I have just written a blog on customer centiricity. Request you all to read it and share your views on it. http://wp.mesptbdL-T

Enhancing customer shopping experience is an art. Every customer is unique in terms of what makes them happy and what makes them enjoy what they are doing. There are a lot of things these days that retailers use to make the customer happy when they walk into their store. Unfortunately, these things need to be renewed periodically.

Most commonly used are ambiance, lighting, pleasant temperature, good fragrance, music and video. These things have now become a mandatory requirements. Modern customers now look for convenience, time-saving and something that they can control on their own.

Internet is fast becoming more like a utility similar to water and electricity in everyone’s life today. In the coming few years I am sure people depend heavily on internet to do quite a few routine tasks and make time for themselves to enjoy the shopping rather than struggling to remember, locate and calculate while shopping.

To give that kind of relaxed shopping pleasure to the customers, retailers start making use of multiple channels of retail integrate to make customers buying process distributed across these channels. 

Retail stores should provide individual page on their websites to each of their customers, where the customers should be able to access that page either from a PC, from a mobile phone or a store kiosk, digital TV to do the following activities

1. Make their shopping list

2. Provide estimate to the shopping list, Hint best buys, offers and other related events

3. Attach the shopping list to the store navigator so that customers move in sequence as per the store layout

4. Perform billing on the customer’s device as he/she picks up and scans using 2 D bar codes

5. Lead them to the cash counters with shortest queues

6. Transfer the billing info from customer’s device to the POS electronically

7. Perform verification of billing by checking the gross weight

8. Allow customer to pay through the mobile phone and later customers pays to the telephone company or bank or credit card or debit card which ever means preferred by customer

9. Credit from returns could be sent to the mobile billing

10. Electronic Co-branding with other retailers, utility providers, clinics, transportation service providers etc

Ideally customer shopping experience process should be distributed across all the possible channels so that customer decides on which channel to use for which part of the shopping process.