Digitally Reinventing The Retail Store With Mobile
By Rodney Bryant, Apple + IBM Partnership
The recent bankruptcies and shuttering of apparel brands such as The Limited, American Apparel and Aéropostale, combined with declining sales at some brick-and-mortar stores, point to the demise of the physical store. Yet this past summer Walmart — the largest brick-and-mortar retailer in the world — announced its acquisition of Bonobos, indicating it may not be all “doom and gloom” for retail stores.
E-Commerce sales in the third quarter of 2017 only accounted for 9.1% of total retail sales — because though the physical store may not be going away, it is transforming.
More and more retailers are creating new kinds of shopping experiences — mostly by converging the physical space with digital tools and technologies — to win over customers. These experiences are happening in smaller showrooms, too, enabling retailers to save on overhead costs, such as inventory and cost per square foot, while still making it possible for their customers to touch, feel, try on and familiarize themselves with the brand and its products.
Today’s connected, empowered and tech-savvy customers want the best of both worlds — online shopping customization and personalization with in-store services. It’s no longer enough to merely allow customers to view online merchandise in the store. Digitally reinvented showrooms are key for retailers to offer customers the hybrid shopping experience they are going to great lengths to create for themselves.
One way to digitally reinvent showrooms is by empowering their best brand ambassadors — or store associates — with the right data and analytics. Store associates, when equipped with custom-made mobile apps tailored specifically for the retail experience, can achieve exponential performance and sales outcomes by offering customers a personalized in-store experience.
Yet, according to the IBM Customer Experience Index 2017, 79% of brands do not have mobile-enabled associates or do not provide their employees with mobile access to customer information. When sales associates can’t access product data at shelf-edge or make swift recommendations, brands lose their competitive edge and, eventually, customers.
Mobile-enabled associates can access all the information a customer would have online — personalized recommendations, size charts, warehouse inventory, customer shipping preferences, purchase histories and much more. With data and insights in the palm of their hands, associates can better engage, inform and impress tech-savvy shoppers by their sides in completely new ways. The advent of mobile and e-Commerce have fostered high expectations and retailers need to evolve to deliver on their brand promise.
Consider Florida-based City Furniture, a family owned and operated retailer creating new digital in-store experiences for shoppers. City Furniture rolled out iPad Pro equipped with IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps to their 400 store associates, replacing a manual-based process which often slowed down converting leads to sales.
Today, mobile-enabled City Furniture associates have access to customer data and analytics-driven information to make personal product recommendations, leading to more than 28% increase in in-home warranty revenue. Store associates can now better upsell and cross-sell products, which so far has resulted in 12% growth in the average purchase order per customer.
The benefits extend beyond the sales associate too. Take, for example, product promoters who travel across retail sites performing in-store promotions. Up-to-date product and promotional information via mobile can improve the customer experience by streamlining communications between the back office and promotions happening on the store floor. M-Industry, one of the world’s largest private label consumer goods companies and a subsidiary of Switzerland’s largest retailer and supermarket chain, Migros Group, recently launched a new IBM-designed mobile offering to transform how employees from their promotion agency work.
Traditionally, these promoters relied on time-consuming, manual-based processes — primarily phone and email communication and paper documentation — that impacted the overall quality of the promotion. Now, iPads equipped with enterprise iOS apps ensures immediate access to real-time product and promotional information, meaning M-Industry employees are better prepared for their store visits and greater value is being delivered to the Migros customer.
Mobile is a game changing factor for retailers with physical stores right now: placing less emphasis on transactions and focusing more on customer engagement and experiences.
A hybrid approach bridging the vast amount of information available online with in-store, mobile-enabled associates are going to be where brand promises are delivered and customized experiences created. More importantly, it represents an opportunity for retailers to thrive in a period of industry disruption.
Rodney Bryant is a retail expert and consultant for IBM Global Business Services. This self-proclaimed geek combines his technology-obsessed passion to over 19 years of retail experience in mobile, commerce, marketing, and merchandising to create profitable and engaging customer experiences for retailers around the world. Currently Bryant is a subject matter expert and key team member developing relevant, efficient, and forward-thinking retail applications, built in native iOS Swift, in support of the new and notable Apple + IBM relationship. For more than 13 years, Bryant built a reputation at Best Buy for integrating new technologies and approaches to business that served as the foundation of some of the companies most celebrated successes, including Geek Squad and Best Buy Mobile.