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AUSTIN, Texas — Today’s consumers are not interested in choosing between shopping online or in brick-and-mortar stores. They want to do both, sometimes at the same time, and they want the experience across all channels to be as seamless as possible.
Today’s consumers are not interested in choosing between shopping online or in brick-and-mortar stores. They want to do both, sometimes at the same time, and they want the experience across all channels to be as seamless as possible.
So argued Cindy Davis, executive vice president of global customer insights and analytics at Walmart, in a presentation at last month’s 2015 IRI Summit here.
"The fact is that our customers, especially the moms, are balancing — juggling is a better term — family and career, time and money, even today and tomorrow," Davis said. "They’re not living in an ‘or’ world, they’re living in an ‘and’ world. And we at Walmart want to be with them every step of the way."
Davis shared three anecdotes showing the way customers are shopping at Walmart today. Laura relocated to Connecticut for her husband’s job, but was worried when a bad snowstorm back in Chicago left her mother homebound. So she went online at walmart.com and bought groceries that she had delivered to her mother’s home.
Sandra, a Hispanic mom, wanted to cook a Thanksgiving meal for her family, yet didn’t want to miss any Black Friday deal. She was able to go online early, before she started cooking, and buy the gifts she wanted.
And Melissa was not ready when she found out that her new baby would be arriving early. She didn’t have a car seat yet, so she ordered one online and picked it up at a Walmart store on her way to the doctor’s office.
"In every one of these situations, technology, especially mobile, is one of the keys to making it all happen," Davis said.
To determine exactly what today’s tech-empowered consumers expect from the retail experience, Walmart has collected massive amounts of its own data, and it also works with suppliers and with such syndicated data providers as IRI, to learn as much as it can about what customers are buying, what they are not buying and why they buy particular products from specific retailers.
"We’ve been studying the drivers of retail choice for decades," Davis said. "And, truthfully, they are still the same: convenience, price, assortment and experience. What has changed is customers’ expectations of each of those areas. They’ve evolved and become heightened as the pace of our customers’ lives has accelerated."
Davis said the roughly 16,000 small-format stores that have opened in the United States in the last four years and consumers’ growing ability to shop right from their phones have changed expectations about convenience.
"At Walmart, we have about 4,500 stores, and that puts our merchandise within 10 miles of 90% of all Americans," she said. "But customers tell us that convenience today isn’t just about location. Today convenience means fast and easy access, whether online or in the store. So we have to be able to deliver on that fast and easy access, which means different things to different customers, or even to the same customer depending on their mission on a given day."
Walmart has been working with IRI to study trip missions and how they can affect consumers’ needs and preferences.
The giant retailer has also leveraged some of the lessons it has picked up from its overseas operations. The Walmart Grocery online shopping service, for example, benefitted what Walmart learned from its Asda unit — that the ability to pick up groceries without leaving one’s car can be more convenient than getting them delivered to one’s home.
Walmart has also developed a personalization engine so online customers see different pages based on everything from their location to their purchase history, and a product recommendation engine that suggests like or complementary products.
Those are some of the ways Walmart offers a personalized, empowered and easy experience to its customers, Davis said.
