Retail 4.0: Customer Experience

Seamless Customer Experience: innovation trends in retailing 4.0

2 minutes reading - Published : 15 Gen, 2019 @ 11:47 by Andrea Ruscica

Hyper-connected customers, non-stop-customers, hyper-informed consumers as to brands and products. Purchasing behaviour patterns that are less and less linear (hence the term infinite customer journey), attention to pre-purchase feedbacks, a wide use of the social networks for gathering information and reading reviews. Awareness of pricing policies. The search for omni channel experiences, which continue uninterruptedly in space (inside and outside the stores) and in time (before, during and after the purchase), the tracking of tastes and preferences for an entire consumer lifetime.

This is the profile of a customer in the digital age, our own. And this is what we all expect from a purchasing experience that is increasingly personal in its mode, timing and interaction. And this is what all retailers pursue in their sales strategies.

Therefore, if all retailers move in the same direction, what makes the difference in customer relations? More specifically, if the challenge in retailing is to make the user experience as seamless as possible, through continuous engagement, thanks to digital technologies mixed with reality, how can certain brands stand out from others and be chosen by such a free-riding customer?

THE “GENERATIVE QUALITIES” OF RETAILING 4.0: THE UNIQUENESS OF THE OMNI CHANNEL PURCHASING EXPERIENCE

In the competition between brands and products it is necessary to work on the qualities that differentiate us from our competitors. Values which represent an important factor of success, unique characteristics associated with the fruition of an experience by the customer. These are the reasons why a consumer prefers a particular brand, grows fond of a certain store, appreciates a particular sales or post-sales service or decides in favour of the immediacy of an e-commerce site or the practical aspects of a click&collect purchase.

“In all of these cases, if the mix of digital and physical touch points is planned correctly, the consumer will tend to never abandon the Infinite Customer Journey, owing to the pleasure of the experience and also to the minor cognitive cost of having to close and reopen new purchasing sessions.” [source: Milan Polytechnic –Digital Innovation Observers – “The innovation of space/time in the customer experience: infinite customer journey”].

What makes the Retail Customer Journey unique is whatever the customer is still willing to pay for. (Andrea Ruscica)

Immediacy | Personalization | Interpretation | Authenticity | Accessibility | Personification | Availability | Patronage.
These are the “generative qualities” recounted by Kevin Kelly in his book “The Inevitable”, describing them as unique qualities, which are only generated in real time during a transaction, an exchange, a relationship. They are the elements driving people to pay for a service /product, in a highly digitalized context which means that in the space of a short time, everything existing in the real world is dematerialized, demonetized and democratized.

We can easily apply these values to the retail experience. For example, sales promotions carried out at unusual times of the day, offered exclusively to certain customers such as the possibility to preview and book the new collection, may represent the immediacy with which the brand makes its product available to its most loyal customers. Or to take another example, customization has now become a common practice for many types of services/products so we are no longer surprised when being offered personalized car accessories. A far greater impact is achieved by personification, which can be described as the ability to counterbalance the immaterial world of a digital service with the emotion of a firsthand experience: online shopping continues to expand rapidly and offline shopping will mainly serve the purpose of enabling a unique experience, such as an art exhibition staged in the store, or the possibility to find local products, distributed exclusively through the sales point, in line with the philosophy of proximity marketing. Which finally brings us to the interpretation: how important is it to receive purchasing advice specifically targeted and tailor-made to our needs?

An approach to seamless customer experience contributes to making the purchasing experience unique and this is the objective shared by Marketing Managers, Retail Managers and Merchandising Managers for the purpose of:

Creating a 360 customer engagement, by crossing the traditional borders of a single channel and eliminating the barrier between the digital world and reality;

Engaging visitors on a multi-sensorial and emotional level, by transforming the store into a relational place, and therefore more meaningful and functional.
This is exactly what digital technologies do: they build bridges between the physical and digital worlds, going beyond the traditional dichotomy between digital store and physical shop.

INTELLIGENT KPIs FOR A SUCCESSFUL RETAIL EXECUTION

Heatmaps, path analyses, the length of till queues, the waiting time for services, the number of customers waiting their turn, purchase frequency, unique visitors, bounce rate, visitors who pass by without entering, the use of new in-store technologies. How many surveys can be carried out in a sales point? And how much data can be collected within an entire omni channel consumer lifetime?

Technological innovation comes to our aid: IOT sensors positioned in the store track every movement and behaviour of the customer when in front of the shelves; image recognition algorithms and digital signage make shop windows intelligent and reveal the tastes and preferences of each customer to the sales staff; augmented reality or virtual reality visors provide an emotional and personalized shopping experience. This information is backed up by the mass of customer insights deriving from the customer’s interaction with digital channels (the first touch point with the product), as well as benchmark data with competitors and contextual news which may influence purchasing choices.

This constant stream of Big Data (constantly updated and automatically integrated with the company’s CRM software) contributes to feeding the retailer with important predictive KPIs for optimizing sales within a “perfect store” philosophy, such as:

Consumer Buying Propensity | calculated on the grounds of the customer’s interactions on communication channels, it indicates the customer’s propensity to purchase a certain product

Engagement Score | used for marketing campaigns specifically targeting groups of customers who show a strong brand engagement

Interest Affinity | used to identify the interests of contacts generated on the digital channels, it calculates the propensity of these users to invest in a particular interest in the future

So, imagine that your sales can count on a mobile application updated in real time, through which surveys can be carried out during store visits. An avant-garde platform of sales force automation, thanks to which the sales staff are supported by predictive KPIs, elaborated by algorithms of artificial intelligence offering indications of immediate efficacy for increasing sales, such as advice on activating targeted marketing campaigns or promotions for specific stores. If this were still not enough, a chatbot of virtual assistance would be available to offer new customer insights. The Retail world of the future is getting closer all the time.

THE PHARMACY GOES DIGITAL: SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTATION WITH VIRTUAL SHELVES

Today, a retail niche is experiencing a strong innovative drive in favour of the Customer Experience. We are often being told that large-scale distributors or fashion are the drivers of retailing but the example of the Cosmetic – Pharmaceutical – Nutraceutical world well represents the potential and opportunities offered by digital technologies.

Small retail stores improve their sales performance thanks to virtual shelves. Rather than force customers to move around from one micro department to another, by filling the shelves in an untidy and confused manner, the integration between physical and digital products optimizes product communication and promotion. The same virtual shelf becomes a store window with a programme of contents for special promotions, theme days and services targeting their customers. Conversely, physical display stands may be given over to areas of high specialization (products and services for which the customer has chosen to enjoy a purchasing experience in that specific store), for which advice and personal contact are essential.

Innovation trends for Retailing reveal the application of new technological and experiential solutions in different branches of the sector. Besides, for 2018, the analysts forecast an acceleration in the dynamics of innovation: new solutions will emerge for supporting the changing patterns of consumption and B2B/ B2C purchasing, aimed at increasing the intensity and duration of interactions with customers (before-during-after sales) and making the purchasing process increasingly fluid and seamless, for a shopping experience without frontiers.

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BIO

For almost 30 years, Altea Federation has been working alongside the global leaders of technological innovation through a holonic-virtual business model which embraces the professional approach and high degree of specialization of a federation of companies under one brand: different yet complementary worlds which reinforce each other while preserving a strong Group identity and an unmistakable approach to the challenges posed by new paradigms in the ambits of Consulting, Technology, Digital and Operations.