Delivering smooth shopping experiences has always been at the heart of retail, but the digital transformation has amplified it to the next level. Continuous market upheavals and economic volatility have forced retailers and CPG brands to upgrade digital and in-store experiences along the way. With no end in sight for ongoing disruptions, brands have a crucial opportunity to reimagine the future of retailing built upon the curve of evolving technology and customer trends.

Retail must reposition itself in a consumer’s life now as the last two years have changed shopper expectations. What do contemporary shoppers expect? What will delight the shoppers? It is the opportune time for retailers to ambitiously reimagine their relationships with customers and raise the bar for future retailing.

Resilient retail to meet new expectations

Dull brick-and-mortar store experiences will make way for the influence of digital intelligence across all aspects of shopping, and not just e-commerce. Meanwhile, consumers will prioritize tailored, engaging, and educational in-store shopping experiences. Furthermore, their purchases will increasingly be aligned with their personal values and beliefs.

The last two years saw the retail industry battling numerous challenges. Brands with full-suite digital capabilities and agile operations were less impacted than non-digital brands. Looking ahead, digital capabilities and operational agility will remain fundamental to retail success. Digital discovery, e-commerce, and fulfillment will grow and get distributed across the various platforms where shoppers spend their digital time.

At the same time, physical stores will have to be repurposed as experience centres, built to offer entertainment, education, and tailored service. Stores will no longer be the conversion centres but an integral part of the product discovery and research experience. Brands will also use stores to establish a climate for customer loyalty and offer a transparent shopping experience from product discovery to delivery. But, for that to happen, there are a few imperatives to be met.

1. Ubiquitous Commerce

Online shopping has become the norm. Hence, retail brands must create new opportunities for transactions in new digital and physical spaces. Websites are not the only way to engage with shoppers and sell products. As e-commerce has grown, so too has customer engagement with brands. Customers like to shop in ways that are convenient for them. Trends like social shopping have seen an increase in volume, reflecting a strong appetite to establish direct-to-consumer models.

Brands need to completely integrate into this evolving marketplace so that they are available when and where their customers are ready to buy. They need to meet their customers where they are already consuming content.

2. Retail entertainment

Customers now research online before they make a purchase in stores. Their expectations are raised by the ease and convenience of online shopping and doorstep delivery. Retailers need to orchestrate a physical space where customers want to go and not just need to go to complete a transaction. Store owners need to come closer to their communities by immersing people in the brand’s values and leaving them delighted.

The goal should not be to make a sale but to build a relationship. The stores should serve as an escape route for customers to socialize, learn, and enjoy a brand’s creative ethos, rich visual merchandising, and a uniting storyline. Hence, stores need to be redesigned in a way that fulfill these expectations of the consumers.

Brands must also play to physical stores’ strengths that digital cannot replicate. First, customers engage more intimately in a physical environment with real interactions. Second, customers engage all their senses in a physical store. Digital does not allow customers to touch, feel and smell the products. Feeling and trying on products is one of the reasons why customers want to visit the stores. Therefore, brands must deploy accurate visual merchandising and planogram planning to engage shoppers in-store and drive impulse buying

3. Rehumanize shopping

Personalization is increasingly becoming the norm and will only get stronger in the future. Customers are more likely to purchase from retailers that use their names and offer personal recommendations. Today, every brand is pushing for retail analytics solutions, but shoppers want humanity from brands. Data is the raw material, but knowing how to leverage it for enhancing the shopping experience is where the real impact can be found.

An elevated experience makes customers feel that there’s always something unique and relevant for them that is suited to their taste or routine. To effectively implement this, retail brands must use customer data to draw up predictive models, understand purchase patterns, and analyse the shopping behaviour of their customers. They should also use data to understand their customers’ cultural context. Leading brands are already using physical store data to improve the online experience.

Conclusion

Modern retailers have much ground to cover, and time is of the essence. If data is the fuel to deliver heightened experiences, customers are the driver. With multiple new touchpoints emerged over the last two years, retail brands should make use of the opportunities technology provides to track customer behaviour and optimize end-to-end processes from visual merchandising to checkout.

The writer is CEO-APAC, Denave, a global technology-powered sales enablement organization, which takes a solution conscious approach to deliver best practices in sales by leveraging people, processes, technology and innovation to drive revenue.

The post Making Retail Future-Proof: The Customer Experience Imperative appeared first on Business of Food.

The new generation of shoppers has grown up speaking to voice assistant devices and shopping on touch screen devices from the comfort of their homes. Thus it is critical for retailers to establish a symbiotic relationship across all customer touch points.

The pertinent question at this point is — how will consumers interact with brick-and-mortar stores in the future? This is where retail management must now make better, faster decisions on how to reengineer their store operations and amplify footfall quantum in the future.

Capitalizing on the values of social shopping

Despite rapid digitalization, there are a growing proportion of customers who want to go shopping at stores, delivering elements of theatre and interaction, that e-commerce cannot offer. It’s an immersive social experience that people crave. Retail management must be orchestrated to facilitate a seamless shopping experience from research to the conversion stage.

Retailers must understand how consumer demands are changing to start redesigning their stores, cut down on assets that they don’t need, and invest in capabilities that will make their stores relevant. They need to dig down granular details like the correct retail mix, layout, products, visual merchandising, in-store promoters, and technology infrastructure. Retailers must also map out the channels and methods to forge customer relationships and loyalty.

Integrating stores completely into the consumer ecosystem

The accelerated shift to online shopping has put the future value of physical retail in jeopardy. However, that does not mean that brick-and-mortar stores will run out of relevance, at least not in the near future. But the role of physical stores will have to be re-imagined as an integrated part of the consumer ecosystem. People are no longer blind consumers and rely on various media channels to get the information they need before visiting a store. This is their zero moments of truth.

Unfortunately, legacy retailers still view digital and physical as separate entities. They need to change their modus operandi to reflect this issue seriously. Physical and digital stores should not be competitive with each other but complementary in an ecosystem where customers jump from one channel to another in no time. It is the customers’ prerogative of how they want to interact with a retail brand, and so from their perspective, all the channels must be uniformly connected.

Whether they are researching, buying, paying, returning, or looking for guidance, all activities happen with the brand and not the channel. A poor experience at any channel can impact the overall brand consideration. Rethinking the importance of physical stores means not only entrenching it in the digital strategy but blurring the lines between the two; so they operate seamlessly for the buyers.

Optimizing store processes

 A successful retail store functions on multiple frontend and back-end processes. Retail management requires creating an effective operation that facilitates both consumer-centricity and easy administration by business stakeholders. From maintaining updated records of inventory to executing analytics-driven visual merchandising, planogram management, and talent management, store processes must be designed for easy tracking and up keeping. A smoothly running retail store with a unified view of all the retail engines will stay agile and evolve according to the market demands. This will eventually reflect on their bottom line. Efficient retail management saves time and results in superior buying experiences across channel

Leverage the right set of metrics to influence routine decisions

As retailers rethink the role and relevance of their stores, there will be some portfolio implications. They will have to repurpose stores into strategic delivery centers, dark stores, etc. It is, therefore time appropriate for them to start leveraging retail analytics solutions to capture and track key metrics across operations and improve their decisionmaking.

The ongoing retail transformations are bound to have economic repercussions at the store level. As a result, traditional metrics like store sales, basket size, and footfall will become inadequate measures of performance. Going forward, retailers would need to track metrics that will give them a unified view of their store operations. They need to look beyond transactional metrics and include KPIs like customer loyalty, visual merchandising impact, store size vs. total footprint, and more.

Conclusion

 There are a lot of moving parts to retail management. With an uncertain future and no concrete solutions in place, brands need data-driven strategies in place that can lead to clear thinking, decisive action, and effective execution across channels. The overarching theme, however, remains the same- the consumer. Every small step or big and bold decision must be laid out with an aim to offer a unique value proposition to the customers. Retailers must pivot from a proposition based on SKUs to one that leads with experience.

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