Creating a > Experience Through Mobility: Key Steps to Help Retailers Realize the Promise of Mobile

More digital interactions and smaller store footprints seem inevitable. Mobile shopping will ultimately drive new store sales and service models as well—models that have the potential to deliver significant financial benefits related to higher close rates and transaction sizes, as well as lower labor and occupancy costs for those retailers that get it right.

Our experience suggests four steps to achieve success:

• Know your (mobile) customer
• Understand the customer journey
• Focus on finding, delivering and measuring value creation for you and your customers
• Develop flexible, iterative capabilities that align with your mobile vision, and experiment to stay abreast of rapid change

Everyone knows that the post-recession consumer is both stubbornly frugal and increasingly mobile—but what really complicates the picture is the fact that not all mobile shoppers are created equal.

Accenture conducted a survey of around 2,500 North American shoppers and was able to identify six unique mobile shopper segments, each with a different attitude toward the use of mobile technology while shopping, and idiosyncratic preferences around multichannel shopping, technology adoption, price sensitivity and brand.

By really understanding who is shopping in their stores, how they shop and how mobile influences their shopping behaviors, retailers can respond with mobile shopping, personalization and promotion capabilities that are designed to create value for both customers and themselves.

While mobile clearly is transforming how people shop, the shopping process that consumers follow—from discovery through research, selection and payment—remains largely unchanged. Thus, making it important to ensure that mobile experiences fit naturally and intuitively with how the consumer engages at different points of the shopping journey.

And while the physical store still plays an important role for shoppers, it doesn’t appear to be disappearing any time soon.

As mobile capabilities become more robust, the associated development and implementation investment requirements will likely become more significant.

Given the pace of change and level of uncertainty regarding mobile technology innovation and consumer preference and adoption, it is necessary that retailers remain nimble and iterative when developing and deploying new capabilities. Having a long-term vision is an important foundation, but planning further than 18 months into the future is likely to be a fool’s errand.

Our research revealed that there is strong demand for targeted, personalized and context-relevant experiences across a majority of consumers. And, once the concept of a better deal is introduced, we believe that attitudes to mobile will shift as a majority of consumers have the technical competence to use mobile devices (today, around 40 percent are deemed tech positive).

Moreover, retailers, through the ability to interact with the consumer in a personalized yet automated manner, will find new opportunities to reduce operational costs and derive competitive advantage.

In the future, we expect retail mobile experiences to transform the shopping experience in tandem with innovations in connectivity, operating systems, applications, or handsets themselves. Consumers will become more comfortable with using their phones to shop, and as go-to tools enabling new, mobile-enabled multimedia sales and service experiences.

Just as Internet security improved and was commoditized over time, allowing more consumers to feel comfortable with online shopping experiences, we anticipate that mobile retailing will make similar advances on the back of innovation in consumer communications technology.