Testing Technology in Tottenham Court Road

In the latest of my occasional store analysis outings in association with Shoppertrak, I visit one of my old haunts in London, checking on the some of the huge hi-fi and technology stores in the capital’s main street for technology addicts to see if their stores are as cutting edge as their products.  I include some independent stores as well as one that would probably be familiar to everyone.  The results surprised me and point to a number of areas where some old fashioned personal service wouldn’t go amiss amongst all the impressive gadgetry.   

Whilst visiting most of the major mobile phone retailers in Tottenham Court Road in preparation for my last Undercover Analyst post, I found myself drawn into a trip down memory lane as I eyed some of the older technology stores in the area.

As I said in my previous post, back in the 90s if you wanted the latest slab of shiny consumer technology there really was no better place to come. I was a frequent visitor. In fact it was only a few years ago that I switched from a TV I bought there 25 years ago, and that was only because of the digital switchover. I like to get value for money out of my purchases!

Everything had changed of course, as you’d expect in the world of modern gadgetry, but many of the stores had a familiar layout and a good deal of the sales pitch was pretty much the same as it had been in the days of tower systems and VHS.

Having just taken notes on some of the most cutting edge gizmo stores on the market, I thought it would be good to see how the more traditional technology retailers were doing, if there is such a thing as ‘traditional’ technology.

The first store I visited store predominantly sold Hi-Fi gear. I’m not sure if calling it that is now an anachronism, but I enquired about a sound system anyway. The sales adviser seemed very knowledgeable and had an impressive amount of product knowledge to call on. Buoyed by this initial encounter, I asked if I could perhaps have a demo of the system and the salesman’s face lit up. All I had to do, he explained, was to visit their demo area on the third floor where someone would be happy to help me.

Missing Link

This is where the experience took a disappointing nose dive. I wasn’t escorted to the demo area, I was just told where it was. This seemed like serious missing link in the service chain to me. Most stores, most notably the large supermarkets, now train their staff to take anyone who enquires about a product to where they can find it. Just sending someone risks that person not finding it or changing their mind in transit. It also gives a rather offhand impression of the service model.

Just pointing someone in the general direction is acting like a signpost. Leading someone to the product is a positive interaction with the customer and keeps them engaged. Moreover, in this case I was supposedly interested in an expensive sound system, not a bogoff on a tin of baked beans. It could have been a very costly mistake for this store. My maxim to staff is always ‘guide, don’t point’.

Once on the third floor it took a while to catch the eye of the assistant, who apparently had no idea I was on my way. Even a phone call from the ground floor warning them of my impending arrival was clearly too much to ask. A totally cack-handed way to operate a sales handover in my opinion, and something they really should work on.

The demo itself went well and I felt the adviser really knew his stuff. But the way I’d had to pretty much drive the process to get there myself left me feeling disengaged by this point. I think, had I been a real customer I might not even had got that far.

Overall though, not a bad store, but some serious service issues to deal with.

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ShopperTrak says – How are customers moving around the store? Gaining an understanding of how shoppers are moving around the store can help to ensure that shoppers don’t miss out on any stock as well as making the most of product placement.

I.e. retailers may find that customers are regularly coming in to the store to purchase small items such as headphones but that they are experiencing a high abandonment rate once shoppers realise that these items are located on the third floor. By moving headphones to the till area, the retailer may see a boost in conversion rates.

Retailers can also look to data to monitor the success rate of implementing new changes, i.e. staff radios. I.e. did conversion go up when staff began using radios to communicate across different floors? They can then tweak these changes accordingly.

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My next visit was to a well known electronics supplier. This store sells a variety of less well known brands but is a seriously great place to come for anything from a walkie-talkie to a GPS enabled swizzle stick. I have to admit I could, and probably have, spent hours browsing amazing gadgets that I’d never heard of whilst desperately trying to find a justification for buying. Luckily for my bank balance I usually fail.

Plain Vanilla

Having said that, it’s a bit plain vanilla in terms of shop layout and fit-out. It looks like the store was built around off-the-shelf shop fittings bought in a clearance warehouse at the end of the 1990s. I’m sure that wasn’t the case, but it was not exactly what you’d called ‘retail theatre’. Slightly incongruous for a shop selling up-to-the-minute products, but maybe they think the merchandise is exciting enough.

The stock displays were neat enough and everything was easy to browse. Staff were around and someone from the back of the store shouted across to me to ask if I needed any help.

To me that’s an approach that’s about as contemporary as the shelving was in the store. If you’re going to engage with a customer, do it face to face and with some commitment. Throwing your voice across the shop is also throwing away a golden opportunity to turn that interaction into a sales opportunity. In many respects it would be better to say nothing than do that. Having come from several stores with a much more focussed customer service ethos, even though it was probably poorly executed in some cases, this seemed like a bit of a throw-back.

Again not a bad store overall, but still lacking that certain something.

My final visit was to a store that today stands pretty much unchallenged in the landscape of UK technology retail today. It’s my policy in these articles not to name stores, but I’m sure it won’t take too much of a leap of imagination to work out the name. It houses a number of concessions and has a wide range of different brands on offer. Indeed it recently merged with another equally ubiquitous high street retailer.

There were a lot of staff about, but oddly many of them appeared to be cleaning staff. They were adorned with Hi-Viz jackets and were busy with cleaning tools. It seemed to me to be an odd time to be cleaning as the store was fairly full of potential customers. I’m assuming it was an outsourced company, but if it had been my store I wouldn’t have wanted to see them on the shop floor during trading hours.

There were numerous sales staff floating about, but it was difficult to get their attention. One of them seemed to deliberately avoid my gaze. I have to say I’ve had this experience in the past in these stores, and it was a behaviour they were at one time famous for. I understood it had been ‘trained-out’ of staff after an extensive re-branding effort a few years ago. Maybe this guy had missed the seminar.

Technical Problems

Many of the products on sale had a demo facility, which was a great idea, except for the fact that most of them appeared not to be working that day. When I finally did manage to capture a member of staff they explained that they’d been having technical problems, so perhaps I just picked the wrong time. Once we did get some of the demonstrations going they were generally a good sales tool.

I must admit I wasn’t particularly impressed after my visit and did notice a customer satisfaction button by the door on the way out. I’ve noticed these are becoming more popular now in larger chain stores, although I suspect the data they provide will be about as qualitative as badly implemented footfall counters. On this occasion it was placed slightly behind the door so I’m not sure many customers would have seen it anyway. Perhaps an indication that the store staff were not particularly keen to see them use it.

I’d previously seen improvements in this company’s customer service performance so it was a surprise to see they’d started to slip back into their old ways. Perhaps having less competition leads to complacency.

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ShopperTrak says:

• It would be interesting to use heat maps or beacons to map out key areas and understand which concessions are drawing in shoppers. By doing so, retailers can gain insights into the customer journey and how shoppers are moving around the store, as well as store layout, staff allocation etc.
• An understanding of your busiest periods means that retailers can use their least busy times to carry out staff training and cleaning for example.

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“Take me to your checkout!”

So there you have it. Smart gizmos not always being sold in a particularly smart way, which considering we’re talking about highly advanced products seems something of an irony.

I was at a conference a few months ago where the concept of robot salespeople was being pitched. It’s not as outlandish as you might think either. These robo-shop-assistants were based on a Japanese designed personal helper droids intended as home help for infirm people. Apparently they cost around a thousand dollars and are easily re-tasked to the world of retail. Maybe we’ll see these in our high street stores in years to come, and I think it would be a good bet that the first place would be in a technology store.

I’m not sure if that says more about retailers than it does about the evolution of artificial intelligence. But as I saw on my travels around mechanical Mecca, there may well come a time when it will be difficult to tell which gadgets are for sale and which are doing the selling. In some instances I don’t think that would be a bad thing.

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The Undercover Analyst – How Focussed is Fashion on the High Street?

As part of a new project in association with retail analytics experts ShopperTrak, I’m going to be looking at the retail landscape in areas around the UK and sharing some insights through regular blog posts. Taking a broad cross section of market sectors and visiting specific but unnamed stores, I’m going to be commenting on how they fare on certain operational areas identified by ShopperTrak as being key to a successful and customer responsive store. I’ll be looking for good and bad practices, innovative ideas and exemplars for all of us to either follow or avoid in our own businesses.

My starting point was my home town of Oxford where I looked at mid-range high-street fashion. I’ve run stores in Oxford myself for nearly 20 years so I’ve witnessed the evolution of the local commercial environment at first hand.  The central retail core in Oxford is not much larger than you’d find in any town centre high street and consists of three main shopping thoroughfares, two indoor shopping centres and a covered market catering almost exclusively for independents. The main shopping street is Cornmarket, where most of this survey was based. Around six major stores were visited each with large footprints and each selling quite similar products to a broad demographic of fashion conscious 18-35 year olds.

Same difference

The overriding impression across most of the mainstream stores was that they all bought their shopfits from the same generic contractors. With the exception of one store, well themed towards their target customers, store layouts were similar to the point of duplication. It may be the nature of the beast that there are only so many ways you can support a clothes hanger, but shop-fittings generally looked like they were ‘off the shelf’, even though I’d imagine they weren’t.

Considering the size of some of these companies and their large marketing spend, brand identification in some stores was not as strong as it should have been. You could have dropped me blindfolded into any one of these stores and I’d have had a hard time telling you which one I was in.

ShopperTrak says : Differentiation is key. Location-based analytics provide retailers with the tools they need to understand the customer profile better, especially how shoppers are moving around the shop floor. As Ian points out, many stores have similar layouts but this is often down to guess work rather than knowing exactly how customers are moving through the store. Understanding the customer journey improves the overall experience so retailers need to have an accurate view of what is happening in store to help them measure effectiveness and constantly make improvements. By doing this we may see an end to all stores looking the same.

SALE SALE SALE!

Some of this anonymity might have been down to the fact that it appeared to be the height of the summer sales in the hallowed city with the main shopping areas a sea of red and white signage.

These days it’s quite difficult to pick out more than 2 consecutive weeks when someone isn’t on sale. The necessity to strip window and internal displays down to the bare-bones during such promotions left no real indication of how attractive the window dressing would normally be. Window displays have somewhat fallen out of favour in recent years, dividing between the bog standard or the eye-popping retail theatre. Of course your window display is supposedly the thing that draws customers inside your store, so outside of sale periods it has to be an important consideration.

ShopperTrak says : Traffic patterns change over different periods – particularly so during a sale. Even though the store feels busier retailers need to be sure that their promotions are actually driving the maximum number of customers to make a purchase. By analysing draw rates, or the ability to bring people into the store, retailers can measure whether promotions and merchandising are helping to entice their fair share of shoppers over the threshold versus competitors. If the draw rate begins to fall it’s a sure sign that visual merchandising is not working as effectively as it should be.

Location, Location, Location!

Internal store layouts seemed to be quite ad hoc. Most large stores use pre-planned merchandising plans produced by head office but none of them seemed particularly well suited to traffic flow in store, neither did they look like they could be responsive to dead zones that were fairly evident. For example, retail environment guru Paco Underhill has identified the area around your main entrance as the ‘landing pad’. His suggestion was that nothing should be placed here as customers are usually looking further into the store to see where they were headed. That seemed pretty much the case in one store where a large gondola had been plonked right in the entrance-way – it was pretty much ignored by everyone coming through the door.

The other obvious fail in my opinion was the tendency to place items that were in the sale at the back of the store. The intuitive logic is of course that this will draw customers further into the store, presumably wowing them with the non-promotional stock on the way. Personal experience combined with this particular visit tell me that this strategy is far too simplistic. Most customers looked straight to the rear of the store and bypassed everything else on their quest to get to the cheaper goodies. There may have been a method in this apparent madness. Keeping the sales hysteria at the back of the shop along with the associated mess and mis-matched merchandise may be a good move in some cases. Also I guess there’s a chance that customers may give the full priced stock another look on the way out after perhaps finding nothing in the sale to their liking.

In these days of eye-watering rent and rates, customer flow within a store is something that needs careful analysis. It’s really not something that can be left to gut instinct or rigidly pre-planned merchandising charts.

ShopperTrak says : Heat maps help retailers determine which areas customers are dwelling in and how long they spend there. This is crucial when analysing the effectiveness of merchandising and product placement. It also enables stores to re-invigorate quieter zones or analyse changes to determine the optimum store layout. On a micro-level retailers can examine conversion rates within specific areas of the store to gain a deeper level of insight into overall performance.

Customer experience

The general customer experience in all but one of the stores visited was pretty good. Stock displays were generally well maintained, apart from one rather tired looking mannequin that personally I’d have pensioned off years ago.

One of the more mainstream stores was a fairly recent opening so had the benefit of newer merchandising displays. This certainly gave a fresher look which was enhanced by the large airy feel of the store. They also had a good layout of stock with accessories and handbags at the front where they can be easily browsed and selected ‘on the hoof’, with items such as shoes at the rear where more time and interaction with staff would be required. However here, as with all the stores visited, staff engagement with customers was nigh on non-existent. Perhaps the labour intensive nature of the display floor meant that sales adviser’s saw maintenance of displays as a higher property than talking to customers.

Personally I’ve always trained my staff to aim at somewhere between intrusive and attentive. Many of the stores I visited could have benefited from tasking particular members of their sales teams with approaching customers on a one to one basis. There’s an obvious ethos with many of these stores that it’s self-service and customers only receive service when they ask for it. But these shops are semi-aspirational in design, they’re not supermarkets. They’re selling desirable fashion, not tins of sweetcorn. In that environment there’s nothing worse than leaving customers with the impression that interaction is bottom of the service remit.

In general though customer service was OK. We saw one person leave a pay point empty while a customer waited patiently, which wasn’t great, but as it was our fault for sending them on the hunt for a different size of a T-shirt that might be an unfair observation. It’s a dilemma for any sales adviser when there’s only one of you but two people who need your help. Perhaps something that could be sorted with better planning of staffing patterns.

ShopperTrak says : Understanding how many people are coming in to the store and which areas they’re dwelling in is a crucial reflection of the overall customer experience. Increasing the average time that shoppers spend in store helps to drive both conversion rates and average transaction sizes. If they stay in the shop longer it means they’re having a better experience.

Retailers can use interior analytics to measure dwell times, looking at whether shoppers are spending the right amount of time in the right areas, how staff are engaging with customers, how well queues are being dealt with or how effectively promotions are working.

Messy but busy

Only one store had significant queues at the pay point and this was also the store with the most untidy shop floor. Perhaps an indication that tidy displays don’t necessarily mean better sales. Or maybe the trashed shop floor just shows how busy they were. However they seemed to be a victim of their own success with at least one case of abandonment being observed as customers tired of waiting to part with their hard earned cash. Again I suspect proper deployment of staff and maybe a re-think on merchandising strategy would help with problems like this.

ShopperTrak says : Retailers need to have an accurate view of their power hours – i.e. their peak selling times. Only by having insight into this can they plan accordingly. Any re-stocking or staff breaks should take place outside of these times in order to ensure the most effective shopper to assistant ratio. Put simply, the fewer the staff available in store during peak traffic times the worse the customer experience is going to be.

As a first outing it was an interesting exercise for me. There are obvious compromises between function and form and many competing demands on the time of the floor staff. But there were many obvious improvements that could be made, perhaps with the assistance of some location-based analytics, particularly in terms of customer flow data and staff movements.

Join me next time when I’ll be looking at how luxury brands fare.  In the meantime you can check out ShopperTrak’s full range of analytic services by clicking the link below.