Inside Outdoor Winter 2018

UNIVERSALLY GOOD. SAFE WATER FOR YOU AND CHILDREN AROUND THE GLOBE. Lifestraw.com The best things in life are good for everyone. LifeStraw Universal is an adapter kit that turns your favorite water protozoa. It’s also a part of our Follow the Liters program, where every LifeStraw product sold provides one child in a developing country with safe water for an entire year. We’ve already reached 633,777 children and we’re striving to reach our 1millionth child in 2018. Let’s get there together. The NEW LifeStraw Universal provides caps and an marketing to be targeted accurately. Here again, it’s largely about streamlin- ing the shopping interaction. Up to this point, retailers are putting a lot of their personalization eggs into the social media basket, at least partly due to the low cost of entry. More than 80 percent say they gain cus- tomer insight through social media and comments, and 92 percent use social media for customer interactions with brand. Nearly 90 percent of retailers are now using social media comments as a critical customer satisfaction measurement, up from 59 percent last year, say BRP analysts. Here again, anything garnered from a social media harvest should be placed in the hands of empowered em- ployees. In the traditional retail model, customers are identified at the point of sale, if at all. However, by the time a customer reaches checkout, if they make it to checkout at all, any chance to deliver a personalized, streamlined, satisfying customer experience may have passed. “Without early identification of the customer, retailers miss critical engage- ment opportunities, such as clienteling and guided selling, which can increase sales and deliver a better customer experience,” BRP analysts point out. Engaged, informed and enthusiastic associates have long been a perceived benefit of independent and specialty retail. So until the time comes when robot replacements and self-service mecha- nisms mature, traditional tactics such as superior employee training, incentives to serve well, adequate staffing and longev- ity all remain of the upmost importance. Also in the meantime, investments in technology that empower associates is both a doubling down on existing spe- cialty strategies and a means for provid- ing the in-store experience that will be increasingly expected moving forward. In your opinion, what do store associates need in order to help deliver an excellent customer experience? Millennials (ages 18-36) Generation X (ages 37-52) Baby Boomers (ages 53-17) Visibility of available inventory at other physical stores or warehouses if a store item is out of stock 54% 57% 69% Ability to look up product details on demand on mobile device 55% 60% 62% Ability to perform checkout activities anywhere in the physical store from mobile device 37% 42% 32% Ability to look up customer reviews to share with shopper considering purchase 34% 27% 24% Ability to look up customer profile information to help provide customer service 29% 26% 18% Ability to use a mobile device to reference automated product recommendations based on shopper profile 27% 23% 15% Source: Salesforce Research winter 2018 | Inside Outdoor 33