Curry’s PC World owner Dixons Carphone has made great strides in the past 12 months to bolster its cross-channel capabilities.
As one of Retail Week Indicator’s ecommerce leaders, ranking fifth out of the 176 retailers reviewed, Curry’s PC World has taken learnings from across its group to develop how its online and offline channels work in tandem to drives sales growth and customer satisfaction.
Of the electricals retailer’s online sales, 40% involve a store colleague, either by a shopfloor employee ordering an item for a customer they are serving via its website or passing on the parcel to the customer at its click-and-collect desk.
Because of this, Dixons Carphone ecommerce director Stuart Ramage is adamant that making it easier for shoppers to navigate its stores and website concurrently makes good business sense, as well as enhancing the shopping experience.
“We have a fantastic store estate and in equal measure, we have a fantastic set of digital assets. What the market hasn’t done particularly well up until now is leverage the value and unlock the magic that can happen when you stitch those two things together and facilitate the customer’s journey between the two,” he says.
“It’s difficult to move from a digital environment to a store one from a shopping experience perspective and yet customers are forging the way themselves. As an industry, we need to stitch those two together in a way that makes it seamless for the customer.”
Helping store staff sell
The most ambitious initiative that Dixons Carphone has launched with this aim is its Store Mode app, which is designed to enable Currys PC World shopfloor staff to better sell to customers.
Launched last September, Store Mode equips staff with easily digestible information on the products on sale, alongside in-store stock availability, price comparisons and product reviews from its website.
“We wanted to build something which aids with the complexity of navigating really difficult to understand products,” explains Ramage.
“We felt like augmenting the experience for colleagues and giving them more confidence by beginning to access the reams of information we have on the website but structuring it in a way that was really accessible for the colleague so they wouldn’t have to go through the unassisted navigation of a standard web journey.”
The first iteration of the Store Mode app was developed in just nine months and initially launched across five stores.
“Store Mode gives the colleague confidence, which in turn gives the customer confidence,” says Ramage.
“As a result, we’ve seen colleague engagement go up, sales go up and customer NPS go up by 20 points.”
That engagement is plain to see in the amount of feedback store staff have given the app.
In the first week of Store Mode going live, colleagues submitted 600 pieces of feedback to the developers on what was working, what was not and new features they would like to see.
As a result of this strong staff engagement, Dixons Carphone rolled out 3,000 iPads across Currys PC World’s 341-strong store estate to ensure every shopfloor colleague has it at their fingertips by May. It aims to make the app transactional before the end of the year.
Ramage says Store Mode is particularly popular with new starters because it allows them to supplement their own knowledge of products with real reviews from customers.
Live chat and augmented reality
In another bid to harness both its ecommerce platform and stores, Currys PC World has launched a live video chat trial.
The electricals retailer has partnered with tech supplier Go In Store and electricals supplier HP on the pilot, which offers shoppers browsing HP products on the Currys PC World website the option to start a live video chat with a member of staff in one of its stores.
The chat presents a one-way live video feed of the member of staff in-store who is able to speak to the online shopper via a headset and showcase the product they are researching and answer questions.
Ramage says the retailer launched the initiative to “try and deliver a really immersive experience digitally by leveraging what we have in our full armoury, which is a fantastic store experience and national coverage”.
He says in the six months since the initiative, which is currently only being trialled on HP products, conversion rates have been “very strong” and NPS ratings have increased with “90% positive feedback”.
As a result, Currys PC World is mulling extending the initiative to more brand partners, particularly those that sell big-ticket domestic appliances.
The retailer has also developed augmented reality capabilities as a means of driving sales of its big-ticket items.
The electricals retailer teamed up with tech supplier Eye Candy to develop an augmented reality-enabled app, which it launched last August and has had 60,000 downloads so far.
The app superimposes 15,000 products from across Curry’s PC World’s range on to real-world settings with accurate dimension sizes, allowing customers see everything from whether that fridge would actually fit in their kitchen alcove to whether a pair of on-ear headphones would suit them.
Ramage says: “You’ve got to be quite careful how much time, effort and money to invest in these pilots, but we took the opportunity with almost no financial investment to come up with what we thought would be a really innovative way to display and showcase products.”
By experimenting with new technologies and harnessing its store and ecommerce assets, Dixons Carphone is showing how bricks-and-mortar retailers can play to their strengths in this increasingly digital world.
