This week I’m privileged to be among the speakers at the Global Retailing Conference, hosted by the University of Arizona’s Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing. I’m in seriously good company, and I can tell you from past experience, the event is well worth attending. The overarching theme of this year’s conference is “Innovating Customer Engagement. ” My topic is, “Can the Store be Relevant in the 21^st Century? “

Even as I prepare to speak on what retailers have told us in previous benchmark reports, I’m looking at the data from this year’s respondents. I thought I’d spend a few paragraphs letting you know some of our early findings here.

At RSR we focus a lot on the differences in strategies, tactics, technology usage, and behaviors of over-performing retailers – those we call “Retail Winners. ” Our metrics are pretty simple: we define a Retail Winner as one whose year-over-year comparable store/channel sales outpace inflation. Quite simply, generally those Retail Winners think and act differently than their poorer performing peers. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the way they are looking at the in-store experience.

In short, this year’s Retail Winner respondents have a laser focus on the customer. That drives them to increase payroll-to-sales ratios: they are increasing the size of their in-store labor pool at a higher rate than their sales are increasing, and they are adding customer-facing self-service touch points in the store as well. In effect, to borrow a phrase from Burger King, they’re letting the customer “have it your way. ” If a customer wants assistance, an associate will be close at hand, but if she’d rather do it herself, or if the employees are otherwise engaged, everything from price check scanners to product information kiosks will be available to help.

Poorer performing retailers are far more apt to look at the competition instead of the customer. They fret far more about competitors’ prices, products and promotions. They know they want to make the customer experience more convenient, but haven’t connected the dots that make employees a critical part of a differentiated in-store experience. They are extremely bullish on in-store rewards and coupons, but haven’t put much attention into educating and empowering their employees in those stores. There’s no blame being placed here. Much of this is a downward spiral that’s hard to stop.

For example, it turns out that under-performers have also held back on that most basic in-store technology: a modern POS system. While it seems that for Retail Winners and average performers, this POS refresh cycle is coming to an end, Laggards are just now budgeting for the refresh. It’s hard to blame them – if you’ve got more than a couple of stores the capital dollars needed for a POS replacement are daunting. Unfortunately, especially in small-box specialty stores, a modern POS system is considered the linchpin of a successful in-store customer experience. It takes a bold and bullish management team to make serious investments at a time when sales aren’t all that robust. Investing in infrastructure doesn’t make the Board or the Street happy. As RSR partner Brian Kilcourse has pointed out, Amazon.com was hammered by Wall Street for delivering lower profits, driven by infrastructure investments. It takes real cojones to buck that whack to the stock price.

There’s a whole lot more interesting data to come – this benchmark comes at an important time. It’s really fascinating to see how retailers are crafting a new relevancy for stores in a world of Amazon Prime and high gas prices. In the meanwhile, I hope to see you in Tucson. It’s gonna be fun.