Crate And Barrel Pilots Tablet Program To Drive Sales And Improve Customer Experience
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Retailer partners with CloudTags to provide customers to use a “Mobile Tote” in-store.
Crate and Barrel has teamed up with customer identification and remarketing services provider CloudTags to engage in a single-store pilot of the “Mobile Tote,” a store-provided tablet that allows customer to scan product barcodes for more information, search for items, and add them to a wishlist. The goal is to improve the continuous customer experience and help drive sales.
“Anything that makes shopping with the brand easier we want to do,” Joan King, VP of e-commerce for Crate and Barrel told DMNews.
The use of the tablet in the store is free, and there is no sign-in required, although customers who provide email addresses can then send themselves their wish list. It also allows those who enter emails to access an exclusive Mobile Tote checkout line and to request a sales associate to gather their requested items for them.
The single-store pilot is being run at the Crate and Barrel in the Westfield Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie, Illinois. CloudTags also recently launched a similar program for Heal’s, a British home furniture retailer. The goal is to provide a seamless omnichannel experience for customers.
“Consumers today are more informed than ever before, which has put many retailers and their store associates at a real disadvantage,” said Tobi Schneidler, CEO of Bouncepad. “CloudTags helps retailers take back control of their store and deliver a smarter customer experience.”
Crate and Barrel is hoping that the tablet tech can help bolster customer experience in the race against its competitors. The move comes many physical retailers attempt to build out a more digital and seamless in-store shopping experience and without creating a mobile-related chore or hassle. The Crate and Barrel concept behind the CloudTags-enabled pilot has drawn praise for its simplicity and high reviews for the enhanced checkout speed option for Mobile Tote users, as most experts note this will likely have the biggest change on the in-store shopping experience.
According to James Yancey, CEO of CloudTags, the Connected Store experience provides in-store customers with the same content and personalization capabilities they could get online without having to expose personal data to get it.
The trial seems to be working. CloudTags reported that encouraging customers to scan barcodes for more than one product has increased in-store checkout rates by nearly five times (12 percent to 56 percnet0, while associate-aided sessions have more than doubled the checkout rate and increased the retailer’s email sign-up rate from 25 percent to 41 percent.
Ultimately, King told DMNews, “It's definitely just a test for us,” she says. “We do a lot of tests to try and understand what our customers value, and this definitely showed us that, directionally, they value anything that will make the in-store shopping experience more seamless. So, it validated a concept for us. We're not going to roll it out to other stores until we improve the full experience of using the Mobile Tote.”
While not every test will prove to be valuable company-wide, each one helps further the overall customer experience. King stated, “We definitely put the customer at the center of everything we do and try to focus our efforts on things that are going to resonate with customers [and] listen to what it is that they're looking for,” she says. [We try to] not ever take technology for technology's sake but instead make sure that we're delivering a really inspirational experience that's seamless and easy for customers.”