Does your business strategy include both online and in-store experiences for your customers? Shoppers want to move between touchpoints — digital and physical — seamlessly. In response, retailers need to knock down the walls that separate their channels, enabling shoppers to move seamlessly from online, to store, to mobile, to home delivery, and beyond.
Reducing friction during the shopping experience can make the difference between an enjoyable shopping experience and a frustrating one, so retailers need to have more than a single channel strategy – they need to deliver the best experience across all channels. Combining a digital and physical strategy opens up several opportunities for retailers, including personalization, flexibility, and enhancing physical stores with digital solutions.
The Value of Personalization
Having data insights to understand your customers and deliver relevant, targeted loyalty and promotions programs is a great example of personalization that can be implemented in stores today. The more personalized you can make a customer experience, the more likely a customer will return. People want to shop at stores they know will have what they need and provide an incentive specifically for their interests. So, from products to technology, consider it all as part of the customer experience to build a relationship with each shopper.
Enhancing Physical with Digital Features
Seamless shopping isn’t just about having the latest technology; it’s using the strength of each piece of technology to serve shoppers’ needs better. Retailers have recently reaffirmed that they cannot keep the status quo long-term and have already been finding ways to adapt to the quickly changing and expanding expectations of shoppers. And they’re still adapting.
Now, we get it. Making changes to a business plan isn’t easy, but not every change has to start from scratch. You can build a winning strategy from what you already have available to you today.
Loyalty and promotions program? Implement an intuitive, easy-to-manage loyalty and promotions program that provides you with insights into each shopper’s interests so you can deliver targeted, relevant promotions for items they actually want to bring them into the store.
Convenient Self-Checkout? Enhance your self-checkout process with computer vision and A.I. to make recognizing non-barcode items easy and accurate.
New kiosk experiences? Make sure you are engaging your shoppers anywhere in the store. From full checkout, to price checks, to deli or bakery ordering, or even ticket ordering/check-ins or concessions, kiosks enables shoppers to take control of their shopping experience without waiting for help.
Digital wallets for alternative payments? Instead of just credit/debit, offer mobile payment options whether through NFC on pin pads or through mobile apps so shoppers can pay for their items with whatever their preferred method is.
Are your operations protected? Finding the right service partner is vital to keep your operations running effectively. Whether that is helping to improve your in-store strategy, using predictive software to identify and prevent issues before they occur, providing same-day on-site support for issues, or off-site repair, you need to minimize downtime associated with common or unforeseen issues.
Consumers value great shopping experiences. Whether the customer values speed and convenience or the space to explore, compare quality, and discover something new, retailers must ensure that customers get that great experience.
The customer journey isn’t linear, and shopping shouldn’t be either. Instead of strictly separating their brick-and-mortar from their digital channels, retailers should make it as easy as possible for shoppers to move seamlessly between all channels.
Want more? Check out our blog “Self-Service: Meeting the Customer Where They Are.”
