Retail world has changed in last few years.Driven by the growth of information technology and consumer electronics. A host of powerful technologies now exist in the marketplace for retailers to increase their efficiency and deliver a seamless experience to shoppers. Here are 10 hottest retail technologies that can give retailing a boost,From virtual shopping and real-time engagement of shoppers to clienteling and mobile wallets.
In the last half a decade, technology has revolutionised and redefined the way retailers can go about their business. With the ever-changing market scenario, companies are fast adopting the latest improvements and advancements that technology has to offer. As consumers are smothered with choices, a seamless, differentiated experience has become the central focus of retailers today to drive loyalty and gain a preferential share of mind of the consumers.
The retail technology space today is filled with hundreds of new innovations such as gesture-driven technology, social media marketing, cloud computing, clienteling and customer lifecycle management tools.
Virtual Shopping
A very interesting technology breakthrough took place in Korea a few months back. TESCO opened the world’s first virtual shopping store in Seoul. The shelves are LCD screens, and buyers choose their desired items by touching them. At checkout after shopping, they have all their ordered stuff packed in bags waiting for them. This eliminates the many steps of customer’s shopping experience – such as pushing a shopping cart full of products, crowded aisles and long waiting in the cashier terminals for checkout – making it more pleasant. Also, for those who cannot make it to the store, TESCO has pasted the virtual screens at subway stations. There, the buyers scan items of their choice with their smart phones, and the selected items are delivered to their homes upon their arrival!
‘Instant’ Real-time Engagement
Real-time engagement can be a great tool for a retailer’s cross-sell effortsby influencing customer’s purchase decision while she is still in the store. Most customer engagement tools communicate with the customers when they have already gone back home, but by then the interaction is no longer uppermost in their mind. The right time to talk to customers is when they are in the store – when the retailer can monopolise their undivided attention. If a customer buys a top and a retailer is able to suggest matching skirts, probably even sweeten the deal with a small offer, the likelihood of that particular product being picked up would be the highest. For one, the retailer is able to cross-sell and monetize the current visit of the customer; at the same time, the offer is better for the retailer’s margins since the discount offer would usually be much lower than what is required to make the customer drive all the way and come to the store. Many retailers in India are already benefitting from real-time engagement tools. Recently, Peter England – India’s largest shirts brand – launched a real-time engagement campaign with Capillary, sending recommendations to customers in-store via SMS based on their current purchase and past transactions. During the campaign period, about 15 percent of customers used the cross sells effectively. At the end of the campaign, the stores recorded 4 percent increase in sales due to the campaign promotions. With more and more brands embracing instant customer engagement, it is important not to leave this tool out of your arsenal while designing your customer experience. With the rapid change in consumer lifestyle, the ubiquity of mobiles phones and always-on broadband connectivity, real-time engagement is not just possible today, but is fast becoming the medium of choice for retailers.
Gesture-driven Technology
Gesture-driven technologies have a wide-range of prospects for the future of retailing with capabilities already for data, videos, images and text to be stored and manipulated on interactive white boards, projectorsand touchscreens with simple hand gestures. With the ability of technology to see users’ movements in space, gestures are being added to traditional methods in new layers of interaction. One such technology, the virtual fitting room or virtual fashion mirror, is popping up all over, especially in the UK. Virtual fashion mirrors allowcustomers to select from an “endless aisle” of apparel and try it on without removing a single layer of clothing. Shoppers can quickly coordinate outfits by mixing and matching an array of garments and accessories from retailer’s online and in-store inventories.Multi-touch surfaces in store windows put consumers’ images into the ad, making the shopping experience more personal by having them interact directly with it. Interactive floor ads similarly let consumers engage with the brand with simple body movements. Shoppers can search for particular products in the store, try on clothes, and make purchases with literally the move of a finger.
Location-Based Shopping Technology
The location-based shopping (LBS) technology has made customers carrying smartphones easier to target than ever before. Shopkick, one of the leaders in location-based shopping, helps retailers to constantly be in touch with their customers. The moment a customer is in the vicinity of your store and has the Shopkick app running (even in the background), Shopkick invites her into the outlet, displays your latest and hottest products on-screen, awards points for just walking in or shopping, and even redeem these for rewards – all this with just a few taps on the phone screen! Near Field Communication or NFC is another form of LBS which is changing the way brands communicate with their customers. NFCs have the potential to impact every stage of the purchase cycle. For example, customers can tap their phone on an outdoor ad to get information on a big sale at their favourite store. Once in the store, they can tap the phone on the tag attached to a product to download the product’s specifications along with a discount coupon. They can tap it on the point-of-sale (POS) device at checkout to cash in a gift card, charge their purchase to a credit card, accept an electronic receipt and register new points in the store’s loyalty programme. The possibilities are endless!
Cloud Computing
Cloud technology is perhaps the biggest turning point the retail industry has faced in recent times. Easy IT infrastructure, low capitalexpenditure, faster scaling up and powerful customer data have all come together to make cloud technology a dream come true for retailers. There are cloud technologies players like salesforce.com which have redefined the entire B2B software landscape over the years, and the trend is spreading to retail. Cloudbased solutions are already being used by a growing number of retailers to support their most important business functions – including the missioncritical point of sale, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and, more importantly, customer relationship management (CRM). Thanks to availability of a realtime cloud, retailers can now create an exceptionally powerful customer engagement opportunity right at the store. With a centralised database which updates continuously and is accessible to all the stores, the sales staff is empowered with the knowledge to give personal attention regardless of which store the customer walks into. Cloud technology is also instrumental in creating a holistic customer experience across all mediums since it can integrate and be available in real time across all the stores of a retailer, online, call centres, social media, etc. Retailers can integrate the data collection process from various customer touch-points such as POS, micro-sites, mobile devices, tablets and social platforms and use them to deliver content to the customers. Cloud-based CRMs also pave the way for superior analytics tools by collecting useful data from stores and making it available to the retailers in no time, and also helping them analyse it in real-time.
Clienteling
Clienteling is the practice of providing one-to-one personalised service, offers and communication to customers in a retail environment. Tablets and smartphones have proved to be an excellent medium to implement clienteling solutions and empower the sales staff with knowledge of the enterprise on the selling floor at the point of decision. At many retail stores, the sales staff can access a customer’s entire purchase history by simply entering her information and assist them in their shopping as per their preferences. In many restaurants, the staff is now using these devices to check what a particular customer ordered in the past and recommend dishes which will be more appealing to her. And with higher propagation of tablets, the cost of devices like these has also fallen below the `5,000 mark, making it a very appealing solution for retailers. The Apple stores use iPhones to process customer transactions and email the receipts, eliminating the need for customers to queue up at the checkout counter.
Inventory Management
With most customers moving to fast fashion, retailers find inventory management becoming more challenging everyday. The traditional ways of inventory management are becoming less effective since they cannot account for the complexity due to diversification. As a result, the retailers end up stocking too much or too little of every product. Using technology and superior analytics, they can now better forecast their sales and optimise their inventory plan accordingly. By analysing parameters such as customer demographics, shopping patterns, merchandise and so on, powerful inventory management tools can help retailers have a better assortment of products in the store. The retailer can select the most apt assortment based on the customer profile of each store, thus avoiding overstocking and wasting shelf space. This leads to higher and faster inventory turnaround cycles and customers get easy access to the products they want. This in turn allows retailers to save inventory carrying costs, sell more and delight their customers.
Customer Lifecycle Management Tools
The customer lifecycle management tools can help retailers classify their customer base into small clusters based on demographics and purchasedata and develop focussed long-term campaigns for each of them. Using intelligent algorithms, the system can predict the next purchase and time for each customer and send out relevant information at the right time. For example, one of the leading pizza delivery chain uses Capillary’s patented customer life cycle management tool to categorise its customer base into more than 17,000 clusters, based on the behavioral indicators of buyers such as their preferred day and time for orderingpizza – weekday or weekend, lunch or dinner, etc. – and utilise this data to trigger marketing campaigns. For example, if a certain customer type orders vegetarian pizzas for two in afternoons on the weekends, she will get an offer on a weekend at 11 am, encouraging her to also order a vegetarian starter along with the pizza and get rewarded. The entire system is fully automated and requires minimal involvement from the retailer. It still keeps the customers coming back to the store all the year long for successive visits, thus increasing profits for the retailer. The customer lifecycle thus creates a much longer customer engagement than would have been the case otherwise. Aleading mobile store chain in India uses this tool to identify opportunities to up-sell to its customers throughout the year. The campaign triggers when the customer makes the first purchase, a mobile phone, and then keeps sending her relevant offers on accessories such as a Bluetooth device to go with the phone, a scratch guard for the screen, etc. in a defined time period (once every two months) when she is most likely to buy them.Most retailers who have moved to lifecycle management tools are seeing over 6 percent increase in sales just from using this technology.
Mobile Wallet
Mobile Wallet or M-Wallet is another technology that is making waves. With new players entering the segment such as Apple Passbook and Google Wallet, this definitely has a lot of potential in the market. In a growing market like India, the leading mobile wallet company called NGPay already has over 1.5 million users throughout the country. The biggest advantage that the mobile wallets have over NFCs is that they works on all feature mobile phones, not just on smartphones. These allow users to connect to their loyalty memberships as well as to their credit cards, making the entire shopping experience hassle-free and seamlessfor them. With the popularity of mobile wallets rising with every passing month, many loyalty service providers in India have integrated their solutions with these apps. Another advantage that mobile wallets have is that they can be SMS-based, which creates a huge opportunity for retailers in regions like India and several other Asian as well as African countries. Apart from shopping, M-wallets also let a user send money to other users with just an SMS, without the need of a bank account. This will speed up the adaptation process in India and give retailers a larger target audience.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is today a crucial part of every brand manager’s marketing strategy. Marketers are today rushing to create brand ambassadors on social platforms to promote their brands. They go to great lengths to acquire fans on social media, but the real question is: “How many such fans are actually customers who contribute to store sales?” With smartphone penetration on a steady rise and social media on the fingertips of so many shoppers, we can finally have a customer engagement programme which can combine the best of online and offline experience and track the fans and followers who visit the stores. The rich data information gained from this should further help with personalised advertising and better loyalty reward offers to customers. Retailers can also reach out to customers when they are not at store and engage them with contests and promotional offers. For example, Social Connect, a Capillary offering, allows you to reward your customers for liking or sharing a post, check-in at your store and promote your brand, a 360 degree experience delivered right at their Facebook page.
