Retail's Secret Weapon: Meet The Tablet
By Hannah Ash, contributing writer
From Dressing Room Selfies To Interactive Shopping Carts, Tablets Raise The Bar For Customer Experiences
The tablet computer is transforming in-store customer experiences. Since the earliest Android tablets were first released in 2009, the tablet has undergone a steady transformation: from novelty item to powerful tool for conducting commerce. A recent Forrester study indicates that 60% of online consumers will own a tablet by 2017. According to a report by Parago, two out of 5 consumers now shop on tablets. Tablets are creating fundamental changes in the way customers approach shopping. For the brick and mortar store looking to stay relevant in an increasingly online consumer habitat, the tablet is a secret weapon that is bridging the gap between real world and virtual experiences.
Tablets can add significant value to the consumer experience. Last week, Karl Lagerfeld opened a new shop in London and a surprise awaited shoppers inside of its dressing rooms: iPads. The iPad tablets gave customers the opportunity to take selfies and share them with their friends, right from the privacy of Lagerfeld's dressing rooms. Tablets are popping up everywhere, even grocery stores. In 2013, for example, CUBOCC created a month-long campaign for Hellman’s to market its mayonnaise in Brazil. Shopping carts in a select market were outfitted with tablets that suggested ideas to incorporate mayonnaise into a dish when shoppers strolled by a certain food item (such as lettuce): this drove sales by 70 percent.
The tablet brings the virtual experience to the real world. Apple’s checkout system is a perfect example of this, as it closely mirrors the virtual shopping experience. With online shopping, customers simply hit checkout whenever they are done - at Apple stores, customers can basically do the same thing. As Jim Carroll, retail futurist trends and innovation expert, commented, "From an interaction perspective, Apple has completely eliminated the checkout line.” Bruce Molloy, vice president of business development at Customer Mobile commented, "the smarter retail shops are embracing the online experience and incorporating it into their store's layout. By using tablets and other interactive displays, they're actually providing the customer with a new type of sales assistance – one that's actually more compelling, passionate, up-to-date, and accurate about the product offerings than the human who's going to ring the sale up." Tablets are poised to bring customers, and brick and mortars, the best of both worlds.