The 12 Most Pioneering & Innovative Retail Technologies and Capabilities
Author: admin
Are you boosting sales by enabling your customers to video shop?
The Covid situation and the resultant restrictions imposed by the governments on retail stores has put a tremendous pressure on retailers for how to generate sales, keep the cash registers ringing and to keep their brand names at the top of their customers’ minds. Brands are in an intense struggle to sell as the customer behaviour is changing daily affecting product demands, trends, and deliverability. Due to the acceleration in cases, there is a fear of going out shopping amongst the customers. This has given a hard time to the retailers in cross-selling and upselling to their customers and also, in getting new customers to buy their products.
This situation was an eye-opener for some retailers and showed them how important omni-channel retail solutions are for their business. Retailers who once had only physical stores are now making the transition to online by implementing multi-channel or omni-channel capabilities. This allows them to upsell their products by enabling promotions across multiple channels and also tracking the inventory real-time.
While the customers are buying their essentials through online channels, it is still difficult for retailers of luxury and lifestyle items such as fashion, furniture, jewelry, and health & beauty products, which often need customizations or where the customers need a closer look of the products before buying. This need has unlocked a new technique of selling these products via video calling. Retailers are even dedicating their customer touchpoints to book an online appointments. Brands are enabling this functionality by utilising the customer data from their omni-channel CRM to call and book an appointment with their sales representatives. The store staff will then help the customer to take a tour of the store and pick the products that they wish to purchase. The buying history from the CRM will enable the store staff to also point out related items that the customer would have looked for had they physically been at the store.
Innovative Omni-channel Retail solutions such as the ETP Omni-channel CRM along with the promotions engine, ETP Accelerator will help you cross-sell and upsell to your customers based on their past and present data thus boosting your sales even in these tough times.
4 keys to seamlessly deploy & monitor omni-channel promotions to increase retail revenues
In the current increasingly challenging and competitive environment, courtesy of the ongoing pandemic, retailers are relying heavily on promotions and offers to pull customers back to their stores and generate higher returns. Though promotions are powerful tools for enhancing sales, but too often, poor execution delivers poor results. Inaccurate promotional forecasting can result in stock out and lost sales or costly spoilage and markdown losses. For many retail businesses, accurate promotion planning and effective execution still remain a challenge. Focusing on improvements to their retail promotion planning can help retailers avoid these pain points and drive a 20% improvement in operating margins.
1: Cross-functional collaboration and rich data drives accurate, automated retail promotion execution
Most retail software solutions don’t accommodate promotion planning, leaving marketers and supply chain planners struggling to incorporate spreadsheet-based guesstimates into their forecasts, relying on a combination of past experience and supplier projections to plan promotions and calculate the predicted promotional sales uplift. Without a centralized system, individual stores are forced to place orders manually in order to meet the demand for promoted products while distribution centres (DC) must estimate inventory and purchasing requirements. Too often, all of this happens in silos, with no shared data or plans.
The ETP Omni-channel Retail Promotion Planning solution – ETP Accelerator, along with ETP’s in-POS Omni-channel CRM solution breaks down these barriers. Customer registration details and buying history accrued in the ETP Omni-channel Retail CRM serve as input to the ETP Omni-channel Promotion Planning tool, enabling marketers to easily define business rules and roll out promotions specific to customer segments, making their relationship with the brands a personalized experience. These promotions can be executed based on customer demographics, age, gender, birth dates, and many more such parameters as well as be defined for a specific range of merchandise or time frame or for a specific channel or store. 
ETP Omni-channel Promotion Planning solution – ETP Accelerator
The retail marketing team can now plan, execute, and monitor a wide range of promotion campaigns, and deploy them quickly across various channels, both online and offline, using an easy-to-use interface while the supply chain team stays in sync to plan the right level of stock, at the right locations, at the right time. It is important to be able to run a large volume business and yet be able to make your customers feel special every time they interact with you
Hierarchy in Promotion Planning
ETP Accelerator also offers the ability for external applications to leverage ETP’s powerful promotions engine as a service feature which is built on Microservices architecture. Any external application can pass order information to ETP Accelerator and in response, ETP Accelerator will apply the applicable discounts and send back the updated order. The monitoring and management of this data exchange can be controlled by the ETP Connect application.
“Get closer than ever to your customers.
So close, in fact, that you tell them what they
need well before they realize it themselves”
– Steve Jobs
2: Accurate retail promotion forecasts help effectively automate store replenishment
An accurate day-product-store level promotional forecast develops a higher degree of certainty around the amount of inventory a retailer is likely to sell. It also enables accurate and automated store replenishment, which is of particular importance during promotional periods. At just a click of the button, the promotions get enabled immediately at all desired locations and channels.
Retailers can develop templates for different types of stores and promotions to fit their business characteristics and goals. These templates are used to quickly implement configurations that automatically calculate initial store orders and subsequent replenishment orders. With consistent access to high-quality data, modern supply chain solutions can improve promotional forecast accuracy by 15%, improving store replenishment and inventory optimization throughout the supply chain.
Planning promotions accurately to ensure timely replenishment at the store
3: Reach your customers online and boost brand loyalty
Promotions in ETP Accelerator can be deployed across social media platforms instantly as campaigns. Retailers can connect with their target market through social media such as Facebook or Twitter to promote the brands. Becoming a part of the social media network helps an organization to capture a large audience and establish direct contact with end-users of the product as well. Posting promotions on social media is a marketing tool to reach your customers online and reignite brand passion and customer loyalty with little upfront cost, which encourages business. The big advantage of having ETP Accelerator as a tool for publishing promotions on social media is that the consistency of the message across stores, eCommerce, and social media is maintained, leading to a holistic customer experience with your brand.
Publishing promotions directly to online/social media
Publishing promotions at the store
4: Measure and monitor promotion campaign KPIs for retail success
ETP Accelerator is equipped with an intuitive dashboard that enables retailers to stay tuned to the customer expectations and modify their retail marketing promotions as well as easily reactivate previously successful promotions. Retailers can view their various marketing promotions across various periods in a daily, weekly and monthly calendar format using the in-built promotions
Performance Dashboards to track & measure the outcome of the promotion campaigns
planning calendar allowing them to further sync their promotions with the brand’s social media network. A set of business rules monitor the performance of the promotion and measure it against a set of goals, giving you a feedback of how your promotion is performing against your target. This drives the discipline in your business as well as delights customers with a unified brand experience that encourages loyalty.
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Which Modern Retail Tools and Capabilities are you using in 2021?
Retail has always been an industry full of changes and challenges, and COVID-19 has highlighted them in bold. External market trends such as emerging new technologies, rapidly evolving new sales channels, increasing competitive pressure, and the non-traditional expectations of the Generation Z/Millennial generation are demanding that retailers rethink their strategies for Getting on the Right Side of the Retail Trends in 2021.
Customer experience has been the competitive battleground for nearly a decade now and many successful retailers were quick to change their business model by focusing on customer experience and retail technology. Those who did not initially move forth were forced by the shock of the coronavirus to harness the power of data and technology to enhance the customer experience and grow brand loyalty and trust.
To help retailers like you deliver more connected and personalized shopping experiences across customer journeys, we have created this article. Here are some of the most pioneering examples of innovative retail technologies and capabilities from the past few years and more recently since the onset of Covid-19:
New Tools for Digital Transformation in Retail
Superior omnichannel shopping experiences
Retail growth drivers are today quite strongly linked to their capacity to integrate the new journeys of digital customers. However, many retailers still manage their offline and online sales channels in silos. The integration capabilities of a robust Omni-channel Retail Software Solution help to map customer journeys and unify all the sales channels, order management, payment processes, loyalty programs, delivery options, and more, both in-store and online. This will enable retail brands to deliver the true omnichannel experiences that the customers expect.
Social Commerce
Native shopping experiences on a social media platform offer shoppers a seamless way to shop online. Instead of clicking through to a third-party website, users can make purchases right from the social media app or site. Shops are custom storefronts for businesses on Instagram and Facebook. Sellers can create collections of featured products, as well as modify the look of their custom storefront on Instagram and Facebook. Once it is set up, retailers have the potential to reach a wide global audience on two platforms.
In-POS CRM capabilities
A retail CRM solution that is integrated with the POS connects the business back-end operations with the supply and demand channels. Using an omni-channel retail CRM software retailers can ensure that their O2O customers can peruse, pick, purchase, like, promote, review, search, seek information and provide feedback from anywhere at any time.
Promotion Planning
Omni-channel Retail Promotions Planning solution such as the ETP Accelerator help retailers plan, execute, and monitor retail marketing promotions and deploy them quickly accordingly across their various channels online and offline. Retailers can visualize promotions across merchandise, channel, location, time and customer dimensions. Promotions Planning software are equipped with intuitive dashboards that enable retailers to create a knowledge based promotions strategy and also to stay abreast of the customer response to their promotions against various goals and targets set for each promotion.
In-queue Checkout
Retail mobility solutions such as the ETP Mobile Store help to improve in-store safe distancing and to reduce queues by creating invoices for the customers as they wait in-queue thus ensuring a faster checkout. Store-staff can also register customers into the CRM program, give them information about their loyalty points and lookup inventory quickly using the retail mobile POS.
Real-time visibility into inventory levels
Inventory Management modules help retailers manage and control the different inventory processes carried out inside stores in real-time for both retail sales and online sales. Managing stock transfers, local purchases & quick product-wise stock take at the store level reduces the lead time for updating physical count of the store inventory.
Chat & Buy
Covid-19 has compelled retailers to have limited in-person experiences which also includes having to severely reduce face-to-face customer support. To meet customers where they are, more and more companies have embraced chatbots and digital shopping assistants, which offer companies and users alike some big advantages like shorter wait times, 24×7 availability and personalized recommendations based on answers to a few simple questions. Once a user decides on a product, the chatbot directs them to the website where they can complete the purchase.
Frictionless Payments
Frictionless payments, or frictionless commerce refer to online and offline checkout processes where the barriers of buying have been minimized. The onset of the COVID-19 crisis and ongoing fears of infection have prompted consumers and businesses to rely more on digital and contactless payment options that use data from devices, apps, websites and wearables to integrate buying opportunities as simply and seamlessly as possible into consumers’ everyday activities and natural environments. Retailers pivoting their businesses toward safe ways to meet their buyers by enabling frictionless payments have an increased need for omni-channel tools. The most common use cases of frictionless payments include mobile and digital e-wallets, contactless card payments, auto-renewing subscriptions, NFC (near field communications) and one-click payments.
e-wallets
A digital e-wallet is a type of electronic device, online service, or software program that enables individuals or businesses to make transactions electronically. It is used for transactions made online through a computer or a smartphone. The e-wallet securely stores users’ bank account details, passwords for numerous payment methods and social network account details so that customers can pay for their purchases quickly with just an email address/mobile phone number and password.
Buy Now, Pay Later
Scrambling for cash for a COD purchase or getting out debit or credit cards for online payments and typing in OTPs every time you make a purchase can be a hassle, especially during a pandemic scenario. A ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ solution gives customers the convenience of shopping now and paying later anytime within a specific number of days, usually fixed between 14-30 days. It could also be an auto-renewed subscription for a product or service that finds its use on a regular basis.
Self-checkout
An increased need to minimize human interaction during the ongoing crisis has also created a requirement for self-service checkouts or customer-operated point-of-sale (POS) stations with which customers can scan, pack/bag goods themselves and make payments using a frictionless/contactless method such as e-wallets, buy now pay later, NFC or such other without interacting with a human cashier, although a support person is typically available nearby.
Secured Online Checkout
A Secured Online Checkout feature allows businesses such as retail to securely accept and process payments with the confidence that all customer transactions are secure thus enhancing the customer checkout experience. For this, all transactions should be secured with the SSL protocol and a PCI certified compliance is a must. The ETP V5 omni-channel retail management system is a PCI PA-DSS compliant solution that is flexible enough to integrate with a wide range of payment systems electronically, including all the well-known payment cards and mobile/e-wallets.
Increased Use of Retail Analytics
Retail business intelligence (BI) solution with powerful pre-configured, retail specific set of KPIs providing a 360° view of business processes gives retailers real-time access to data about stores, sales, customers, employees, inventory, merchandising, etc. and provides actionable insights about customer behavior across multiple retail channels. This helps increase foot-falls, improve margins, volume size and supports business functions like promotions and pricelist optimization, demand forecasting, product assortment and customer segmentation.
ETP has developed a comprehensive omni-channel retail software solution to enable you to adopt most of the new retail tools and capabilities. We are happy to offer you a quick 1-hour workshop that’ll help you understand how you too can integrate your online and offline POS with each other using our ready-to-use omni-channel solution that includes e-commerce integration, a robust supply chain, and a powerful promotions engine.
Reach out to ETP!
Getting on the Right Side of the Retail Trends
The past twelve months alone have produced more digital transformation in retail than the last decade. Retailers, manufacturers and consumers alike were forced to change and what appeared to be quick fixes in the early days have now quickly become habits. The swell in online shopping, the demand for frictionless payments, the quick deployment of buy-anywhere-pickup near you and the scramble to adopt new technologies that enable all these changes are just the beginning.
What innovative retail trends are retailers like you looking forward to implement in 2021 to get on the right side of trends?
Strive for 1:1 personalization
Consumers’ expectations will only continue to rise in the future. That’s why creating 1:1 experiences within your campaigns – whether it’s personalized product recommendations or a data visualization including loyalty points with the help of efficient promotion planning solutions – will be key for driving engagement and keeping your customers engaged over time.
Aim for a single view of the customer
Harnessing your data and using it to power personalized campaigns will be imperative in the coming years. Unfortunately, capturing that data is still a massive challenge for many brands. Customer data platforms (CDPs) can help streamline the flow of data to create a single view of the customer – and they’re worth the investment.
Supply chain resiliency amid distribution
It is important for retailers to build back confidence by winning the last mile, fortifying every link in the supply chain, driving decisions through the consumer lens, and measuring resiliency investment. Order fulfilment (e.g., last-mile delivery and pickup-near-you) will see the heaviest investments, followed by warehouse management and procurement.
Create consistent omni-channel experiences
If there is one thing we’ve learned in the aftermath of COVID-19, it’s that nothing is certain. With some parts of the world reopening and others closing, it’s never been more important to provide best-in-class experiences no matter where your customers choose to interact with your brand. Flexibility is key for survival – hence, it is all the more important to operate your business via multiple channels, both offline and online.
Consistent, on-brand experiences are a necessity across email, mobile, your website, and beyond. The companies that get it right will be omnipresent for shoppers — connecting online, in stores as well as social commerce and making sure every touchpoint is frictionless.
Operating through multiple sales channels will lead to more complexity. Entrepreneurs, we know for sure, are an impatient lot when it comes to administrative encumbrance. That is precisely why ETP has developed a platform to relieve you from most worries when it comes to omni-channel sales. We are happy to offer you a quick 1-hour workshop that’ll help you understand how you too can integrate your online and offline retail POS with each other using our ready-to-use omni-channel solution that includes e-commerce integration, a robust supply chain, and a powerful promotion planning software. Reach out to ETP!
ETP Group partners with Pepe Jeans India to boost customer experience in the Fashion Industry
ETP Group partners with Pepe Jeans India to boost customer experience in the Fashion Industry
ETP proudly announces a new win: Mumbai, India, 31st March 2021
Pepe, the popular denim brand partners with ETP to boost in-store customer engagement and sales, manage own as well as franchisee store operations efficiently, capture useful business analytics, and to migrate from physical to omni-channel retail. Pepe Jeans London is a young fashion and denim brand born in Portobello (London) in 1973. Since the very beginning, the brand worked with maverick photographers, artists, models and directors from all over the world, creating an international spirit reflected within the collections and the Pepe Jeans team. Pepe Jeans India Limited had a full course evaluation process led by their business and IT teams in India and Spain.
Speaking about the partnership with ETP, Mr. Manish Kapoor, Chief Executive Officer says, “We selected ETP as it meets our current and foreseeable future requirements from POS and Omni-channel software. The company has a good solid customer base in India and an R&D that is constantly innovating. Also, access to management, operation team’s domain knowledge of retail was very important and we see that we have found a great partner in ETP for Pepe Jeans India.”
Speaking about the partnership and project, Mr. Arijit Datta, Director- Finance, Pepe Jeans India Limited shares, “We believe this is the beginning of an endearing and fruitful business relationship between Pepe India and ETP. Look forward to working closely to make this project a grand success.”
Welcoming Pepe Jeans India into the ETP customer family, Mr. Naresh Ahuja, Chairman and CEO of ETP Group said, “ETP is pleased to partner with Pepe Jeans India. Over the past 30 years, we have made continuous investments in Retail Software. ETP’s Omni Channel and Ecommerce strategy and continued innovations will support Pepe Jeans India to meet their goals of business growth and customer engagement experience. We look forward to working with Pepe Jeans in more countries in the future.”
Commenting Mr. Bhavesh Doshi, VP at ETP says, “We are happy to begin the implementation of the ETP Omni-channel Retail Software project at Pepe Jeans India. With a good amount of fashion retail experience in India and with the enthusiasm from Pepe Jeans India team, we are confident we will be delivering the project benefits to Pepe Jeans India.”
Pepe Jeans India selected ETP as a partner to achieve following objectives:
- To have a POS solution for their retail stores which is reliable, flexible, easy to use, scalable, and meets the statutory requirements of India.
- To achieve omni-channel capabilities including click & collect, click & deliver, and endless aisle.
- To create promotions and campaigns to increase sales and build deep engagement with its consumers.
- To have a POS that can work at their own stores and franchisee stores.
- Integration with SAP
- To work with a partner that has a history and ongoing R&D that will continue to innovate in the retail software space to meet their future expectations.
ETP will be implementing its V5.5 Omni-channel Retail Software Solution at Pepe Jeans India. Modules to be implemented are:
- ETP Store
- ETP Mobile Store
- ETP Omni Channel
- ETP EAS
- ETP Accelerator
- ETP Analytics
- ETP Integrator
- ETP Connect
About ETP Group
ETP is an Omni-channel Retail Software company serving market leaders in 24 countries across the Asia Pacific, India and the Middle East regions. ETP’s solutions include Omni-channel orchestration, POS, Mobility, CRM, Marketing Campaigns, Promotion Management, Order Management, Supply Chain Management and Analytics. ETP has successfully executed over 500 enterprise software projects for 500+ brands. ETP’s unique value proposition is its ability to consistently deliver enterprise grade Omni-channel solutions to its customers and build long term strategic partnerships spanning decades.www.etpgroup.com/
About Pepe Jeans India
Pepe Jeans London is a young fashion and denim brand born in Portobello (London) in 1973. Pepe Jeans India Limited is headquartered in Mumbai. It serves to be one of the most established and popular casual jeans and denim brands. Pepe Jeans has a strong retail presence in India with exclusive brand outlets, multi-brand outlets, and large format retail stores. It also retails through popular online platforms such as Myntra, Amazon, Flipkart and Ajio, among many others. As a denim pioneer, the brand has always been driven by constant innovation to keep up to the market trends and to bring about limitless creativity in each of their products. www.pepejeans.com
Headed by Mr. Manish Kapoor in India, Pepe Jeans India has established itself to be a style statement for every youngster throughout the years and has been successful in expanding its market aggressively pan India.
This holiday season, move the queues super quick so you can sell more.
The holiday season always brings in waves of shoppers that often results in longer checkout and long queues. This will often turn shoppers off and direct them into your competitors’ store where there are shorter queues and more efficient check out systems.
So, what can you do to move the queues at lightning speed and potentially sell more and gain more customers?
Have a mobile POS (mPOS) system
A mPOS system will allow your staff to help customers check out faster and for them to assist with smaller purchases so that the customers can be out the door as soon as possible.
Having an mPOS system would also mean that you can be registering right outside the store and customers are able to enter and purchase quickly. This allows retailers to engage shoppers in the queue awaiting to enter the store and potentially close sales using the mPOS system. This divide and delight strategy will help ease the crowd significantly and customers will not have to wait too long to pay for their items, keeping them happy and allowing them to have a great impression of your store.
Introduce BOPIS
BOPIS, buy online and pick up in-store. This strategy allows customers to buy and purchase online and hop over to your store to grab the item. They may even be queueing in another store and purchasing your item so that they can grab and go afterwards.
By doing this, customers will be able to have the instant gratification of getting the item instantly without having to queue for it.
Offer endless aisle
During the holiday season, it is common to see empty shelves and frustrated shoppers. Staff are unable to restock the shelves in time and that leaves the shoppers frustrated because they made a wasted trip down.
Hence, having an endless aisle option, allows for the customers in store to view the entire inventory across all your stores and warehouses and pick out the item either to be shipped to their homes or reserve it for pick up another time. This will reduce the number of shoppers queuing up just to ask about the availability of the item and when will the next batch of stocks arrive, significantly reducing the queues in stores.
Have an e-commerce presence
All the previous options are all related to the physical store front. What if you have a fully digital option where shoppers are able to shop online and have the goods delivered right to their doorstep?
In this way, you reduce the number of customers in store and may even potentially have more sales online because the customer is not limited by the number of items they can carry!
How to use loyalty marketing NOW to boost holiday season profits
Many stores are looking at growing their customer base to generate more revenue. More customers equals more revenue, right?
Yes, in some sense that is the truth. However, if you are not retaining your customers and the outflow of customers is equal to, if not larger than the incoming new customers, not only will you not grow your revenue, you might be even losing revenue!
So, what should you do to retain your customer base? Loyalty is the key, here are some ways you can work on your loyalty programmes in the festive season.
Reward all paying customers
You know how some stores require a customer to sign up for a membership or download an app just to redeem rewards? Or there are some that only accept credit cards to issue points.
It is important that stores pay attention to all customers and try to capture their value as much as possible.
During this festive season, instead of letting customers go through a lengthy sign up form and potentially lose their interest in signing up for any loyalty programmes, issue a Mobile POS to register them instantly and gain rewards for their purchases, this way the customers might be incentivised to purchase more gifts from your store just to redeem that reward!
Understand how customers want to be rewarded
Some stores offer cash rebates, some offer a little gift or just a priority to an exclusive item. Rewards for loyalty programmes can come in many shapes and forms. However, a little research needs to go into how customers would like to be rewarded for their continued purchases from your store.
Especially during the festive season, many customers may be looking for cash rebates for their gift purchases. As they are buying in large quantities for gift exchanges for family, colleagues and friends, they might be looking to save so that they can stretch their dollar to buy more gifts. Think about that!
Develop personalised loyalty programs
Nothing beats having a personalised loyalty program that shows the customers that they are being valued and taken care of.
Knowing your customers’ buying behaviour will inadvertently allow you to know what sort of rewards and programmes they are looking for. No one programme will be suitable to all customers. So dig out the data and start to tailor the loyalty system to individuals so that they will be more likely to think of your store when they want to make their next purchase.
Especially now when they are shopping for themselves or for others, it is a great time to see their buying behaviours and figure out the customer buying journey.
3 ways to help shoppers buy more and buy fast
Shoppers like to browse and take their time shopping, that’s probably during normal days. During the festive seasons, we all know that shoppers just want to get their festive shopping done as soon as possible. Stores are also in a rush to clear as many shoppers as possible so that they can clear their stock and hit the KPIs for the year.
So how then do we go about speeding up the process?
Here are three ways to do it:
Send gift ideas and personalized offers
Make use of your data collected throughout the year and send your existing customers a curated list of gift ideas and offers.
Not only does this show that your brand cares for its customers, it also reduces the time they need to think about what to shop and spend more time browsing and buying from your shop.
The personalised offer will pique the interest of the customer and the discounts essentially encourage them to buy more!
Give them all the options with endless aisle
Limited shelf space? No problem. With technology nowadays, it is easy to list your entire inventory across stores and at warehouses online. Even with customers that are unfamiliar with your store, you are able to showcase all there is to them in a single screen!
Staff will be able to approach shoppers and offer them suggestions that are not on the shelves and allow the customers to view the entire inventory and choose from there. Then if the inventory is not in store, the sales associates can order the products for home delivery from the store on the same screen.
With endless aisle, stores are no longer limited by the shelf space and will be able to offer more to their customers. Shoppers will feel that they are getting more than they expected and this will increase shoppers’ satisfaction.
Help them get out faster with mobile POS (mPOS)
Lastly, all shoppers want, after browsing and getting the stuff they need, is to pay and leave, fast. To enhance the shoppers experience, mPOS systems can be set up for them to do self-checkouts or for shop assistants to process those that have a few items so that shoppers who only have a handful of items can grab and go.
mPOS also opens up the opportunity for customers to Buy Online and Pickup In Store (BOPIS). This will facilitate the shopping experience more effectively and efficiently, leaving both the shoppers and the store assistants to have a more pleasant festive shopping experience.
3 ways to get your store ready for the holiday season
In this holiday season, even with the pandemic and increased online purchases, there will undoubtedly be increased footfall into stores in preparation for the gift giving season.
Given the covid restrictions, many stores have a limit as to how many customers can be in store at a given time. Hence, there is a need for brands to be ready to tackle frustrations and long lines and potential loss of sales during a supposed peak period.
A recent case where a leading footwear store had its flagship store closed due to the breaching of COVID restrictions during a product launch which drew huge crowds outside the store despite the advisories on crowd management. Nobody wanted this to happen, but it did!
There are a few ways that stores can tackle the basics, and potentially increase customer experience and sales.
- Get staff trained and ready
In stores, other than the products, staff is important in giving the shopper a pleasant shopping experience. With increased crowds, staff needs to be trained to not only be quick in their service and checkout, but there is a need for them to be good in their product knowledge so that they are able to assist customers promptly. The knowledge will help the store to be more efficient in tending to customers’ queries and improve their shopping experience. This in turn helps to manage the crowd and allows the store to serve more customers in a shorter amount of time, decreasing the wait time for customers waiting to enter the store.
Keeping COVID in mind, the staff needs to be trained to handle social distancing and product handling as per policies set up. Having masks and hand sanitizers handy goes a long way.
- Think through Point of Sale (POS) workflow and system
The last thing you want is for the checkout to be slow and frustrate the customer enough to leave the queue and not buy anything. Having a faster POS workflow not only reduces wait time but it also allows employees to concentrate on engaging the shopper and potentially sell more through the checkout process.
With an efficient and easy to use POS system, instead of fumbling around with unnecessary checkout processes, employees will be able to offer recommendations and convince shoppers to purchase other items to complement the customers’ original purchases.
- Invest in a mobile POS (mPOS) system
Nothing beats being able to purchase items even without even going to the checkout counter and queuing up. Since there will be a line out the door, why not make use of the opportunity to sell items to the people in the queue? Having an mPOS system opens up a lot of opportunities, inventory can be checked on the go, items can be purchased outside the store and it just makes the shopping experience so much better.
Shoppers who just want to grab a small item are able to just purchase it from dedicated counters that have the mPOS system in place. Meaning, shoppers who just want to buy a single item would not have to wait in line and can be in and out of the store faster. This allows the retailer to clear customers faster and maintain a healthy queue and keep shoppers happy.
