Show me the way
Published: 11 May, 2006
So you want to keep your shoppers shopping in the amazing collection of shops that have decided to make your mall their home? Making sure this happens is a matter of ensuring that customers understand your centre's offer and can find their way around. This is pretty straightforward if a shopping centre consists, effectively, of one indoor street, but most locations just aren't like that. Indeed, guiding shoppers around the twists and turns that characterise many modern malls is arguably the single most important thing that management can do to make sure that when visitors finally get inside a scheme, they get round to spending.
Sound and movement are the most important factors to consider for keeping shoppers in the information loop according to Siemon Scammell-Katz, chairman of shopper behaviour consultancy ID Magasin. He comments: "If you use light and movement you're about four times more likely to get people to notice something than using a static display." Perhaps with this in mind Capital Shopping Centres has installed self-service information points in all of its centres, aimed at supplementing the manned service desks that continue to be used.
Peter Barton, operations director at CSC, says if you use "paper-based systems, every time a new shop is brought into the centre you have to update everything and go to the printers. With the system we use, it can be updated from a distance."
According to Barton putting outsize information pods with relevant store information has been a cost-neutral exercise. He says that in 2004 CSC was the first to start using the interactive touchscreens to inform its shoppers about the range of services, since when every centre in the portfolio has had information pods installed. This might seem an expensive undertaking, but the deal struck between CSC and its supplier, details of which Barton refuses to divulge, is that installation and maintenance are effectively free in return for the screen suppliers taking a cut of the advertising revenues. Which might lead you to conclude that CSC's information pods are primarily concerned with revenue generation and that they are just another way of putting adverts in front of people.
== a human face ==
This however is rather to miss the point claims Barton. He says that the screens that have been put into CSC malls act primarily as information sources - to help shoppers find out about which shops are in the centres, where they are and the range of events that may be taking place. As such, they have a distinct advantage over manned service desks - which tend to be expensive if only because somebody is employed to be on duty while a centre is open. Owing to the fact that CSC's digital information points are largely self-financing, a good number of them can be installed in any location.
This means that CSC covers its options. Barton points out that at the Harlequin mall in Watford there are "between 45 and 50 different entrances into the centre, so it's desperately important that people know where they are."
The pods are not small. "You can't miss the damn things," says Barton. He points out that you can miss customer services desks, because there tend to be fewer of them. Scamell-Katz makes an acute observation: "With any kind of communication, what we talk about is time, location and content. The problem is that mall operators aren't very good at putting information in the right places. They tend to put them away from areas of customer flow." It's a problem that CSC has clearly overcome.
There is also the mindset of shoppers in a mall's public areas. Scammell-Katz says: "It's hard to keep people's attention in a mall because once they leave a store they may switch off and will then be in navigation mode." This is fine as far as providing directions is concerned, but malls should also be concerned with putting people back into shopping mode and effective customer service should be able to do this as well.
But what about shopping centres that do not actually run to an interactive touchscreen system? There are plenty of them and secondary and tertiary schemes will almost certainly rely upon a human interface. For this to work, staff must be well briefed.
At the top end sits Bluewater. The Lend Lease-owned scheme works using what might seem old-fashioned printed navigational aids. But according to Amanda Campbell, head of marketing at Lend Lease, this is singularly effective when coupled with the Lend Lease philosophy of "guest" and "hosts". The theory is beguilingly simple. Shoppers at Bluewater are "guests" and anybody working at the site is a "host."
In effect this means that the dreaded word "security" will not be heard in Bluewater, Touchwood or Overgate as those involved in keeping the mall safe are as much "hosts" as anyone else working for Lend Lease in its UK locations. The upshot is that there is a generally benign feel to the centres and customer service has the potential to be almost omnipresent, in the form of "hosts" looking to help people as well as carry out their various other functions. That said, Campbell says that Lend Lease is looking at digital wayfinding systems, but a decision on whether to go ahead remains outstanding.
The Lend Lease and CSC strategies to customer service tackle the issue in contrasting manners. But the net effect is broadly the same - shoppers are not left stranded. This should be the aim of any shopping centre customer service initiative and whether budgets are substantial or otherwise, it should be a priority.
