How to upgrade your click & collect experience

Digital retail sales will increase around 20% during the coming holiday season in US market. 

Similar growth figures have been projected also for the European market. During the holiday season store pickup as a delivery option accentuates as people tend to want their goods fast, and large volumes of orders may cause delays in parcel services. The growth of click & collect has been reported widely, for example John Lewis has reported that more than half of their online orders were picked up via click & collect last year.

The holiday season is just around the corner - now’s the perfect time to start improving your click & collect processes, and make it a crucial part of your customer journey and customer experience. Here are our tips on how to get started:

Recognise the role of click & collect

Recognise what kind of role click & collect (and all the other delivery options) play in the customer journey. Is it going to be just a low cost delivery option or do you want it to play a crucial role in building an exquisite customer experience?

Home Depot is a good example of recognising the biggest bottlenecks in customers’ needs and empowering shoppers: both professional contractors and DIY shoppers can easily find, select and collect the products they seek. Home Depot ended up developing delivery options suitable for their customers’ needs, including a self-service pickup solution.

Another great example is Finnish verkkokauppa.com: they provide fast access to a selected part of their product range, which is available for click & collect 24/7.

Invest in the click & collect experience

Build a capability for click & collect. Traditional retail spaces have been designed to serve in-store payment, so quite often click & collect customers are served separately in some non-specific department or at a customer service point.

Difficulty to find a click & collect point, long lines and slow service don’t exactly promote good customer experience. Among UK shoppers the biggest issues in click & collect are long waiting times in stores and staff’s inability to locate items in addition that there is no dedicated area. These issues should be fixed before you start promoting your click & collect service.

When developing your click & collect processes, ask a good number of people to test the service and improve it step-by-step based on the feedback you get. Here you can find a good list of tips how to fix some basic things in your click & collect.

Promote, promote, promote

Remember to promote your click & collect option. Click & collect is typically the only delivery option where your customer experience is totally in your own hands. It is a great way to get the customers visit your physical retail location, which is always a golden opportunity to upsell and cross-sell.

Did you know that the Norwegian sports retailer, XXL, offers a 5€ discount voucher with in-store pickup if at the same you buy items with more than 20€. This is one way to get customers spend time and money in the store when collecting their online orders. Target reports that 1/3 of all click & collect customers end up buying goods also from the physical store when collecting their order, so it really pays off to develop click & collect. 

There are also several interesting startups in this field, including Curbside providing solutions for retailers to match customers’ need for fast delivery. We believe that the importance of click & collect in omnichannel retail will increase as a delivery method and now is the perfect time to make sure you are on top of the click & collect game.