Consumer expectations continue to run ahead of what retailers are delivering. But they clearly show what your customers want from multichannel services.

I had an interesting afternoon yesterday chairing the retail track of IBM’s UK Impact 2010 conference. The event was being run by IBM’s software division, and there were lots of highly technical PowerPoint slides, but there were also some cold, hard statistics that retailers can’t ignore.

One of the sessions covered consumer research IBM has undertaken into the smarter consumer. 5000 consumers, admittedly who are web-savvy enough to fill in some research online, completed the survey in the UK. It includes a lot of the normal insights that most retailers can guess at – consumers like websites more than kiosks, consumers want to use the web to compare prices etc.

But within this research are a few results that might not be so obvious, and show how comfortable consumers are using the web to get better service from retailers. Some 76% want to be able to use retailers’ websites to schedule product deliveries, 57% to access live customer support and 32% to schedule meetings with in-store employees.

So a third of consumers would like to be able to book a time-slot online to make their visit to your store more efficient and helpful for them. If you are a mobile phone retailer, or a children’s shoe store, or you sell any other kind of products where service is crucial and queues can quickly build on a Saturday morning then surely this would help to manage consumer expectations and staff scheduling.

And despite how sniffy some retailers remain about live chat and other instant customer support services when consumers are on your website and they have a question about something they don’t feel the same way.

Finally three-quarters want to schedule deliveries online. This is an area where retailers are quickly improving, and to their credit listening to consumer feedback.

Customers are getting smarter, but so are the retailers who listen to them.

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