During a presentation at eTail Philadelphia, someone from Sears mentioned that a lot of people visit both Sears.com and Kmart.com to find out information about their stores, i.e. location, phone number, etc. and that they have spent a lot of time fixing up these areas to best serve these customers.

Being a big believer in serving your customers needs, I agreed that this was an important area to focus on, especially if metrics show that it is a high traffic area. In fact, just the week before I had visited Kmart.com to find out when my neighborhood store closed on particular evening. I found the store information page quite easily, but there was one major problem — the website didn’t list the store hours!

So, I had to call the store to find out when they closed. This is hardly customer-centric design — if you know customers come to find out information about a particular store, best practice would be to include all the information that is important to these customers. Sears.com in particular has some great options in this area — you can specify what features you are looking for in a particular store (auto center, outlet, within a mall, etc.) and each page also lists which departments are available for each store. It doesn’t, however, show the store hours!

I’m sure that many people who click on “Store Locator” or similar are trying to find out where a particluar store is located near them, or how to get there on a map. All the same, however, I’m also sure that many people are looking for store hours, and making a customer pick up the phone and call the store after they have already taken the time to visit the website is not a very good way to treat anyone.

There may be some logistical issues to making sure the store hours are correct on the website, and as such not showing them is certianly better than showing the incorrect ones. However, if a company deems this service important enough to have on thier homepage and metrics show that customers do use it, figuring out how to show the correct store hours seems like something worth doing. With the right system, the stores might even be able to keep the information up-to-date themselves, even showing special holiday hours messages when applicable (a time when many people are interested in whether a store’s hours have changed).

Incidentally, Nordstrom does a nice job on their store pages, showing not only a map and contact information, but also point-to-point driving directions, store hours and a listing of upcoming store events (although I’m not sure why a search by “store number” would be necessary — this doesn’t seem like something a customer would know).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 6:01 pm and is filed under web UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.