As the IT head of a consumer goods company, when I think about customer experience I think about where products and technology meet - at the store shelf. To me that’s the battleground for what we do. Our products swim in a sea of 60 feet of competing brands and private label brands. Customer experience involves how we educate the consumer to say, “Listen, this is the brand you should be taking and why,” right there at the point of decision.
To gain insight on customer experience, I've spoken to many of our customers, but also to our sales and marketing staff, about what happens at the point of decision. Some shoppers pull out their iPhone, or even their iPad among the older set, to add to any information they get on the shelf. To me this is a huge opportunity to figure out what the use cases are.
To date I don’t think retailers have cracked the code on this, because they think the point of decision is all about mobile. But how do you really use that technology to get them to make a decision to take your product and put it in a cart? At the end of the day, you can give them all sorts of information.
A lot of retailers think about competing with the likes of Amazon, but I think more about the customer experience from the outside-in. Socially, people still like to shop. No matter what happens online, they’re going to continue to go to brick-and-mortar stores. With that reality in mind, how can you make it seamless for shoppers to get the information they need? How do you take the Internet and somehow bring that in so that they can add it to the conversation of what they’re trying to do and make a decision at that point of need? That’s the real challenge for me, especially because a lot of people aren't going to want to put "one more app" for Nature Made or another of our brands on their devices. So how do you make it invisible to people that they’re being pushed information to guide their decisions?
Happily, there is a lot of great new shelf technology coming out, technology that may really disrupt the current experience, and it’s just a matter of time before somebody figures it all out. In the meantime, there have been some crazy experiments. One retailer tried a holographic technology that did a great job getting your attention, but after you walked up to the shelf all it did was spit out a coupon. Not much of a payoff.
That being said, technology can help you reach a multitude of different kinds of customers, because the Target shopper, the Costco shopper, the Walmart shopper, and the Walgreens shopper are all different from each other. What could sensor technology do to help customize offers to each one? At some point soon, someone is going to figure out how to make an RFID or near field communication chip that’s affordable for the mass market. Whoever figures that out will win big, because then you have the ability to make seamless connections between a physical device that you’re holding, and the physical product itself.
Brian Beams joined Pharmavite in June 2010 and is responsible for determining the strategic direction of the company’s IT solutions, infrastructure and technology operations, as well as the company’s customer and consumer-facing technologies. Brian began his career with 14 years as a technology consultant with Andersen Consulting’s (aka Accenture) worldwide technical services group, rising to the level of Associate Partner while based in Chicago, IL.
