What ‘Webrooming’ Means for Retailers
By now, many retailers have realized that fighting the consumer trend of showrooming is a losing battle. Despite their best efforts, there's little that retailers can do to prevent consumers from browsing or testing products in-store and later purchasing those products from an online competitor.
However, even though 73 percent of shoppers have admitted to showrooming in the past six months, even more shoppers (88 percent) have engaged in "webrooming," a new shopping trend that actually works in favor of brick-and-mortar retailers.
The Impact of Webrooming on Brick-and-Mortar Stores
Webrooming is the practice of researching products online before going to a brick-and-mortar store for a final evaluation and purchase. For retailers, webrooming presents opportunities to provide shoppers with information they expect to receive online (e.g., product information, pricing, peer reviews, etc.), while maintaining control over the customer journey by showcasing the physical store experience as the consumer's final destination.
There are several tips and strategies brick-and-mortar retailers can use to take full advantage of the webrooming trend:
1. Adapt to consumers — wherever they are. The days when consumers adapted their behaviors to accommodate the limitations of individual retailers are long gone. Now, retailers must adapt to the fundamental reality that they have to change their business models to serve the fluid needs of consumers, who are firmly in the driver's seat in today's retail marketplace.
By adapting customer experiences and improving their ability to serve customers across multiple channels, retailers can leverage webrooming as a way to generate greater levels of satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Break down organizational silos. One of the biggest challenges retailers face in adapting to the new multichannel expectations of consumers is breaking down the internal organizational silos that prevent the delivery of a seamless customer experience. For example, e-commerce, marketing and in-store operations should no longer be viewed as separate divisions within the retail organization. Consumers view them as one brand.
To take advantage of webrooming and other consumer behaviors, retailers need to recognize that all internal functions share the same task. All touchpoints and interactions need to reflect a common brand goal and brand promise, and they must work to deliver a unified customer experience across all channels.
3. Leverage data. In the age of big data, retailers have an unprecedented amount of information at their fingertips. Every channel and touchpoint produces data that can be used to provide valuable insights about consumer behaviors and to highlight areas of improvement across the customer experience.
It's especially important for retailers to pull key insights from customer feedback data. By effectively monitoring, measuring and analyzing feedback across all channels, retailers can significantly improve their ability to maximize webrooming opportunities.
Retailers should resist the temptation to view webrooming as a magic pill that inoculates them from the effects of showrooming. Instead, leading retailers are embracing both webrooming and showrooming as realities of the evolving retail landscape, enabling them to create exceptional customer experiences that cut across all of the channels and touchpoints that are important to delivering a great experience to today's consumers.
Dr. Gary Edwards is the chief customer officer at Empathica. Gary can be reached at gedwards@empathica.com.
