By Ken Rosen
Every once in a while, I get shocked in a Twitter chat. Today, it was:

73% of shoppers [owning smartphones] prefer using their smartphone to handle simple tasks in-store. Only 15% prefer to interact with an employee.

The source is Ian Greenleigh (@be3d) (thank you Ian), who was quoting an Accenture study discussed in Internet Retailer.

And you can’t write this off as a tiny deviant group: the study hit 10 countries and included half men and half women and half under 35 and half over.

What do we make of this? Can owning a smartphone really change behavior?

Short answer: Yes.

Putting a sharper point on this, another Accenture study tidbit: 48 percent of conventional cell phone users plan to buy a smartphone in the next 12 months.

If 73% of smartphone owners—which soon becomes 73% of phone owners—which soon becomes 73% of customers—find ever-smarter smartphones better than employees at telling them which product to buy, whether the price is right, and how satisfied they are likely to be, the very definition of “store” needs to change. Retailers need to break their mindset about the value a store actually offers.

Most discussions of channels are about integrating online selling with offline stores. Gap is a regularly cited example, letting you buy where you want and return where you want. But this misses a more disruptive change.

Most brick-and-mortar retailers tell you online buying delivers price and at-home convenience, but nothing beats stores for service and hands-on experience. The hands-on aspect may remain, but for service? 73% of these buyers just disagreed. They told us a store is primarily a local inventory stocking location. The cloud of crowds, my Facebook friends, previous buyers…all of these whisper to me through my phone. Buyers trust themselves (right or wrong) to know which voice is trying to sell to them and put those sources aside just as they do the sales people in the store.

Are you responsible for brick-and-mortar retail locations? If so, you need to rethink their value and their…and your entire company’s…relationship to customers—even more than most of you already think you do.

Takeaways

  • Strip away your assumptions about the value you offer customers…and actually ask them.
  • Your customers increasingly have “the internet in their pocket.” Embrace that and find ways to engage (and when possible co-opt) these new data sources.
  • Assume for a moment your sales people are useless to customers. How can you change that?

Want more? Please see Part II of Your Customer Prefer Their Phone to Your Employees.