The Invisible Technology
by Kate Nightingale, Consumer Psychologist @ Humanising Brands
This is a series of 4 articles, in conversation with OLR where we are exploring the behavioural/psychological underpinning of various retail technologies and how these can be extremely valuable to your brand.
The Invisible Technology
Our first two stories introduced the concept of meaningful and meaningless friction and showed how some easy to implement and use technology can truly reduce the meaningless friction and enhance the meaningful friction, resulting in much stronger consumer-brand relationships, loyalty and many other consumer behaviour benefits. Let’s explore another scenario.
The power of subconsciousness and what's 'not there'
You know that moment when you found the product you love and it also shows it’s on sale? You are excited and almost running to a sales associate to pay, only to find out that the price scanned is not the same as your online research promised. Disappointment is only the beginning of the impact of such a situation. Unfortunately, it trickles into any brand trust a customer might have built with your brand. According to Edelman Trust Barometer (2022) brand trust is the third consideration after price and quality in any decision making, jumping from position five in 2019. Even the smallest mishap starts creating doubt in a customer and since the human brain is wired to pay more attention to negative information and experiences than positive (in a ratio of 5:1), it can take you five good deeds to regain this trust.
Technologies that prevent dissatisfaction
While a lot of the focus and attention goes on delivering excellent customer service, beautiful displays and products to drive sales, if the store IT system fails to operate, all the effort to satisfy and delight the customers goes to waste. There are technologies that focus on preventing those negative experiences.
iHub for example is specifically designed to ensure seamless communication between Xstore POS and other omnichannel components, to eliminate mismatched or incorrect information thus reducing the chance of damaging your brand trust in the minds of your customers. OLR has also developed HAWK for real-time monitoring & alerting of the Xstore POS system to maximise system uptime, improve checkout speed and reduce customer frustration in the queue/ store walk out and ultimately reduce and prevent lost sales!
To ensure everything in the omnichannel runs smoothly, services like Automated Regression Testing are put in place to continuously test and improve the performance of your retail technology portfolio and play a key role to ensure the end-to-end customer journey experience is as slick as possible!
“Although a lot of retail technology that we often think about is customer-facing, these back of the house, hidden solutions have a tremendous direct impact on customer experience and satisfaction.”
As brand trust is continuously growing in importance and will stay like that for a long while, customers will be constantly preferring brands that are worthy of their trust. Breaking that trust once, is not a big deal. Twice, a customer starts to ponder. Thrice and you can likely say goodbye to them.
If you have more questions about consumer psychology or the technology integration behind it, get in touch with KATE NIGHTINGALE or OLR respectively.
References:
Edelman (2020). 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer. Retrieved from: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2020-trust-barometer