Why the Retailers must provide a Personalized Experience to the Consumers?

By: Retail CIO Outlook | Thursday, October 24, 2019

The retailers have to adapt to the new digitalized technologies if they want to increase their profit margin. The consumers are becoming more prone to digital, and their choices are also changing due to the hassle-free online stores.

FREMONT, CA: Over the past decades, retailers have first felt the impact of digitalization through the evolution of online shopping. Coincidentally during this time, the retail industry also witnessed a massive demand for smart devices by the consumers. However, due to many reasons, the physical stores are still slow in adopting digitalization despite the hype regarding automation and artificial intelligence (AI). If the stores are digitally advanced, it will not only be beneficial for the customers and but also the retail teams if they prepare themselves properly.

However, the expansion of online stores has increased the expectations of the customers with regard to receiving even more personalized and hassle-free shopping experiences across online and in-store contexts. The environment of a physical store is more complicated as it has to engage its customers and also provide them with a memorable experience of online shopping. The stores must address the following challenges if they want to deliver their customers a more personalized feeling while shopping.

Inability to understand In-Store Micro-Trends

To provide in-store personalization, retailers have to understand the behavior of their consumers. The responses might consist of many factors like the type of consumers, for example, customers who visit frequently and those who visit once in a while. Duration of the customer is also a significant factor in understanding the behavior, and the retailers have to follow the time taken by the customers to purchase, such as whether they want to click and collect, or they to visit other similar stores and then buy. The retailers also have to understand the purchasing pattern of their consumers, the factors, and trends that are influencing them to change their habits. Marketers have to know to utilize the data so that they deliver their targeted consumer information and offers either directly to a consumers' smartphone or sales assistants' mobile device. The in-store application of customer analytics is the real competitive differentiator that covers the store estate, per store dynamics, and also the consumer behavior not only within a store but also across multiple stores. With the data generated from new digitalized devices in each store, the retailers can easily optimize merchandising, marketing, and shop floor teams to understand how consumer behavior can impact a store's performance.

Empowering and not burdening the Store Staff

It is common for retailers to have frequent staff turnover, and this increases when temporary staff are employed during peak trading periods all through the retail calendar. To end this, the shops can provide their team with mobile devices so that they can engage and support their customers in a better way, but the procedure has to be maintained. Just providing the sales assistants with a smart device will not only work in this situation if the person does not know anything about the products. The consumers in the physical stores will simply lose interest in purchasing if a salesperson cannot assist them with the products they want even when they have a smart device with them. By empowering the sales assistants, retailers will have the chance to increase their sales. Sales assistants will need tools that have intuitive software interfaces and can adapt to a specific role within the department of the employee. The devices that have complicated and time-consuming user interfaces prevent the employees from using them and also reduce the business value of the retailer.

The Importance of In-Store Data Connectivity

The retailers have started experimenting with digitalized devices to increase their in-store customer engagement. The in-store staff will need to adapt to the new system, as their consumers are changing their purchasing patterns, but once they become accustomed to it, they can gather more profits from it.

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