Bringing Order to Chaos: Simplifying the Retail Customer Transaction for Enhanced Service Experiences. In today's global retail industry, the customer experience matters more than ever before. Why? Customers' expectations have increased. Research companies like The Temkin Group, which focus on the customer experience, have found retailers are now willing to make even larger investments in customer experience improvements during 2015 and beyond to shrink the number of unhappy customers.
Making a bigger investment in the customer experience shows retailers and enterprises in industries like banking and finance, insurance, telecommunications, and real estate, are headed in the right direction. But the question is whether they understand what actually makes customers unhappy in the first place. After all, if 96% of unhappy customers never complain and 91% defect to the competition, there is a critical need to understand more about what is making customers unhappy.
What Retail Customer Expect The Temkin Group also identified three main components to a retail customer's expectations. The Shut-In Economy — Matter. In 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the internet could make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew more isolated and depressed.
“We were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such anti-social consequences,” said one of the researchers at the time. “And these are the same people who, when asked, describe the Internet as a positive thing.” We’re now deep into the bombastic buildout of the on-demand economy— with investment in the apps, platforms and services surging exponentially. Right now Americans buy nearly eight percent of all their retail goods online, though that seems a wild underestimate in the most congested, wired, time-strapped urban centers. Katherine van Ekert isn’t a shut-in, exactly, but there are only two things she ever has to run errands for any more: trash bags and saline solution. Imagineering the Omni-Channel User Experience at Disney. At the start of 2014, we called cross channel experiences a major trend to watch.
While cross channel remains important, we are seeing an evolution to omni-channel experiences. Omni-channel focuses on creating a consistent experience across all customer touch-points, where cross-channel is often limited to only a portion of the experience. Disney is a great example of the “magic” that happens when a true omni-channel experience is delivered. Historical Limitations of Cross-channel One cross-channel strategy may focus only on the digital channel.
It ensures the digital experience works across all browser and operating system platforms, various screen sizes, and device types. While this is a worthy effort, it leaves out all of the other channels a customer may come in contact with such as in-store and call centres. Omni-channel Disney’s Omni-Channel User Experience Disney’s website at desktop, tablet and mobile phone sizes MagicBand RFID wristbands Summary. The Messy Business Of Reinventing Happiness. Bob Iger wanted approval. It was February 2011, and the Walt Disney Co. CEO gathered his board of directors inside an intimate theater at the company’s Team Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. There, just the night before, Iger held an early screening for the board of Captain America: The First Avenger months prior to its release. The soon-to-be blockbuster served as another sign that Iger’s bet on reinvigorating Disney’s movie business through his acquisitions of Marvel and Pixar was paying off big.
Now, with his directors reassembled and sitting in the first few rows of the theater, Iger set his sights on his next gamble, his boldest yet: to reinvent the brand’s most beloved asset, Disney’s iconic parks. Iger planned to pump nearly $1 billion into this venture, called MyMagic+, a sweeping plan to overhaul the digital infrastructure of Disney’s theme parks, which would upend how they operated and connected with consumers. The theater was quiet, the elation gone. Discovery Island. Get Ready For The Real Story Behind Disney's $1 Billion Attempt To Reinvent Its Iconic Theme Park. Since as early as 2007, Disney has been working on MyMagic+, an innovative project to reinvent the experience at its iconic Disney World park. The company invested nearly $1 billion into the program, which brought wearable computing and a digital layer to the park, re-imagining how guests interact with Disney World's attractions, hotels, and cast members.
But you have not heard the full story of MyMagic+. Disney is as controlling of its brand as Walt was over every frame of his motion pictures. What Disney has tried to present is a G-rated fairy tale where the right-brained minds of Disney’s creative "Imagineers" and the more left-brained IT and operations groups at its Parks and Resorts division worked in perfect synergy. Tomorrow, my feature story on Disney’s MyMagic+ will go live online and hit newsstands. What you haven’t read is how change agents pushed the project through a difficult and risky journey. But the truth is, this is how innovation happens.