All of us have a front-row seat to watch the biggest revolution in retail shopping since department stores were first built a century ago in the center of cities.
Because we, the consumers, are leading the revolution.
We're wielding price-check iPhone apps in stores without hesitation. We bounce from friends' Facebook pages to a company's own app on a phone before handing over a credit card in a brick-and-mortar retail store.
Simply by posting a few updates on Facebook or Twitter, we can become a mass market ad for a brand -- or their worst nightmare -- with hundreds and sometimes thousands of followers.
Retailers can use all that data, gadgets and social networks to their advantage. The key is making customers -- and their data -- the focus of everything a company does, from buying to marketing, selling to providing customer service.
We call this new approach smarter commerce because it involves collecting and analyzing the bits and pieces of data floating around about customers -- not just what they buy and where, but why and how they choose those products and what they say to friends. Armed with this analysis, companies can predict their customers' changing tastes, rather than reacting to them.
Data and analytics are tools that make consumers influential, and have become the basis for pinpointing insights. These insights are at the center of the processes that make each company run, whether it's inventory optimization, target marketing or supply chain management.
Customers are making a new set of rules in the game between buyers and sellers and both can benefit from them. These changes can help retailers as well, if they are willing to transform their businesses.
For example, Hertz has always valued customers' opinions about its rental cars and customer service. In the past, Hertz employees painstakingly read each customer comment submitted online or by phone and placed them into categories, such as problems with cars or requests for managers to call back customers.
Now the world's largest airport car rental company uses analytics software to examine customer survey answers -- including text messages -- to make sense of customers' feedback. The automatic system sifts through and tags key customer input for Hertz, helping the company react more efficiently and nimbly.
Urban Outfitters is also using software to create a company-wide order management system for its retail stores, web sites and call centers across its various retail brands. By being able to see its global inventory, Urban Outfitters customers can research, buy, ship and return products anywhere in the world.
What merchants need today is a nimbler, smarter system of doing business. It's a given that the web, iPhones, Facebook and Twitter are creating better informed, smarter consumers. We'll all benefit from the creation of new ways to buy and interact with our favorite companies.
One way we'll benefit is by getting only retail deals we're likely to be interested in -- not irrelevant spam that wastes consumers' time and businesses' money. All the analytics out there can now give retailers the power to cater to each person's preferences, essentially turning marketing into a customer service. The end of spam --- who wouldn't sign up for that?
To learn more about IBM's smarter commerce, click here
Is this just another piece of junk that is going to break?
Who is getting rich off of my purchases?
What kind of pollution is being generated by this product?
Why is there so much junk out here that I don't need?
Are the people who make this product being paid well or are they slaves?
What we need is a reliable rating system for environmental and labor impacts. Ha, ha, that wouldn't do much for business, would it?
I say "offer" because Best Buy has just demonstrated yet again that fewer consumers are willing to pay extra for service, even Nordstrom-level service -- unless shopping at those upscale brick-and-mortar establishments. Point of sale service does not always require "can I help you" part-timers standing around uncomfortably on expensive retail square footage, but when it does, either invest in training and lots of it, or abandon the sales model. I believe just knowing we can get an informed opinion on a product when we want can still make all the difference, whether or not we did our due diligence before walking into the store.
Pillows and pillow cases on line - same product for 70% less than what I would have to pay in town.
Cookware on line - same product for 48% less than what I would have to pay in town.
Music, books, and art prints - consistently 15-25% less than what I would have to pay in town.
Even when they figure out how to add sales tax, these items will still be 8-62% less than what I would have to pay in town.
And customer service (in terms of returning broken/damaged items) has been better for me on-line than when I get stuff in town. The one thing that local venders could do to win this fight is customer service ... and they couldn't care less.
They also seem to have a policy of only hiring people who are willing to learn what the store has and how to use these items ... which has become something of an on-line characteristic these days.
Yes, a consumer revolution is just around the corner, just not the one these "visionaries" seem to think is coming...