Retail has always been a difficult business, with customers quick to vote with their feet. Retailers are always looking for innovation to help improve their business outlook and customer experience.
In this blog, I'll provide a summary of some of the top challenges that retailers face - and how technology can assist in delivering better outcomes.
As a retailer, how do you know what your customer likes and what they don't? The amount of stock of an item you sell is a pretty good indicator of course, but do you have more detail than this.
Some common questions are:
These are the basics for a retailer to help understand the customer journey. st
Technology helps in a lot of ways here. Here's a quick summary list of some ideas:
The point of analytics is simple: Use information to improve the customer experience in your store.
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Apple has done this brilliantly. Brightly lit stores and enticing merchandise all delivered in a typically architecturally beautiful store location. The reason these work well is the multi-service aspect.
Customers can drop in for technical support, or to touch, feel and play with the latest technology. It's multi-sensory.
Staff use their own technology to take your order and it's done standing with you, while looking at the goods.
Every retailer loses stock, whether it's because the goods are damaged, mislabelled or are perishable.
Theft though is an avoidable type of loss and one which is a real challenge for many retailers.
The common approach is banks of cameras, with operators trained to look for suspicious behaviour, backed up by instore staff who are trained to speak to customers with integrity, while challenging those they believe may have stolen goods from the store.
Electronic tags of various descriptions are common too.
The technology improvement here has to be with the use of machine learning and AI.
We already have systems which can use facial recognition to determine if customers are repeat visitors (great for Analytics), but also to easily track all the locations that person has been (great for COVID tracking).
This is of great assistance in determining if someone has been stealing stock on a regular basis and where they might have been, along with determining if there are any accomplices. Loss Prevention is not a fun topic, but one which unfairly targets retailers and the more discrete the technology can be, the better for all concerned.
Automation in the supply chain allows for efficiency. Large warehouses process a lot of stock, but the key aim is to shorten the supply chain and moves goods from the source to the customer as soon as possible.
Voice pick devices as well as wireless bar code scanners allow warehouse staff to be mobile - and so increase their efficiency, but there's a limit to the amount of stock that can be picked.
Automation in warehouses is taking the supply chain by storm. Wi-Fi based robots are used to pick stock and this allows the efficiency - and speed of stock rotation - to exponentially increase.
The robots are of course expensive to commission, but thereafter offer 24*7 stock picking with accuracy and speed. The warehouse though needs to be built specifically with the aim of automation in mind.
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At IPTel we supply and integrate a lot of wireless networks for our customers. I'd be remiss not to have some analysis of how Wi-Fi has changed from a nice-to-have to a must-have.
The first point when discussing retail Wi-Fi is why would you want to spend more money on increasing the density of APs and providing a more universal Wi-Fi experience.
Wi-Fi is a great enabler - some of the key items are:
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Retail is a difficult business, but innovation and use of technology helps attract and retain customers.
If you're a high end retailer like Apple, you have technology built into every aspect of the customer journey, but the same is true for supermarkets and other retail stores.
One key thing is obvious: staff are becoming more enabled with technology they carry. This in turn allows them to be more efficient and spend more time on front end customer interactions - which allows the customer experience in the store to the the focus.
Retailers also need to be a lot more agile than they used to be, from automated shelf labelling, through to guest Wi-Fi and smartphone apps. Retailers need to respond quickly to a changing environment and customer expectation, all the while trying to lower costs and improve profit margins.
Hopefully this run through has been of use. We deliver many of the technologies discussed in this blog, feel free to drop us a line, if we can help at sales@iptel.com.au
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