In my RPW article last week, a look at our recent Store Report examined Retail Winners’ understanding that employees hold the key to an improved store experience; 65% of Winners identify the ability to educate and empower in-store employees via new technologies as their top opportunity to make the store more alluring to increasingly educated consumers.

This week, I’d like to finish the thought, as belief is only one side of the equation. Via their actions, Winners aren’t just talking the talk: they have been actively providing their employees with technology-enabled touch points in stores longer than have any of their competitors.

Investment Backs Belief

These touch points include computer-based product training, self-service HR, and computer-assisted selling tools within the store walls.

Winners previously told us that one of their biggest challenges is increasing store consistency and employee productivity: tech-enabled self-serve systems are an effective way to help meet such challenges, made all the more valuable by their opportunity to improve the workforce during “down ” times; it is far better to have an associate learning about product features at 3 pm in the absence of shoppers than standing around looking for some menial task to re-perform.

The largest retailers have an even higher propensity to use these tools: 100% have utilized self-service employee touch points for more than a year (compared to only 33% of small retailers).

Further Customer Enablement

While providing employees with knowledge remains the bailiwick of Retail Winners, all retailers have solidified their use of customer-facing technology touch-points this year. Strange Brew

This is an interesting tactic to employ: the customer already has an unparalleled amount of information at her fingertips. She has already tipped the scales in the technology equation, but retailers, in the absence of ubiquitous Wi-Fi in stores, see real value in tapping into her tech-savvy nature with touch-point offerings of their own. In some ways, this speaks to retailers’ lack of confidence in their existing workforce: perhaps if the store is full of new tech toys to play with, consumers will be more likely satisfied.

However, many of these installations, which include kiosks, price-check scanners, and product recipe displays, are easily replicable on a customer’s own device. With digital signage (which greatly improves a stores’ overall look and feel) serving as the exception, wouldn’t it be cleaner and more cost-effective for retailers to provide these services in a strong, positive engagement with the customer on the device she already knows and loves?

Clearly fear of what she might also do on that device stands in their way of moving forward with such opportunities, and it’s our position that it’s time for this (already-obsolete) fear to disappear.