By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
6/24/2008
I spoke at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition’s Mobile Conference day, and after spending the whole day listening (and delivering, to be fair) the same messages over and over about mobility and its rapidly rising role in the retail customer service experience, I have to wonder if retail needs, now more than ever, an executive tasked solely with managing the customer service experience. For the record, I’m defining “mobile” and “mobility” here as creating sites and services that allow consumers to interact with a retailer directly through their personal mobile phone.
Here’s why I’m wondering this. In speaking with both vendors and attendees at the conference, there are only two things that are clear about mobile in retail. One, unlike with eCommerce, you can’t just run out and create a “mobile” division. A major reason for this is because mobile relies much more heavily on the other channels than eCommerce originally relied on stores. A mobile division within retail would take a 3-dimensional opportunity and address it with a one-dimensional solution. And the implication for retailers has been a hodge-podge of people deployed to figure out the strategic role of consumer mobile devices in the overall retail experience.
There are marketers who are trying to apply some kind of adaptation of the pay-per-click advertising and direct mail models that they’re only just now getting their hands around for the Internet. There are eCommerce people who want to know why they can’t just create a WAP version of their site and be done with it. And there were no store ops people there, trying to understand how mobile will change how consumers interact with stores – a worrying sign.
The second is that this is an extremely immature space. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s saying that. But here’s the deal. Outside of Japan and maybe some Nordic countries, consumers have done very little to inject mobile phones into their shopping experience. Yes, in some part it is a chicken-and-egg thing – they haven’t done it because there hasn’t been anything out there to do it with. But that is changing rapidly, and we don’t know how consumers will react. In fact, I would argue that we have yet to understand the full impact that the Internet is having on shopping behavior, let alone have a grasp on how consumers are using or will use mobile phones.
So the things that consumers can do with their mobile phones in retail is in wild flux – a give and take between solution providers putting capabilities out there, and consumers adopting, adapting, or even discovering on their own, use-cases for those capabilities – sometimes very unexpected use-cases.
The mobile “channel” isn’t so much a channel as it is a bridge – one that will accelerate cross-channel behavior by serving as the connection between the physical and the virtual world. Consumers will use those capabilities to create whole new ways of shopping and engaging with retailers. Marketing doesn’t have enough of the picture, any more than stores or online or catalog/call center, to own these critical processes. If retailers don’t have someone tasked with owning, defining, and managing these emerging and evolving processes, they risk leaving their most strategic differentiator to chance.
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