News

A self-service media Mecca in New York

January 24, 2006

This article appeared in the Retail Self-Service Executive Summary, Winter 2006.

A store that offers a lot of choices is a great boon for the shopper - as the number of products in a store increases, so does the chance that each customer will find exactly what he is looking for.

But more products means more product data, and when you're dealing with a complex, multifaceted segment like entertainment, sifting through that information quickly becomes a challenge.

Virgin Megastore's Virgin Vault program might just be a blueprint for how to handle this information overload. The New York store, recently equipped with 150 product info kiosks, enables customers to help themselves to information without putting a burden on the staff.

What's on the sales floor?

Virgin's New York store had dabbled with info-dispensing kiosks, but only on a toes-in-the-water scale, according to IBM retail executive consultant Dan Hopping. Before the Virgin Vault deployment, there were 20 freestanding kiosks throughout the store, and "a whole bunch of listening stations," Hopping said.

Today, 150 IBM Anyplace Kiosks fill the store. All of them pull product information from the same database, meaning that when a new CD is added to the system, it's available on all of the screens.

Robert Fort, director of information technology for Virgin Entertainment Group North America, said that previous Virgin listening stations were CD-player based, with only one to four titles at any one station. "Now the customer can listen to most CDs, view trailers for most movies and see screenshots from most video game titles, from any digital station in the store."

That "any data, anyplace" approach not only makes things more convenient for the customer, it also represents serious cost savings for the store. Previously, store personnel were required to move physical CDs from one listening station to another, a task that Fort estimates took two to five hours every week. He said the company also saves money because it no longer has to open a copy of every title in order to load it into a player.

Fort said customer response has been overwhelmingly positive. "It's a joy to see customers' heads buried in headphones, listening away, scanning, browsing, searching. We see customers taking stacks of products from the aisles, going to a station and listening through each to narrow down their purchase decision."

He said a family recently approached him in the store, a couple with three teenage boys, and told him, "We don't have anything like this in North Carolina."

The boys found about a dozen titles each that they wanted to purchase, thanks to being able to preview them in an in-depth fashion, Fort said.

Making it work

Hopping said IBM's role in the rollout was cut-and-dried. "This kiosk isn't something that takes a whole lot of planning - it's just a drop-in," he said. "The majority of the planning was in things like what do you put on the screen for the customer?"