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Here's my take. I grew up in my parent's brick-and-mortar retail business: a four-store bicycle shop that's one of the largest and busiest in the nation. We w
by chrissnell 12y ago
Here's my take. I grew up in my parent's brick-and-mortar retail business: a four-store bicycle shop that's one of the largest and busiest in the nation. We were an early pioneer on the Internet, one of the very first to sell bicycle parts online back in 1995. These days, they don't do much e-commerce but brick-and-mortar business has grown a lot and the management is still tech-savvy.
Here are the problems that I see:
1. Employees are busy. In the bike shop, you're constantly running around, helping this customer and that customer, answering the phone, taking in a repair, doing a demo, etc. It's going to be very hard to get someone on a computer or iPad to do live chat. If an employee is typing on a computer within sight of a customer, the customer will assume that they aren't busy and will interrupt them with a question. The problem is so bad that when my father would go out onto the sales floor to fix a computer, he would put on a fake badge that said something like "DataTech Computer Repair Services" so customers wouldn't think he was a shop employee and interrupt him. Perhaps a speech-to-text interface might work but how is that better than a simple phone call?
2. Non-technical employees (most brick-and-mortar employees) are slow, inaccurate typists. Back when my parent's store was heavy into e-commerce, we quickly found that we needed dedicated guys to take online orders over the phone because most of our guys couldn't touch-type. If your interface requires a lot of typing, the employees and the customers using it aren't going to be happy.
- tonysusername 12y agoThanks for sharing!
- alaskamiller 12y agoanswering the phone That's what this is.
- chrissnell 12y agoNot according to the video demo on their landing page right now.
- alaskamiller 12y agoThe video demo is fine. Text is phone these days and answering a text is exactly the same as answering a phone call asking for more info. A 20 yo retail associate at American Apparel will take to this and figure this out in an hour.
- rahatm1 12y agoI totally agree! An average teenager/young adult sends 3000 text messages per month. For this generation, text messages are more convenient than phone calls.
- chrissnell 12y agoI understand where you're going with this now. Employees tap out responses on their smartphones. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer now: you walk in and see an employee looking down at their phone and tapping away. Most people won't assume that they're conversing with a customer. The phone conversation doesn't have the same "hey, I'm busy with another customer right now" effect that an audible phone or in-person conversation has. Customers will assume the worst: that they're being ignored for the sake of some employee's personal texting.
- tonysusername 12y agoEmployees already use there phones while at work to text their friends etc...When a customer walks in.... They would usually put there phone in their pocket and satisfy that walking. Can't see how they wouldn't use this in the same way.
- alaskamiller 12y agoFloor staff are trained to be proactive rather than reactive. When the customer has already voiced their intent and it doesn't necessitate more interaction you can switch to another channel queue. Obviously if that's not the dynamic of your shop then this isn't the right tool.
- tonysusername 12y ago
- TTPrograms 12y agoI assumed they were talking to an AI of some kind. They should do that instead.