The Store of the Future Is Only As Good As Its Associates | Ask An Expert

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Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for today's Ask, an expert webinar brought to you exclusively by the Omnitalk retail podcast network.

I am Chris Walton, your host for today's interview and interview in which we are going to explore the question of five to 10 years out.

What will the store of the future look like from.

From the perspective of the employees working inside of it?

What technology will they use?

What will their day to day jobs look like?

What processes that we all know and love will either simply go away or take on drastically new forms and conceptions?

As a former store and district manager at Target and the former lead of Target's own store of the future work, you know, this is one topic that is near and dear to my heart.

So it is with great pleasure to that I introduce you now to Matthew Mott, the director of marketing at Zello, who will help me to explore all these questions with all of you today.

Matt, thank you for joining us.

Yes, thank you, Chris.

An absolute honor to be here.

Excited to talk about this subject.

Near and dear to my heart.

Probably been working on something like this for, for 15 plus years.

Really very excited to share it with you all.

Really?

Well, yeah, this is, this is going to be a really heady conversation because we got to look out and say like, how are things going to change?

So, so are you ready to get into that mindset with me, Matt?

Yeah.

So, I mean, just a small aside, like growing up, superheroes love them, but I never wanted to be Batman, never wanted to be Superman, Wonder Woman, any of those.

I wanted to be Jarvis or really Black Panther or you know, the sidekick that was creating the cool gadgets that the hero used.

And so to bring that back to, to this, this arena, like the frontline worker is the hero.

And I love making cool gadgets to help them and save the day.

That's a really cool reference point to start off this webinar.

I hope everyone listening and watching live enjoyed that as much as I did.

All right, because, you know, and the other thing, Matt, too, the thing I love about these webinars is we are presenting them live on LinkedIn.

So we're talking live right now.

So all of you all watching can be a part of it.

And you can ask your questions of Matt and I at any time.

So please don't be shy.

Just use the chat session window on your desktop or mobile because I, I got a feeling If Matt spent 15 years on this topic, this is going to be a really, really good discussion.

All right, Matt, So set The table for us, the one, I've already said it a couple times, but five to 10 years out, how will store level employees be interacting differently with technology than they are today?

So big, big question.

And as you know, Matthew McConaughey might say, like, sometimes you got to go back to go forward, like the Lincoln commercials.

So let's go back and think about the history of computing in Silicon Valley, right?

The, the history is the interface has always gotten in the way of trying to use computers.

When computers first came out, it was a command line and you had to know how to type into the command line to use a computer.

Well, then, okay, let's get rid of that.

And we went to the mouse and the keyboard, right?

And everybody kind of learned how to, how to type on a keyboard and use the mouse, but you had to have one of those things to do it.

So that was kind of in the way.

So fast forward, right?

Then we're, we're touch screens.

Everything, you know, is on your phone.

You just click and point your finger and touch the screen.

And that made technology more accessible.

And then today, what we're starting to see, and I probably, you know, for those listening like you're, you're interacting this way with your machines is voice, right?

You simply ask it what you want.

And with the advancements of LLMs and AI and all of that, that's gotten really easy and really intuitive to do.

And so to me, that's the next iteration of this is how does a frontline associate interact with all the store systems and people and agents that they may need, need on a daily basis just using their voice?

And that sounds really cool.

And great problem is retail has kind of gone in the other direction as of late, where we have associates with more devices, scanners and handhelds and store phones and sometimes also the radio and then all kinds of store technology that they're having to interact with.

And so you know, where we have folks in Silicon Valley ditching the keyboard and the mouse to just speak to their computer.

In retail, we're kind of maybe five, ten years behind that, in which we've still got lots of keyboards and touch screens and mouses and things.

So basically like the idea is to be keyboardless in a lot of ways.

And so, so what is, what is the value of that for the store level employees?

It basically what I think that they can take their eyes up out of the device.

I think the, the key advantage of people going to a store physically, right?

We have all this e commerc so many tools to Shop online is that you can interact with another human and that you can give that other human ownership of your problem.

Right?

Like help me with this thing, find this size, find this particular item that I'm looking for.

And to do that, that other human, the frontline worker, needs to be eyes up and present and hands free and ready to help.

I love that expression, eyes up.

When I think about the future, you know, the future of a store, especially five to 10 years out along that horizon, because, yeah, I mean that's, that's, that's the way I've always conceptualized it too, Matt, is that like the physical world is something to be taken in.

Right?

And so, and so that's what we're talking about here.

So, so, so talk to me about then that.

How does the technology, how do, how do technologies come together to allow the store associate to take in the physical retail environment, you know, side by side with the shopper and their fellow workers?

The way that we're sort of approaching it is this idea of a physical edge and what that actually means.

If you look at computing, there's this computing edge, which is an idea that when you have a device that needs to access some data that's in a data center or the cloud, so to speak, there's this latency that happens of like I push a key and it has to go and ping a server somewhere and then come back with the information.

That round trip just takes too long for whatever the use case is.

Right.

Say it's a mission critical life or death use case.

Like it needs to happen.

Now that idea taken into retail is this physical edge.

And that's where the store floor is kind of the edge of the retail enterprise.

It's the only place that the company actually touches the customer.

And today, like any request or any real useful thing that happens there requires a kind of a round trip back to a system or back to a manager or a stock room or a screen.

And that latency there is where the customer experience can degrade.

Right.

And so how do we collapse that and put sort of everything the associate needs right there at the edge, at their hands in the moment they need it without, without an interface or some sort of like training to know how to use a tool without that getting in the way.

I imagine then as a component of this.

You haven't said this word yet, which is actually kind of shocking because I don't feel like I can have a conversation for 10 minutes about retail without saying this word, but AI, the agentic.

Agentic was the word I was thinking about too, there's an agentic component to this too, right?

In terms of how you're thinking about this operationally.

Yeah, I was gonna see how long I could go without saying AI.

Right, here we go.

Seven minutes in, I think.

Yeah, right, seven minutes, give or take.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's certainly an agentic component, I think in a world of the future and maybe the, the very near future.

Right.

Like our co workers are not going to be all humans.

And so we already have our clods and our, our chat GPT muse, like Facebook has their own agent.

Right.

And then companies like large retailers, like they're building their own, right, they're building their own agents that they give fun names to that the employees are going to use as a, as a co worker.

And so kind of going back to like this idea of like radio communication and like just I need to talk to somebody and I need an answer at any given time, like that somebody is probably not going to be a human for very long.

Right.

And so how do you create an interface where you can either, you ask a question and it decides whether, you know, you need a human or an agent to answer that?

I think it's a really cool, like thought experiment to think about happening very soon.

Yeah, it's a really cool way to, you know, think about how do you design your employee experience for the future, you know, you know, if your goal is to make them heads up, what is that?

So what I'm hearing you say is you need, you need a lot of computing power that is, you know, localized to the individual worker.

There's probably agentic capabilities that are running alongside of that to provide the answers to the questions that they need or to at least funnel them into the place, funnel them into the arena that gives them the best answers to those questions.

And then the other point I'm hearing from you, going back to your keyboardless analogy and the evolution of Silicon Valley too, is that voice is going to be a key component of that future as the kind of tool that unlocks that for the day to day worker.

So why voice?

What is it specifically about voice that is so compelling in the vision that you're painting here, Matt?

Yeah, I think there's, there's sort of practical explanations that I could cover.

But also I think there's a more like, as, as we get into the age of AI and age, like there's also a more human aspect where like voice is like probably the first thing you hear as a human.

And in hearing your mother's Voice, right?

Or your name or like, like voice is such an essential part of the human experience and it's, it's so powerful in that way.

And so just to get a little meta, like I think that's a big reason why voice is important, especially when you're talking about customer service and like connecting with people as they walk into a store or environment.

You know, there's a reason like when you call a customer service line you get like the, the robot voice that you're just kind of like you cringe a little bit.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess when you think about it too, like the voice that's being piped in for one employee could be very different than the other and it could be in very different langu down to it over the long haul is the best way to put it, that voice, Voice, our voices as humans act as kind of the bridge between the hardware and the software.

Is that the right way to think about it, Matt?

Yeah, yeah.

And that's really only been made possible because of the advancements with LLMs where like natural language can, can be understood and converted into commands for, you know, a piece of technology.

And so voice is kind of the only thing that's still available when your, your eyes and your hands are doing stuff, right?

You're looking at a customer looking for something, you're holding items, etc, like voice is all you have in that, that moment.

So that's what, what also makes it really powerful.

And then also there's no adoption curve, right?

Everybody, you know, you come in with your voice, you don't have to be trained on how to use a specific tool.

Just ask what you need, right?

What are you looking for?

And I think we're already seeing that in the digital space, right?

Like E commerce websites, for example, are all going to this like very simplified interface that's more of a chat experience that you would get with like OpenAI or Claude.

Right.

And so that's happening in E commerce and the, in actual physical commerce.

That.

Chat like that the customer is going to expect that level of service and knowledge from the person standing in front of them.

And, and that's going to be really difficult at, in traditional methods.

And so how do we make that person or enable that person with all this knowledge right in the moment?

Right.

Okay, so the way I'm envisioning this then like there's, there's, there's two words that are coming to mind.

Like as, as you're painting this picture from the perspective of the employee.

One is.

One is that voice enables me to have, like, kind of like a sidekick or a.

Or somebody that can help me answer the questions.

And then the other part is, you know, it can also serve as like, kind of the orchestrator, like, talking me through actions I need to take to maybe like, set a planogram or, you know, clean up a spill.

There's been, you know, and so I want to.

I want to put that into, like, into my parlance, for example, too, Matt.

So, like, I can remember a day when I was working in a store and a woman insisted that I measure all of the plastic totes she was considering buying, even though, you know, it said there right on the label, you know, of.

Of what the.

The.

The.

The.

The dimensions were.

But in theory, like, if I.

And I was like, I have no idea what they are.

Like, let's check the box.

But it's in theory, if she had said to me, hey, what are the dimensions?

And I had somebody that could, you know, talking to my ear and be like, hey, here's what the dimensions are.

I could be like, very confidently say, oh, this is 36 by 12 by 10.

Yes, ma'.

Am.

Here you go.

Let's, let's, you know, let's get to this.

Let's get to where we need to go here.

Now, that's like, one example of what I think of as like, the sidekick example, right, Matt?

And then the orchestrator.

I can think, you know, like, from an orchestration standpoint, as I'm thinking about it, like, I think of, you know, hey, somebody got sick in aisle 10.

You know, it's biohazard.

There's all these techniques you have to do, but nobody ever remembers what they are because they don't happen that often.

And so, like, as soon as that happens, I could have somebody in my ear essentially talking me through the procedures of doing that cleanup effectively and safely.

Is, Is that the good framework to think about it kind of as the sidekick and the orchestrator at all times.

For, for the sidekick?

Yes.

Right.

Like the ability to get that information about the containers immediately.

I think also the one that.

That comes to mind when we.

We talk to customers and retailers is this idea of available to purchase or availability is very nebulous now because for sure, you know, curbside pickups, you have delivery, you have people standing there in front of you and, like, is something available to promise or available to purchase?

It's.

It's tough to pin down sometimes.

And so if, that.

If maybe you didn't have the right size for the woman you're speaking about, could you say, like, okay, do we have one of these available to purchase?

No, but there's one in the next door over.

It can be here tomorrow.

Right.

And then you can communicate that to the customer.

So that's another example there.

For your Orchestrator, I would say the things, you know, someone's sick in aisle three, we need to clean up.

That, that's still the Sidekick.

Okay.

That's still a side skill, the helper.

Okay.

Yeah, still the helper that's going to log a task in a service piece of software like ServiceNow or something, or a maintenance ticket, and it's going to ping the right person to come clean that up.

That's still the Sidekick.

Orchestrator would be more like, hey, my register 14 is down, right?

I need some help.

And obviously you get the help to get registered 14 up.

But then the system knows, hey, this has happened five weekends in a row for this particular store.

Something more is going on.

Right.

Wow.

Like, I think you just kind of blew my mind a little bit too.

Like, so you're saying, you're saying the orchestration is not help.

So when I think about when I was saying orchestrated, it's like me helping me do the work that I'm responsible for doing, talking me through it.

You're actually saying orchestration is at a different level.

Like, orchestration is getting the work done for you that either the employee generally needs to do or doesn't even know that they need to do.

Because like you said, it's been happening a lot and it just goes.

And does that work in the background?

Is that what you're saying?

I think it's, it's more about.

It elevates it understands patterns that happen that maybe a particular employee on a particular shift wouldn't notice.

Right.

Because they don't, they don't see the full pattern, but, but the orchestrator can recognize that pattern and, and elevate it or escalate it to the right people or systems to, to solve it.

So what's an example?

Give me a, give me a concrete example of that, you know, you touched on a little bit, but explain it a little bit more.

Like, what's another concrete example of, of that, of what you're describing?

Another one that is a little bit more kind of nuanced is this idea of a walk away moment.

And so being able to identify how many walkaway moments happen in a particular shift or store across a time period.

And a walk away moment is detecting when an associate, like asks for something they were with a customer, hey, do we have this size?

Hey, are there any of these in the back?

And then they didn't get a response and needed to go check themselves to go see, so they walked away from the customer.

And so from the orchestration level, if you see that pattern happening, you can identify where it's happening most and what the requests are.

So like it's always asking about a particular size.

Do we have this in the back?

Right.

And then you can make adjustments based on that information.

That means there's a lot less paperwork involved for the day to day employee.

Right.

Like if the work orders are being handled for me, so the cash register goes down, that means there's a lot less paperwork that I'm having to handle.

There has to be.

Yeah.

We want humans doing things that uniquely humans can do, which is connecting with people, solving problems, owning problems.

Right.

And for people that work at a desk, we already have agents that do all the paperwork, do the form filling.

So how can we bring that to the frontline associate so that they can do the things that they're there to do, which is connect with customers and deliver a great experience.

Yeah.

If I'm not having to sit in the back room and file work orders and you know, things like that or maintenance requests and things like that at my desktop or whatever.

Because that's probably not the easiest thing to do anymore.

You know, maybe you could do it on a mobile device, but that sucks when you know you've got customers right around you too.

So.

So that, that's an interesting angle.

It's like, you know, how are you heads up on the floor with your day to day, floor level workload?

But then how are you shifting your back office workflow as well so it can happen more streamlined to give you more time back.

Talk more about the walk away moments though, because I want to make sure that people understand what it is that you're.

What are you, what are you talking about there?

What can you actually track, you know,.

Based on permissions and setup, et cetera?

Like, the frontline conversations are huge.

Like a gold mine of a data set that's right there that has so much rich data about like what's happening on the front line and like where things are either going wrong or going well.

Why are, why does this store perform twice as good as the next one?

Right.

There's, we have all the systems around inventory and logistics, et cetera, but we don't have anything that's capturing the frontline data.

So that's been really interesting to See and like to talk about with our customers of like, hey, we've seen these things like do you feel it on your end?

Like when we're seeing this in the day and they're like, wow, yes, that's what we feel.

But we haven't been able to prove it right.

Until we've had this data.

And so a good one.

I'm thinking of a recent example.

It was a multi floor store, right.

And so you have guests that come in on the bottom floor and they ask for a certain item where to find it, right.

And you send them, okay, that's on the second floor.

And then instead of an associate leaving with them to bring them to the second floor, they can rate, they can, you know, instantly deliver that message to the person on the second floor.

Hey, this person's wearing so and so they're looking for this type of pants, right.

And so that prevents a walk away moment of like you've got somebody along their whole customer journey.

The other one that I'm, this was a, like a sporting goods retailer.

But this idea that, hey, the inventory system, it says there's supposed to be two out here, but I don't see any.

And this customer wants one.

Okay.

And nobody can answer their question.

Nobody knows like, well, yeah, the inventory says two.

I don't, I don't know.

Right.

Okay.

I headed to the back to check.

Right.

We can, we can capture that little snippet as a walk away moment.

Right.

And you're recording how often that's happening and then looking for patterns in the data to show you that there's an opportunity there.

Yeah, that's really interesting to me too because when you think about it and in retail we really only measure the outputs.

We don't really have a good sense of the inputs in terms of what's, I don't even know if input is the right word here, Matt, as we get very theoretical and philosophical here, closing out this interview.

But those examples of what you're saying, I don't think we do like, you know, if we're getting asked, you know, is this item on floor two or floor one, you know, or I get directed down to floor one, we don't really know the closure rate on that question against the transactions, the output, so to speak.

So there are a lot of, there's a lot of lack of understanding around all the inputs that are out there in a retail operation.

That's what you're saying?

Yeah, I think it's, it's leading versus lagging indicators.

We, we measure a ton of lagging indicators in retail, but it's hard to measure the leading ones.

Like why did this customer leave without purchasing something?

You know, how can we truly know that?

And, and maybe we can't truly know it, but we can get some strong indications from some of that frontline chatter that happens again.

Huge superhero like Iron man fan.

Jarvis.

Right?

Love Jarvis.

He's the guy that makes all the suits and like is, is like assistant.

Yeah.

We were talking to some of our, you know, kind of premium retailers recently and they have so much data that they collect via online sales and, and rewards programs, etc about specific customers, likes, dislikes, purchase history, kind of what's the next best thing that they might buy or purchase.

Right.

And so, but, but it's like how do you identify that person walking into the store and help them appropriately?

And so like this is completely like future state.

But like we're.

No, that's okay, go.

How awesome would it be if the in the associate's ear is like, hey, this is Chris Walton walking in.

He recently purchased a dining room set.

He's, you know, he has a XYZ item in his cart right now online.

Like, let's go help him out.

Yeah, like a truly personalized store.

Yeah, yeah.

Then you're, you're like a personalized shopping assistant for these people that come in and you have Jarvis in your ear like helping you be that person.

Yeah.

To me that's like the pinnacle.

Like that would be so cool.

Right?

And that's really a cool way to think about it, especially in like a self identified retail environment, like a club experience or something like that.

Like that's, that's, that's a really cool way to take personalization to a new level.

All right, so my last question for you.

I'm gonna get you out of here on this because I think you definitely are the expert on this subject from talking to you and spending the last 30 minutes or so with you.

So for those watching live or listening later and maybe like me, that don't have that much exposure to using voice AI technology, what advice would you have for them to immerse themselves in it and to better assess, you know, whether this vision of the future that we've been talking about will actually come to fruition.

Yeah.

First thing, and probably easiest thing is to create a keyboard shortcut for the dictation feature on your Claude or your chat GPT, whatever your, your agent of choice is.

Okay.

Like, so, like mine is the command button.

And so instead of typing, I just hold down the command button.

And just blab away at my Claude agent.

Right.

And you get more comfortable with the idea that you don't have to have a fully formed, like, thought or like, it can be really stream of conscious.

Right.

Like, and.

Right.

They're pretty good at making you coherent.

If you just blab on for, you know, 45 seconds or so, they're like, okay, this is what you really want.

Right?

Right.

And you're like, wow, you're going to be surprised by that.

Yeah.

So I would say do that like today, set a keyboard shortcut for the dictation feature on your agent of choice.

Wow, that, that's a really great nugget.

I'm gonna go.

I'm gonna go do that right now.

And you're right.

They're gonna, they're gonna actually interpret me and make me feel like I'm way more articulate than I'm not.

As they try to flatter me in, in their answers and responses too.

Right, Matt?

Yes, they.

You do have to, like, they are very flattering, like in complimentary.

And you gotta be.

Okay, I need you to be more critical of me.

Like, Right.

Ego is starting to grow here, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The over confidence I get from talking with these things is crazy.

But anyway.

All right, man.

Well, that's a great note to end on.

That's a great piece of tactical advice too.

I love when my.

When our guests are able to share something like that too.

That's a really good thing for everyone to go out and do.

And if they haven't, like I said, I've not tried that yet.

I've only really interacted with LLMs through.

Through typing, so I'm gonna have to try that out.

So thanks, man.

That was really fun.

Hey, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so obviously we're on all the socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Etc.

If you want to reach out to me personally, I would love that.

My email IS M Mott MM O T T@Zillow.com also on our website, Zillow.com you can sign up for a free trial.

No credit card needed.

There's no, no commitment.

Right.

Nobody's going to call you.

You can just sign up and start using the tool instantly.

Awesome.

Well, Matt, thanks for your time today.

This was fun.

What does the story of the Future look like?

5 To 10 years out?

I could keep going on this topic all day long, but fortunately we got to call it quits at some point.

So thanks to Ella sirjorn for producing today's webinar as well.

And on behalf of all of us at Omnitalk, be careful out there.