Building the Customer-Centric Store

No one has enough time these days. To increase convenience for shoppers and encourage purchases, retailers are increasingly setting up their stores to make it easier and faster for customers to find and pay for exactly what they want.

Two growing trends in the retail industry are customer self-service and the customer-centric store, and several factors are driving these trends. For example, shoppers are pressed for time and demanding easier and more-enjoyable shopping experiences. They want to get in and out as soon as possible and have a good time while they're on the premises.

To help satisfy these demands, retailers are making efforts to reduce the amount of time customers have to spend in line and improving the efficiency of store operations. Competition is a key driving factor, because customers can always shop at another retailer that better meets their needs. Many retailers have found that self-service in a customer-centric store can often be the best customer service.

Technology is also helping. Customer-centric stores use technology such as kiosks, mobile solutions, self-checkout, and RFID to make shopping easier and more pleasant. Additionally, customer-centric stores can help increase sales through lower employee costs.

Kiosks offer retailers many advantages—portability, for example; the devices can be placed almost anywhere. They are always on, enabling customers to shop at their convenience. Because of a lack of physical limitations, they can offer a large catalog with consistent information. Not oriented strictly toward customers, kiosks provide training and assistance for sales staff and enable staff to transfer that knowledge to customers. As noted earlier, kiosks can reduce labor costs as well as generally minimize overhead.

Kiosks in Action

Some examples of kiosk use in customer-centric stores:

• At the store entrance, they dispense targeted coupons.
• They offer near-immediate access to prices through price verification scanners.
• They offer entertainment to add enjoyment and variety to shopping.
• They can deliver promotions directly to the register.
• Shoppers can use them to print coupons.
• Job seekers can employ them to submit applications.

Other kiosk applications include product and store directories, product and in-store promotions, public access to a store's Web site, loyalty and store card programs, gift card sales, and customer surveys.

The primary components of a customer-centric-store solution are:

• Servers in the store or at headquarters to host applications
• PCs or POS devices in a fat-client environment
• Sun Ray ultra-thin clients in a thin-client environment
• Other customer-centric hardware, such as kiosks, price verifiers, and self-checkout systems
• Store systems application software
• System integration services

In conjunction with leading business partners, Sun Microsystems can help implement customer-centric-store solutions. Sun provides the server for the customer-centric applications, the PCs/Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, and system integration services. Sun's partners (360Commerce, Retek, GERS, Fujitsu, Wincor-Nixdorf) provide the store systems software; any customer-centric hardware, such as kiosks or price verifiers; and POS terminals.