Overcoming Showrooming With WFM
By Erin Harris, associate editor
Showrooming — when customers go to a store to see a product in person only to buy it from a competitor online — has become problematic for some retailers. Indeed, the rise in smartphone adoption and the visibility of shoppers using phones to scan bar codes or take photos has drawn attention to the potential problems with consumers using stores as showrooms. Retailers are coming up with solutions to combat fickle window shoppers, such as providing better customer service through well-informed sales associates. Nordstrom, for example, recently began offering perks, such as free shipping on in-store purchases, while Target is exploring offering more items made exclusively for the retailer, which would make comparison shopping more difficult.
All signs point to Amazon, and the fact remains that Amazon will continue to threaten physical retail stores, particularly those products for which price is the only differentiation between them. Surely, retailers need to determine how to utilize digital to make their store experience more valuable, engaging, and effective for customers. But there exists another way to combat showrooming — workforce management (WFM). If your approach is to train your workforce to embrace and foster customer centricity, your customers should give you their business. "As sales continue to migrate from stores to online, retailers cannot keep doing business the same old way," explains Dave Andrews, director of marketing communications at Reflexis. "If the store labor continues to be pegged as a percentage of in-store sales — and all indications are that this will be the case for most retailers — retailers need to do all they can to increase the efficiency of their store managers and associates and provide them with the technology to intelligently engage their customers."
An engaged, informed workforce — one that puts the customer first at every interaction — can help thwart showrooming. Keep your eyes peeled for our May issue, which will feature a special report on workforce management. The report will highlight additional ways to combat showrooming, and it will present an overview of the future of workforce management in retail operations, with the overriding objective of attaining higher efficiencies in store operations while improving customer service.