Tag: Future

Know How Leading Luxury and Lifestyle Retailers are Future-Proofing their Retail Technology Investments

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

In the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of retail, luxury and lifestyle retailers face unique challenges. With discerning customers and rising expectations, these retailers must constantly strive to enhance the shopping experience while maintaining their brand allure. To achieve this delicate balance, investing in the right retail technology solutions is crucial. In recent years, omni-channel retail software has emerged as a game-changer, enabling luxury and lifestyle retailers to future-proof their investments and stay ahead in the competitive landscape.

Seamlessly Integrating Multiple Channels

Omni-channel retail software empowers luxury and lifestyle retailers to offer a consistent shopping experience across various channels, including brick-and-mortar stores, online platforms, mobile applications, and social media. By seamlessly integrating these channels, customers can enjoy a cohesive shopping journey, irrespective of their preferred touchpoints.

For instance, a customer can begin their shopping journey on the brand’s mobile app, explore the latest collections, and add items to their wishlist. Later, they can visit a physical store to try on the products and seek personalized assistance from knowledgeable store associates. Finally, the customer can make the purchase on the brand’s website, using their saved preferences and obtaining seamless access to their loyalty rewards. This level of integration enhances customer satisfaction and builds brand loyalty, as customers appreciate the convenience and personalized experience.

Driving Traffic to Physical Stores

In an era where e-commerce has gained significant traction, luxury and lifestyle retailers must not neglect the importance of physical stores. Omni-channel retail software leverages various technologies, such as mobile apps and location-based marketing, to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores.

By offering exclusive in-store promotions, personalized discounts, and special events, luxury retailers can entice customers to visit their stores physically. This not only provides customers with a unique shopping experience but also presents opportunities for retailers to engage with customers directly, enabling better understanding of their preferences, giving the store staff up-selling or cross-selling opportunities, and enhancing the overall shopping journey.

Enhancing Inventory Control

Accurate inventory management is paramount for luxury and lifestyle retailers, as stockouts and overstocking can lead to significant revenue losses and damaged brand reputation. Omni-channel retail software offers real-time visibility of inventory across all channels, providing retailers with valuable insights into stock levels, product movement, and customer demand patterns.

By centralizing inventory data, retailers can optimize their supply chain, minimize stockouts, and ensure the availability of popular products. Additionally, with the software’s predictive analytics capabilities, retailers can anticipate demand trends and adjust their inventory levels accordingly. This efficient inventory control leads to reduced carrying costs, increased sales, and improved customer satisfaction.

Achieving High Fulfillment Rates

In today’s retail landscape, customers expect fast and reliable fulfillment options. Omni-channel retail software equips luxury and lifestyle retailers with advanced order management systems, enabling them to fulfill orders from any channel with efficiency and accuracy.

Whether a customer places an order online, in-store, or through a mobile app, the software automatically routes the order to the most suitable fulfillment center, be it a warehouse or a nearby store. This dynamic fulfillment process ensures quicker order processing and reduces the risk of delayed deliveries. The high fulfillment rate not only delights customers, but also helps retailers build a reputation for reliability and promptness.

Fostering Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a driving force behind the success of luxury and lifestyle retailers. Omni-channel retail software plays a pivotal role in fostering customer loyalty by providing personalized experiences and rewards for loyal shoppers.

Through data analytics and customer segmentation, retailers can identify their most loyal customers and tailor marketing initiatives to suit their preferences. Loyalty programs integrated into the software offer incentives such as exclusive access to new collections, birthday offers, and early access to sales. This recognition and appreciation reinforce the bond between customers and the brand, encouraging repeat purchases and turning them into brand advocates.

Embracing the In-Store Digital Future: Essential Strategies for Modernizing Brick-and-Mortar Retail

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

The retail industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, particularly with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic did not completely eliminate brick-and-mortar retail, it did highlight the need for businesses to adapt to the evolving preferences of consumers. The shift from physical stores to online shopping had put pressure on traditional retailers even before the pandemic struck. The need to do business during the pandemic further highlighted the significance and need for merging various physical and digital channels of retail operations, leading to the so-called “retail apocalypse”.

Although there is a gradual return to in-store shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers must keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of modern retail. While ecommerce remains a vital channel, it’s worth noting that 44% of shoppers still prefer the in-store experience. Therefore, embracing in-store modernization has become more critical than ever for businesses aiming to establish themselves as leaders in the future of retail.

To thrive in this new era, brick-and-mortar businesses should adopt four essential strategies:

  1. Contactless Payments: The pandemic accelerated the adoption of contactless payments as consumers sought safer and more hygienic options. Data shows that 8 out of 10 consumers are now using contactless methods, driven by safety and cleanliness concerns. Providing fast and high-quality contactless checkout experiences is crucial to meet customer expectations.
  2. Interactive Self-Checkout Kiosks: Self-checkout kiosks have gained popularity, especially during the pandemic, as customers appreciate the convenience and perceived safety they offer. In fact, 87% of respondents express a preference for retail stores equipped with touch less or robust self-checkout options. These kiosks not only facilitate payment but also serve as a platform for brand messaging, customer engagement, and promotion of exclusive offers.
  3. Digital Signage: Traditional paper signage falls short in terms of adaptability and sustainability. Digital signage, on the other hand, provides businesses with the flexibility to quickly adapt and convey relevant information to customers. From static images to interactive menus and real-time maps, digital signs enhance the customer experience and enable effective communication of new products, updates, and sales. Additionally, digital signage contributes to sustainability efforts and eliminates the need for costly and frequent overhauls of outdated paper displays.
  4. Omni-channel Approach: The pandemic revealed the importance of offering alternative purchasing methods beyond traditional in-store service. Brick-and-mortar retailers that failed to adapt to customer preferences and civil mandates faced significant challenges. While online commerce continues to grow, in-store shopping offers unique sensory and interpersonal experiences that cannot be fully replicated online. By implementing an Omni-channel approach, retailers can bridge the gap between the physical and digital realms, providing personalized customer experiences and leveraging business intelligence data to enhance shopper satisfaction.

Embracing these strategies allows brick-and-mortar businesses to modernize their operations and deliver memorable experiences to their customers. Technologies like the ones developed by ETP can assist companies in acquiring, analysing, and leveraging business intelligence data to stay agile and flexible in this ever-changing retail landscape. As retailers strive to adapt and succeed, their tools must keep pace with their evolving needs.

Deliver a true Omni-channel Customer Experience through the Retail Store of the Future

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

The retail industry has always been full of challenges. With the COVID-19 pandemic particularly highlighting these challenges, today’s market conditions combined with the fast-evolving customer expectations dictate that retailers should fast-track digital innovation and transform traditional business models.

Customer experience is the new competitive battleground, and those retailers who are able to harness the power of data and technology to enhance the customer experience are winning in this battle of growing customer loyalty and trust and gaining greater market share. Acting on customer insights and implementing changes in processes, technology, and mindset for the digitalization of customer journeys gives you the necessary momentum for long-term success in retail.

 

Transition to the low-touch digital store

In spite of the significant growth of the e-commerce channel, stores remain key touchpoints in the customer shopping journey and are still driving between 70% and 90% of total retail sales. In-store retention and engagement are critical to building loyalty and driving a higher volume of sales. However, your customers expect digital experiences that go beyond shopping, while always ensuring their safety.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software supports retailers in offering convenience services, such as mPOS-enabled queue management solutions and frictionless payments. These help ensure your customers have a pleasant, minimum-touch shopping experience, and ultimately spend more. Mobile POS solutions in your stores enable you to improve customer flow and ensure safety measures like social distancing are followed.

Coupled with user-friendly, innovative retail digital transformation solutions such as Endless Aisle (digital product catalogue), in-store advance orders, and targeted promotions, you can be certain of supporting in-store digital customer journeys and improving in-store customer engagement. From development and deployment to managing periodical updates to your retail software suite, ETP’s consulting, global deliveries, and support teams will take care of every step and provide promised results.

 

Offer superior omnichannel shopping experiences to your customers

Retailers’ growth drivers are now more strongly linked than ever before to their capacity to integrate the new journeys of digital customers. However, many retailers still manage their offline and online sales channels in silos.

Our expert business consultants leverage our integration capabilities to help you map customer journeys and unify all of your sales channels, order management, payment processing, loyalty programs, delivery options, and more, both in-store and out-of-store. This will enable you to deliver the true omnichannel experiences that your customers expect.

 

Empower your workforce to succeed in its new role

As the role of the store is reinvented, in-store employees will have a part to play as personal advisors to shoppers. With ETP Mobile Store, you can give your employees access to the tools and applications they need to succeed in these roles. These will be accessible from anywhere through secure mobile terminals and cover CRM, inventory management, order management and more.

There is an ongoing competition to recruit, retain and develop the best talent, particularly among millennials, who value a great employee experience. ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions can improve the collective knowledge and performance of your teams by facilitating better teamwork.

Additionally, retailers can avoid any skills gap resulting from high workforce turnover and give proper career perspective to their employees. The Orange Digital Academy and User Adoption Program offers flexible solutions that help you ensure your employees are trained and aware of new policies and processes, including the implications of new COVID-19 regulations.

 

Enhance your operations and drive growth with leading-edge technology

With consumers seeking the best of both worlds between physical and online shopping, retailers must prepare for a hybrid future. Adopting emerging technologies will help them transform their value propositions with respect to how they can improve their customer’s life, and make it easier and more fulfilling. A bold digital transformation strategy requires immense collaboration across technology ecosystems but it will help ensure success for the retail business in the long term.

Retailers typically operate a complex distributed network of business locations: offices, stores and distribution centres. At the stores, in addition to the POS, they put tablets, video, digital signs and other technologies to work simultaneously. These technologies are having a profound impact on the business performance and customer loyalty. It is crucial to ensure that the locations, channels, and devices are not operating in silos, and the data collected by each of them is not stored individually. Also, the new solutions should be able to access and understand the data stored in the legacy systems quite easily.

Balancing inventory assortments, managing orders and maintaining uniform pricing across channels requires you deploy retail technology that gives you one version of the truth about your inventory and your customers irrespective of the device or channel.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software helps you apply more granular levels of control for specific business processes along the end-to-end integration, security and build/deploy service delivery chain. With omni-channel orchestration, you can directly determine the most preferred method of order fulfilment for each customer, personalise promotions for them based on merchandise, location, time and/or customer hierarchies, and manage third-party integrations with ERP/legacy/such other systems. This ensures you can deliver the agility and responsiveness required to enhance the shopping experience at all your business locations.

Furthermore, ETP Connect allows you to bridge your online and offline channels, costs and IT estate while ensuring that all services work in harmony with the required governance level.

Leveraging Technology to Drive Innovation in Retail

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

Technology to drive innovation
Innovation in retail has long been driven by new technologies and the desire to see what they can do. From video rental shops to Amazon, retailers have fallen over themselves to adopt tech that gives them an edge over the competition—and a bigger piece of the pie. Today, brick-and-mortar stores face much stiffer competition than their online rivals. After all, how can you compete with the convenience of shopping from the comfort of your own home? You could argue that you can’t. But I’m here to tell you there are still plenty of ways for physical retailers to use tech to innovate and get ahead in this brave new world. Here’s a look at just some of them:

Remember the days when customers visiting a store were greeted with a salesperson following them from aisle to aisle, making product recommendations and steering them towards the cash counter? It’s not that long ago that such practices were commonplace in retail. But today’s customers are more demanding than ever before—they want to be able to shop whenever and wherever they want, without being followed by a salesperson or being pushed into buying more than they need.

As shoppers now seek a more convenient method of shopping, it is imperative for brick-and-mortar stores to reinvent themselves by offering an omni-channel experience and creating a seamless shopping experience for their customers. While the use of technology can serve as an effective tool in achieving these goals, retail companies need to take the initiative to stay relevant and useful to customers.

The importance of leveraging technology cannot be overstated when it comes to transforming information into actionable insights in order to personalize interactions with shoppers. By doing so, organizations can create a superior customer experience that sets them apart from competitors who lack these capabilities.

The first step toward delivering this enhanced shopping experience is through digital technology that, among other things, enables data gathering at multiple touch points. This gives retailers access to a goldmine of customer information that helps businesses to remain relevant and useful to their customers.

But how do you use this data? How do you know what kind of information you should be collecting? How much should be collected? And how can it all be used effectively in order to improve the overall customer experience?

Data is truly a gift from heaven for retail companies—and not just because they can use it as part of their analytics efforts; data collection also provides important insights into consumer behaviour and preferences. With this knowledge in hand, companies are able to create personalized experiences for each individual shopper based on their shopping history and preferences rather than relying simply on demographic information such as gender or age range alone (which may not always accurately represent them). It also allows retailers greater insights into where there might be demand for new products/services or locations within stores, where consumers prefer spending time during different parts of their day (e.g., morning vs afternoon shifts) and so on.

The next step involves leveraging technology tools available today to transform that information into actionable insights. These insights can be used to personalize interactions with shoppers based on their unique browsing and buying patterns and to proactively address their changing needs throughout their journey, from purchase to return.

This is the heart of a customer-centric approach that can make all the difference in your store’s ability to get things right for your customers. With it, you will:

  • Use retail CRM tools to better understand how shoppers interact with your brand, which products they prefer — or don’t — and what messages resonate most with them
  • Use data analytical tools to help you identify common pain points across customers as well as groups within your base; this could include identifying which product categories are underperforming or where there are gaps in inventory (e.g., if multiple customers have been looking at specific items online but not buying them)
  • Use retail management software solutions such as the ETP V5.5 Store software coupled with the ETP Connect – a secured web services middleware or ecommerce management solutions such as Ordazzle powered by ETP, integrated with ERP systems from Oracle, SAP, Infor, and more so that retailers gain visibility into where/when orders come in from customers vs. where/when can they be fulfilled from.
  • Leverage mobile POS (mPOS) technology for providing value-added services including providing product information and price comparisons across channels. The ETP Mobile Store mobile POS software converts your store staff into intelligent assistants that can also help in inventory management by identifying which products are selling faster than others.

Additionally, retailers should use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service. For example, a retailer could install cameras at the entrance of the stores to monitor the flow of customers during peak shopping hours. This data can then be used to determine where additional staffing may be needed or identify bottlenecks along the customer journey so that employees can address them immediately.

Data analysis can also be used by retailers who want to deliver superior customer service as well as track consumer trends across the supply chain, helping them optimize inventory management practices and streamline production schedules.

Retailers have access to a wealth of consumer data thanks in part to social media. By leveraging this information, companies will be better equipped to serve customers’ needs by providing the products and personalised promotions they want when they want them—even before they know what those desires are.

The ability for companies to quickly identify consumer trends allows them to not only plan, but also to identify cross-selling opportunities.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is no longer an option for retailers, but a business imperative. If you’re not leveraging technology to drive innovation, the process of change will still happen — your competitors and customers will be the ones who lead it.