The store: where customer experience happens

When doing business in today’s network economy, the basis for success is the ability to activate new relationships and to develop and consolidate existing ones. And companies that operate in the commercial sector are no exception to this trend. Quite the opposite, in fact. In light of their traditional role connecting the value propositions of industrial companies to the needs reflected in demand, they represent the central players in the new network economy.

This means that the store is the “node” where the connections between supply and demand materialize. But today the store is more than the traditional setting where buying and selling takes place. Instead it is a fundamental “relationship platform” that can serve as an evolved connection between upstream companies on the value chain and final customers.

Store Management. Il punto vendita come luogo di customer experience,was first published in 2005 by FrancoAngeli and has since been reprinted several times, with a third edition coming out in 2017. Our book takes a deep dive into all the key aspects of store management that relate to developing customer relations. From this perspective, everything that happens in the store, from activities involving direct contact with customers such as sales, to more distant activities like logistics – it all ultimately shares the same purpose: to create engaging experiences that generate a great number of solid, trust-based customer relationships.

Our book covers a range of topics, from the choice of store positioning, location and design, to more operational issues (product assortment, visual merchandising and communication, information systems, logistics, managing sales staff), to measuring store performance, a critical step in evaluating the effectiveness of the initiatives of store management and for formulating future policies. We offer store managers insight and advice on how to set off a cultural transformation of the function of the store, with customer relationships as the focus of attention.

In choosing the approach for our book, we were prompted by the changes that we were seeing in the commercial sector at an institutional, competitive and managerial level. In fact, companies have to gear up to face the enormous challenge of relationship management by transforming their stores into relationship platforms.  But running a store with an eye to creating such a platform implies major changes that aren’t limited to simply redesigning the environment, launching promotional initiatives or establishing one-to-one communication. Becoming a relationship platform means making profound modifications to the business strategy, the functions of the store and the value creation processes.

The pandemic has tremendously magnified the importance of customer relationships. In fact, many store managers have discovered relationships that they used to take for granted, and have begun to make conscious choices about how to deal with them, utilizing social media to merge the physical and digital worlds.