The lack of synergy between the online and offline customer experience

12th June 2009

Picture the scene; walking into your favourite retailer you’re forced to turn left to buy something, or turn right into a separate area to experience the brand, you simply can’t do both at the same time. Even better, walking into another of your favourite shops you ask a sales assistant if they sell jeans and get no response what-so-ever from them. When you do manage to find the jeans area, the sales person isn’t prepared to help you narrow down your choice by ascertaining the size, fit, style and price you’re after. Then when you eventually find a pair of jeans, you get to the checkout only to be told there are additional costs associated with buying the product that you weren’t aware of.

Now I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking this wouldn’t happen right? Well in the offline world you’d be correct, but in the online world…well that’s a different matter. As too few transactional websites are fit for purpose, and many fail to deliver the same customer experience enjoyed in the brand’s store channel.

Let me give you a few examples;

Paul Smith.co.uk; I searched for Jeans and got one pair showing. I was then rather fortunate to find a link, which does actually bring up more jeans.

But then I was left with literally hundreds of products to choose from. So why don’t they help me sort and filter these choices down so that I can see a selection of products that fit my requirements on price, size, fit, style etc? After all I’m a busy man, I don’t have all day to scroll down an endless list of products.

With anything from 30% to 50% of their online sales likely to start in the search box, I’d suggest this would be a good area to focus on.

I noticed that you can click on ‘collections’ for more of a brand experience or on ‘shop online’, for a fairly bland transactional experience. Surely it would be more effective to leverage the tremendous heritage and richness of the brand enabling customers to experience an integrated brand and transactional experience, as they do in the offline channel?

Oh, I found a pair of shoes I liked and was cross sold a nice pair of socks to go with them, but what’s this, the socks are out of stock, and don’t appear to be available as an ‘email me when back in stock’ or back order service? Why did you show me them in the first place?

After this mildly stressful experience, I took myself off to AnnSummers.com ; Ok, so we all need a bit of light relief now and then (And no that’s not what I mean!), but one look at the homepage and my head was buzzing. Sometimes less is more you know! If they reduced the huge amount of content, offers and calls to action on the homepage, bounce rates would reduce and conversion rates would increase.

This is a vastly different experience to that instore. I can appreciate the need for subtlety in the store environment, otherwise customers wouldn’t cross the threshold, but there is virtually no correlation between the on and offline brand experience.

Abercrombie.com; As is the case with too many retail sites, I got half way through the checkout process before I was told how much delivery is going to cost. I wonder what % of abandoned baskets is triggered as a result of this?

It’s not rocket science, just provide customers with the same experience and level of service you give them in your store. If you don’t someone else online will.

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