The evidence is everywhere, for all to see. Mobile technologies have become ingrained into people’s daily routines. As those routines relate to shopping, consumers use their mobile techs to find the best solutions to their lifestyle needs by searching for content about products and services within the context of the need, checking what the community of like-minded shoppers has to say about their potential purchases, and finally by engaging in commerce (the exchange of money for goods & services) with the selected retailer. These activities can (and often do) happen in concert with web searches at home and in-store browsing. Mobile isn’t so much a selling channel as the glue that brings all the other legacy selling channels together into one (hopefully) consistent shopping experience.

In our most recent benchmark report, The Impact of Mobile in Retail, the data led us to make some fairly pragmatic recommendations. Here are some key suggestions we make for all retailers:

Don’t Deny Mobile’s Influence

Retailers are under-estimating mobile’s influence on consumers’ buying decisions, perhaps thinking that they have time to meaningfully address the challenges and opportunities associated with putting the store into consumers’ pockets and purses. Think again. External data from quantitative consumer studies show conclusively that consumers are using mobile as an important tool to making many or even most of their purchase decisions. Retailers should assume that all of consumers’ purchase decisions will be made with the influence of information made available on mobile devices.

Put Price Transparency Higher on the List

Mobile technologies have made price transparency real for consumers, and its time for retailers to get with the program. In this era of price transparency, pricing is no longer an attribute of product, but it is central to brand and corporate strategy. Less than ½ of Retailers in this study indicate that using mobile to check price or availability is important to make available via mobile, and fewer than 1/3 have implemented such capabilities. While ultimately price can only be a negative (retailers get no points for getting the price right, but points off if its too high), not making price-lookup and comparison readily available is damaging to the Brand right now.

Gain Insight into Consumers’ Complex Paths-to-Purchase

The #1 reason for developing a mobile application, even with all the complexity of multiple mobile operating systems, provisioning, and security that that brings with it, is that mobile apps can deliver valuable information to retailers about how and where consumers are making their ultimate purchase decisions. Smart retailers are looking at apps for more personalized communications, which includes opportunities for more targeted location-based offers. Just as importantly though is the fact that the mobile app can report back metrics that retailers can use to understand how consumers are interacting with the Brand. From a technology perspective, this is not trivial, since it entails capturing those non-transactional signals, relating them to consumer behaviors, analyzing them, and doing something useful with the result. But without such capabilities, much of the product selection process is invisible to retailers, since it happens outside of the store.

Employees!

If the store is to remain relevant, employees need to know just as much – or a little more- than customers do about the available products and services. Retailers continue to give short shrift to the imperative of arming their own employees to promote the brand to consumers while they are in the store. To fix that, retailers have to do several things, but it starts with connectivity: retailers must enable WiFi connectivity for their own people in the store.

Get Help

One of the biggest inhibitors that Retail Winners in particular are dealing with in addressing the mobile imperative, is the shortage of internal skills in either the eCommerce group or IT to pursue the opportunity. There is only one short-term solution for that, and that is to go out and find the talent. But that brings up the issue of a challenging ROI: retailers balk at investing too much in a direction that they are unsure of. This brings us back to our top recommendation, to not under-estimate mobile’s influence. It is hard for business people to accept that they don’t control the adoption curve for these new technologies, but it is true nonetheless. Companies like Samsung, Apple, Google, Nokia, and others are more likely to affect the compelling case of mobile adoption, than anything that gets decided in the retailer’s executive suite.

It’s More than eCommerce

As we said earlier, mobile isn’t so much a selling channel as the glue that brings all the other legacy selling channels together into one (hopefully) consistent shopping experience. That’s a far-reaching statement, because it implies operational changes to all of the existing selling channels as well as the technologies that support them. It implies one enterprise-wide view of the customer, product, and inventory. To the extent that retailers have “verticalized ” operations supporting the current selling channels (for example, separate organizations supporting the stores vs. eCommerce vs. the catalog), this can pose huge challenges for the retailer.

One Executive to Guide them All

RSR has said this so frequently, that it should be “old news “, but retailers must task one senior executive, reporting to the CEO, with the job of defining and managing the overall customer experience. Mobile makes it an imperative.

But we didn’t pull these suggestions out of thin air: they are the result of our interpreting the data we collected from retailers over the past few months. We invite you to read the full report that led us to this place, and please drop us a line to let us know with which points you agree – and disagree!