Social Media Coming to the Mall: A Cross-Channel Response

Abstract

Traditional shopping malls experience the effects of expanding online shopping. In addition, social media grew as a platform for customer orientation and expression. In-mall retail must respond. We take the customer journey as the guiding model for customer experience building and focus on converting cross-channel built customer expectation into enriched customer experiences in in-mall stores. We focus on the in-mall part of the journey but recognize the need to engage with customers in other parts of the journey and on social media. That is where the word-of-mouth spreads nowadays. We develop a ‘u-retail’ process model and a cyber-physical system concept for a mall: we combine a mall website, mobile apps and interactive storefronts containing Facebook processes into an integrating system. Customers can manipulate info and processes displayed on the interactive storefront through touch or mobile devices. The Facebook shopping-with-online-friends process inserts real-time feedback from social media friends in the storefront window. We show how ‘gamification’ and trust and loyalty breeding can be employed. Mall and retailers attract customers in a collective manner, from parking services to package deals. Cross-channel customer tracking is part of the concept, providing a view on both online and offline communities. Ubiquitous tracking of customers foster deep customer relation and experience of data. We implemented a first partly surrogate prototype to validate the concept. This partly empirical, partly designed experimental implementation can itself be a big data tool for scientists and retailers to acquire deeper insights. The concept can be generalized to other social contexts.