Where there is customer pain there is opportunity.
A former student of mine from Minne-so-cold, Natalie, sent along a profile from seattlepi.com of a business that may deal with not only the pain of the customer, but a pain experienced by retailers who try to serve these customers. The common source of these pains? Teenage retail employees.
Experticity, which recently landed $1.2 million in angel financing, is testing a technology for in-store computer kiosks that would allow shoppers to touch a flat-panel screen and then get questions answered from a customer service agent — one who may be located thousands of miles away. With a broadband connection transmitting data and voice, the customer service agent could advise a shopper on the benefits of certain products, pull up pricing information on eBay or show diagrams of how products work. The system also could be designed to allow shoppers to speak with agents in Spanish, Russian or other languages.
One of the questions I always ask those who are considering starting many types of retail operations is this: “Do you want your financial future left in the hands of a bunch of high school kids?!”
While this may solve part of that problem, the Luddite in me cringes at the thought of another computer to interact with. You see, I still get yelled at by the woman’s voice in the computerized self check-out for messing something up every time I try to buy a few groceries at Publix …..