A guide to in-store Click & Collect

The problems with in-store Click & Collect and how to solve them

Customer expectations are rising.

Today’s customer expects retailers to meet them where they are: on any device, any channel, any time, and the same applies to delivery.

In-store Click & Collect, where customers order online and pick up in a bricks- and-mortar location, is widespread and its popularity is growing. It gives control to consumers by allowing them to collect at a time convenient to them.

By driving footfall into the store, it also gives customers an opportunity to interact further with the brand. In addition, environmentally-conscious shoppers are using pick-up options more often as a means to reduce carbon emissions and packaging.

But from both a customer and retailer perspective, the service, at many retailers, is broken. Increasingly, the in-store experience is getting worse as retailers “cost engineer” their in-store offering which often results in existing systems stitched together by manual processes. This causes knock-on problems for customers; evidenced in the fact that year on year Click & Collect customer satisfaction rates are falling.

For most retailers, offering a seamless, engaging solution seems tricky, resulting in a poor customer experience, frustrated store associates and missed sales. When auditing some of the biggest brands, we saw manual processes, paper-based systems, and long wait times.

For multichannel retailers, Click & Collect is selected on more than 33% of orders. Yet customer satisfaction levels have failed to keep pace with this demand and are now lagging behind. In fact, a study by JDA revealed that nearly half of all customers experienced a problem, be it a lack of notifications or long wait times because of cumbersome processes in-store.

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