Boston • New York • Detroit
Boston • New York • Detroit
Total Wine & More is a national chain built on an enormous selection of wines, craft beers, and spirits. That selection is the draw, and it’s also the problem. Most people shopping for wine are novices. Faced with a wall of several hundred bottles, they need real guidance to choose well. Without it, they default to whatever they recognise, or they leave.
The obvious fix was more staff on the floor. It didn’t survive contact with the numbers. Knowledgeable wine staff is expensive, takes a long time to train to a useful standard, and turns over quickly enough that the training never fully pays back. Multiply that across a national footprint, and the cost of solving the problem the obvious way exceeded what the problem cost.
The expertise needed to be available at the moment the customer was deciding.
Inexpensive iPad kiosks, placed through the store where the decisions actually happen. Cheap enough to deploy at scale, and they don’t need retraining every time someone quits.
The kiosks carried what a good floor associate would have told them:
Content was controlled both by corporate and by individual stores. Head office kept information consistent and current across the chain; stores kept it relevant to their own inventory and local customers. Neither model works alone at national scale.
The clearest evidence came from what Total Wine did next. The kiosk programme was extended to bring craft beer into the same experience, a category with the same problem, where customers face a large, unfamiliar selection and need help navigating it. Retailers don’t widen the scope of something that isn’t working.
The chain got knowledgeable customer service across a national footprint without hiring, training, and replacing the staff that would otherwise have been required to deliver it. The cost stayed fixed while the coverage scaled, which is the whole argument for solving a service problem with a system rather than with headcount.
Thirty minutes. Bring the business. Leave with the one thing worth building everything else around.
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