The Truth About Today's Retail Customers May Shock You (Here's How To Stay In Business Anyway)

Micah Solomon

If you’re involved in any sort of brick and mortar business, anything that exists in the quote unquote real world–retail, services, hospitality, manufacturing, etc.–it’s time to take a good, honest look at what the digital revolution has done to your customers and prospects.

What you’ll find might be uncomfortable to accept but it is, as they say, what it is. The availability of mobile, internet, kiosk-based, and other digital solutions has brought on a profound change in customers’ outlook and expectations, a change that can be summarized in a single sentence: Customers now expect every business, in every industry, to be as easy to do business with as what they’ve previously encountered online and in self-service solutions.

This high standard is what I call “digital parity,” and it means that:

• Interactions, whether offline or on, should be intuitive, efficient, and fast, and shouldn’t require extraneous human intervention by either the customer or your employees
• Your processes should allow your customers to have control over their own account details and the ability to modify their service preferences
• Customers should be able to access, review, and purchase from your entire catalog and inventory (as they can on iTunes)
• The limitations of a particular location should never constrain them (a freedom that they’ve grown used to online, where they can listen or read immediately via e-book or MP3, or have delivery of a universal selection of items directly to their choice of home, work, or conveniently located “Amazon locker” for pickup)
• You, the service provider, should have (discreet) access to a customer’s entire order history, without ever asking them to repeat any of it, and your systems and employees should be poised to intelligently make use of that information with zero notice and no lag time

Old-School POS • © 2015 Micah Solomon micah@micahsolomon.com

This is a pretty long list and not every item applies to every business situation. These expectations have, however, irrevocably reshaped your customers’ minds, and we all need to adapt, and soon. The ease, convenient selection, and immediacy with which customers are able to transact business from their homes, smartphones, and tablets has already caused industry-leading businesses to fall by the wayside as a result of their inability to compete with or adapt to the changing expectations defined by advances in the digital world.

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A business that achieves digital parity has a chance at succeeding in this new economy, assuming the other parts of its offerings are sound. Those that can’t will fall by the wayside, even if they get most everything else right. Among those already on the casualty list: Borders, Tower Records, Blockbuster, J&R Music World, Kodak, your friendly local video rental store, many of the more hidebound travel agencies, and retailers and wholesalers in almost every niche.

My goal here, of course, is to keep you from being added to this list. And there isn’t much time left to be rescued from your old ways of doing business. The change in mindset I describe is now almost completely realized in the newest generation of your customers, the millennials (born 1980-2000, give or take), whose world has always included online, connective, and mobile technology. Change is also coming, and at nearly as rapid a pace, to customers of all ages. So I respectfully suggest you get crackin’.