Pain points are a part of business. They create opportunities to innovate, diversify and grow. Without customer pain points, there is no reason to be in business. Trading goods and services is as old as mankind itself.
It’s time for the Retail Brick and Mortar Store to stand up and be counted! All of the talk about the demise of Brick and Mortar stores is premature.
In this age of E-Commerce the vast majority of retail sales are still conducted face to face in a physical store. Even Millennials shop in a physical store 50% of the time.
The phenomenal growth of E-Commerce is undeniable. But more importantly we must remember that customers want an OMNICHANNEL experience, NOT a Single Channel experience.
At the intersection of what the Customer wants and what the Retailer wants is the Brick and Mortar store! This is where the Brick and Mortar Store is uniquely positioned to leverage its significant advantages!
The growing size of today’s consumer market sets the stage for entrepreneurs and companies of varying capacities to take part. The US consumer market alone was at $1.5 trillion in 2016. And this number is continuously increasing, including omnichannel customer service.
According to an article from AdAge, US Gen Y or millennials are also swiftly increasing their slice of the pie, spending more than $200 billion annually.
“The system is down. We can’t ship any customer orders. We’re not sure when the system will be back up again.” Oh no … Customers do not care about this stuff.
Coming into the Holidays, the busiest time of the year, that is the last thing that I wanted to hear.
I thought about it and said, “The Customer doesn’t care.“
From that point forward we pulled together the necessary resources and visibility to get the problem solved quickly. But the message was clear: The Customer doesn’t care about our internal problems.
As supply chains evolve and grow, products are often passed between dozens of hands at factories, shipping vehicles and pallets, distributor warehouses, retail warehouses, shop floors, and delivery fleets. They often travel thousands of miles to go direct to consumer.
And they go through multiple intermediaries, something which has an impact not only on the profit margins, but also on the brand’s ability to connect and communicate with their customer.
With revenue growth remaining a challenge, almost half (48 per cent) of manufacturers are racing to build Direct to Consumer (DTC) channels, with almost all of them (87 per cent) seeing these channels as relevant to their products and consumers.