Customer Retail Experience: In-Store & Online

What makes a customer experience successful at retail? Yes, the in-store retail experience must be impeccable, but so, too, must the related online experience.

David Polinchock from Polinchock's Ponderings and I, after several intense discussions on the subject, decided we would visit retail stores in NYC to explore and research their in-store & online experience.

[See Brand Experience Lab: Creating a Branded Retail Experience for my first meeting with David.]

This past June 21, 2010, David and I spent the day visiting retail stores in SoHo and 14th Street in New York City.  We visited:

2 Apple Stores [in SoHo and on 14th Street]

Pink

Uniqlo

Levi's 

Gap

All Saints Spitalfields

Madewell

J Crew Men

TopMan/TopShop

Pure Dark

LuLu Lemon Athletica

Burton's

The Evolution Store

Timberland

Sicis

[Note: next time, I will make sure to track my retail visits with  my hiking trail marker app so you can follow in our tracks the next time you visit NYC.]

As we visited these stores, we were curious about how sales associates would interact with us, what they knew about their store online activities, how well each store integrated in-store selling with online resources. We were both armed with cameras. Some stores welcomed photos; others strongly forbid them!

We were interested in how technology was used and integrated in-store. [By the way, we came across the first ever iPads used as interactive retail displays and they looked much more effective than the more traditional computer kiosks.]

Over the next few weeks, I plan to take you through several of these stores and explore with you how each goes about creating a memorable customer retail experience not just in-store, but also online.  It's what David refers to as "Oneline".

I look forward to sharing these adventures and observations with you and encourage you do your own explorations and share them with us.