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THE EXPANSION of omnichannel retailing presents our industry with a chicken-and-egg problem: Does consumer behavior drive changes in retail tech innovation or does retail tech drive changes in consumer behavior?

This is much more than a philosophical musing. It’s a question that matters greatly to retailers. Retailing becomes more intricate over time at a pace that exceeds growth in consumption.

This means the next incremental dollar you add to your top line will be a little bit harder to obtain than the last one. Omnichannel requires retailers to maintain, optimize and adjust to keep pace with shopper expectations and behaviors. Those expectations change fast. They are elevated by shopper experiences and shaped by forces outside the retailer’s control.

I call this the Law of Equivalent Experience: The best service standard experienced anywhere is instantly expected everywhere.

HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND SHOPPER EXPERIENCE in the present era of digital and social media immersion outside the store?

I’ve been insisting for some time now that the walls of the store are dissolving before our eyes as shoppers arrive pre-conditioned, pre-considered, even pre-decided due to their SoMoLoMe experiences outside of the building. Earlier this month I had the privilege of sharing some ideas about the flip side of this equation as participant in an excellent webinar, “Digital Disruption and the Retail Experience: Earning Loyalty in the Age of Empowered Consumers.”

The event was part of the Customer eXperience Thought Leader Forum series, produced by our good friends at CustomerThink. Conformit sponsored. I joined Miguel Ramos, Mobile Practice Lead at Confirmit, to explain how the retail enterprise can be re-engineered for success in the age of empowered consumers.

To make my points, I updated SCAMP, a model I developed for understanding customer experience in the physical store. The new wrinkle was to examine with a few examples how social, mobile, and digital experiences are influencing retail experience engineering in an era where Big Data flows can overwhelm store data. SCAMP is a model with five pillars: Service, Convenience, Ambiance, Merchandising, and Price, I originally proposed here in TensersTirades in 2008.

I invite you to click the images above to access the full webinar recording or to download a PDF copy of the slide deck.

Retail Tech Innovation or Consumer Change: Which Came First?

SCAMP: Deconstructing Shopper Experience in a Big Data World