Measuring, Enhancing The IT Impact On The Customer Experience

By Aditya Nath and Arvind Srivastava,

Retailers are rapidly recognizing that in-store customer experience is a key enabler in driving higher sales and customer loyalty. This has led to an industry-wide deployment of new and innovative technologies at all customer touch points. The need for continuous tracking and monitoring of availability, usability, utilization, and health of these technologies has been heightened as retailers wish to gain an understanding of how customer experience and buying behavior is being impacted by them. Unfortunately, today's in-store IT monitoring systems are ineffective in being the "eyes and ears" of the retailers. They are unable to provide the level of insight that is critical in helping retailers decide on the optimum level of investment in technology as a function of measures such as revenues per square foot, sale per employee, average cart size, customer satisfaction index, etc.