The Internet of Things in Retail: Redefining Brick and Mortar Stores
customer segment or individual customers, can help retailers devise innovative strategies for customer engagement and sales uplift. With IIoT-R technologies and associated analytics distributed to multiple store locations, new insights and decision making is available from the local store up to the macro organization level. This leads to an understanding of the business and retail operations that did not exist before, enabling improvement to the customer experience.
Social Concierge: In- store beacons, video recognition and various display technologies can offer a social concierge experience to customers in the store by greeting customers with personalized welcome messages and using the customers’ exact location to provide them with a guided shopping experience with the help of a store map, accurate product locations and personalized offers on customers’ mobile devices.
Convenience: Sensor-enabled shopping carts allow customers to sync their shopping lists with the cart. This helps guide customers with an optimized path through the store, based on the listed items, thus improving their shopping experience and saving time. Customers can scan products and make payments while placing items in the cart eliminating the need to stand in long checkout queues.
Social Shopping: The smart mirror combines RFID technology with augmented reality to allow shoppers to try on apparel virtually, without going into a fitting room. It can be operated using gestures, and can recommend garments and accessories that complement the customer’ s intended purchase. Customers can view themselves in several garments simultaneously and also share pictures with friends and family, thereby opening up opportunities for social shopping.
These sensor-based solutions help customers make more informed purchase decisions and reduce checkout times with smart shopping carts and contactless payments, significantly improving convenience and the overall customer experience inside the store. The IIoT-R is thus poised to change the in-store customer experience, just as Web 2.0 did with online shopping.
4. EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF RETAIL STORES: OPPORTUNITIES OFFERED BY THE IIOT-R
Retailers gain a deeper understanding of the customer’ s path to purchase, preferences and shopping habits, which can be used in a variety of ways to optimize various customer touch points and build differentiation as well as strong brand perception. Rich insights gained from deploying sensor-based solutions provide a multitude of options to improve operations across various retail functions. A number of these options are reflected in Figure 1.
- 22- June 2016