avoids a lot of queueing which is the downside of this discount retailers business model.
Hi Karen,
Neil Rackham’s research (in his book SPIN Selling) indicates that generally, as price goes up, so does the fear associated with the purchase. I think more people will be happy to order small to medium purchases online but larger or more complicated purchases demand prudence from the buyer which probably includes inspection before acquisition and/or payment.