Commentary
March 15, 2019
Photo by iStock.com
By Jim Kander, Spectralink director of sales, Retail Americas
In today's complex, omnichannel marketplace, ensuring a superior customer experience isn't easy or guaranteed. The retail customer experience is constantly being shaped and reshaped by countless interactions across multiple points of engagement that span from online to in store. And growing demands for more personalized care and time-saving shopping conveniences require retailers to constantly evolve their customer care capabilities by integrating more advanced tools and technology across multiple systems and solutions.
To address these growing demands and challenges, many retailers are turning to enterprise mobility for solutions that help converge and optimize omnichannel technologies while empowering staff to provide more responsive, informed and personalized customer care. But to succeed, retailers will need to do more than simply deploy a new mobile device or solution.
They'll need to work in new ways with mobile solution providers to create a more collaborative and customer-centric partnership that keeps pace with evolving customer needs and expectations. At the same time, solution providers will need to work in new ways with vendor partners to ensure seamless solution integration, maximize performance and optimize customer outcomes.
More complex solution needs require a more collaborative approach
Today's retail customers have high expectations when it comes to their retail experience, and retailers are responding with innovative services that make shopping easier and more convenient. But these services also create new challenges by requiring greater integration across more channels, systems and technology. Buy online/pick up in-store, for example, requires real-time staff alerts to ensure orders are filled and ready when customers arrive for pickup. Endless aisle technology must be continuously fueled by real-time inventory data, and mobile POS systems require seamless integration with back-office and third-party payment systems.
Retailers also want to empower staff with more data and apps that put ready access to relevant customer information right at their fingertips while harnessing new capabilities such as AI, IoT and geotracking to provide more personalized and responsive care. But the success of these solutions depends on the ability of solution providers to work effectively with a broad base of vendor partners.
Solution providers need to expand collaboration and communication beyond specific solution implementations and maintain an open and ongoing dialog with partners. By doing so, they can continuously share insights and expertise that better inform ongoing solution innovation while improving technology integration within solutions and with customers' existing infrastructure. Continuous communication can also lead to better team and workflow alignment between organizations to improve efficiencies, productivity and overall solution performance.
Solution providers must also evolve
In the past, many retailers have relied on mobile solution providers for ready-made solutions that help them enhance customer care while improving workforce productivity. But given the complexities of today's retail environment and the constant, rapid evolution of consumer demands, a more continuous and collaborative approach is needed to better align mobile solutions to current and future needs.
This shift requires solution providers to evolve their role from sellers to trusted advisors. That means communicating with customers continuously to identify and address ongoing goals and needs and even providing recommendations that extend beyond their own portfolio to help customers streamline operations and enhance customer care. It also means rethinking their approach to solutions overall.
Solution providers need to strategically evolve their focus to become platform providers that can support retailers with specific applications and workflow tools while also providing greater flexibility and scalability to support future needs.
Retailers, in turn, need to do their part to establish stronger and more collaborative partnerships by involving solution providers earlier on to help assess issues and opportunities that can influence and advance customer care.
The result: a more customer-centric approach
By creating more collaborative, customer-centric relationships with both vendor partners and retail organizations, mobile solution providers can help expand opportunities beyond traditional parameters to help retailers achieve new business gains.
We recently collaborated with vendor partners to help a leading chain of specialty/import retail stores elevate retail operations and insights by mobilizing better inventory management and notification capabilities. By combining built-in barcode scanning technology with specific workflow-aligned apps, we created a solution that lets associates instantly access current price, status, description and schematic bay location as well as check on-hand product availability at other locations and distribution centers. They can also contact other stores to verify product availability, put a product on hold and even access a map locator to share with their customers. We also worked with this retailer to integrate additional apps into the solution to support BOPIS and other workflows that further enhance customer care and sales growth.
Topics: Mobile Apps, Mobile Marketing, Trends / Statistics
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