How has COVID changed the customer experience in stores?

Javier Lorente Martínez, the lecturer on Marketing and Technology and Director of the Master in Big Data and Analytics at EAE Business School Madrid, has recently published an article in The Retail and Marketing Review entitled “Has COVID-19 changed interaction in brick-and-mortar stores? A study on self-checkouts”, which analyses how COVID has changed the customer experience in stores.

The report compare the customers’ perception and concerns in stores before and after the lockdown. Specifically, it focuses on self-service checkouts in supermarkets, as they are one of the features that most clearly modify the customer experience in store.

The questions on which they study was based were: Does the use (or rejection) of self-checkouts affect the fear of infection and the quest for asepsis? Does the consumers’ vision change with respect to the rest of the aspects that influence their experience before and after lockdown?

The following key conclusions were drawn from these questions:

A significant number of consumers tried the self-checkouts. The perception of queuing time worsened, as they considered that all this waiting time increased the risk of infection. Therefore, it was worth “trying out” this new customer experience.

Secondly, a significant correlation was found between the interest in and propensity to use self-checkouts and the perception of the importance of safety in the customer experience in the physical store. The greater the concern for health and infection, more likely the customers are to use self-service systems.

Moreover, the report is one of the first studies to highlight the importance of aspects related to risks of infection in a customer experience setting. Concern for safety was always present but, previously, this concern was more focused on potential accidents than on disease. The study revealed a growing sensitivity among consumers that customer journeys (the process that consumers follow to make their purchases) should take into account aspects related to the sanitary protection of users.