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| Builder and Fixer David Otani |
“Who is your competition?” This
is a question I ask my retail customers and typically they respond with a few
different company names, but rarely do they respond with Amazon. Amazon’s
ability to provide great pricing, critical product information including
customer reviews, and deliver within a short period of time is the new standard
for customer service. Retailers who cannot provide the same level of excellent service
along with a great tactile experience which Amazon cannot do, will not succeed in retailing
in the future.
Retailers, in general, are late to the technology party. They are imbedded with legacy systems that were costly to deploy and now painful to write off. That said, if retailers want to compete and stay relevant, they will have to improve their systems to provide the consumer with more information and keep track of their consumer’s activities across multiple channels.
The cost to garner a sale in brick and mortar is exponentially
more expensive than on the web. However, a brick and mortar provides a tangible
experience with immediate gratification that the web cannot. A brick and mortar
shopping experience can include customer interaction, the ability to touch and
feel a product and, of course, the option to leisurely browse the aisles of
whatever products or displays that catch their eye. Additionally, brick and mortar provides a
branded experience that no third party re-seller can ever provide.
There will always be a place for brick and mortar in the retail
world. This doesn’t mean the consumer will view brick and mortar with a different
set of lenses. If anything, the consumer will expect more from brick and mortar
because of the face to face customer experience. Therefore, brick and mortar should
be determining the customer service standard, not Amazon.
Additionally, David lectures at FIT semi-annually, runs a Judo school, and is currently ranked number one in the U.S. in Judo in the masters division.
