How Retailers Need Better Software

Independent brick-and-mortar retailers have an interesting dilemma, how to keep competitive with ecommerce retail and stay truly customer centric in an era of retail disruption and an influx of retail technologies.

Retail Needs to Adapt or Face Disruption 

Retailers no matter the vertical, need to appeal to Millennial consumers and learn what's necessary to compete in an era of Retail technology where ubiquitous IoT, beacons, digital signage, Chat bots, customer service automation solutions and Virtual reality (VR) are right around the corner. Currently related to retail the competition is heating up in Cloud POS systems and UGC scommerce solutions. For retailers to keep up, it's crystal clear to me what is needed: 

1. Adopt a cloud POS solution 
2. Create Customer Created Content Sharing & Viral/Influencer/Visual Marketing Contests (UGC)
3. Adopt Digital Receipts to offer a more seamless customer experience 
4. Implement an SMS marketing strategy. 
5. Marketing automation that creates personalized Emails matching customers with products, in-store experiences and special events/promos. 

Small to medium indie retailers need to adopt a minimum of technology solutions to remain competitive. Revel systems, recently announced 

“Only 45% of retailers and 44% of restaurants, on average have a given back-end system integrated with their POS - severely restricting the functionality that frontline employees need to service customers and optimize operations.”

My Cloud POS Picks: 

1. Vend 
2. Revel Systems
3. Shopkeep
4. Shopify
5. TouchBistro 
6. Bindo
7. ERPLY
8. LightSpeed
9. NCR Silver
10. SpringBoard Retail 

Businesses struggle to provide excellent in-store/in- restaurant experiences. More than half are challenged to overcome roadblocks preventing businesses from delivering excellent experiences. Only 50% of retail associates and 44% or restaurant employees have a given customer engagement capability we asked about.

Customer Created Content

An often overlooked component to how the digital aspect of the customer experience works is visual & influencer marketing on such platforms as Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. For young consumers, it's essential for an ambitious SMB or even Enterprise level retailer to have a software solution that can dynamically fill this urgent need.

This has many names, but is essentially keeping up with how social media is used now in visual marketing and on channels focus more on UGC, storytelling, personal brands, influencer marketing and branded contests that are more interactive. 

My Visual Marketing Picks:

1. Candid.io
2. Like2Buy
3. Curalate
4. Pixlee
5. Viraltag
6. Olapic
7. Readypulse
8. Offerpop
9. Dash Hudson
10. BazaarVoice

Social commerce is just huge in 2016 and especially for your Retail stores branding trust with younger Millennial consumers. It's a critical key strategy if you plan to scale towards ecommerce more or are already an ecommerce retailer.  In my mind a good solution will be able to: 

• Facilitate social commerce (direct buying via Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc...).
• Leverage UGC to create branding trust and better emotional customer experiences (ECE).
• Help you identify and establish better relationships with you top brand advocates & UGC creators.
• Create #hashtag branded contests, moments and campaigns that can be paired with influencer, viral and corporate social responsibility themed topics. 
• Create viral video marketing opportunity that's customer created content, interactive and more aligned with peer to peer and the sharing economy that Millennials relate to as more authentic. 

Digital Receipts 

This is an interesting arena to speed up transactions and offer customers a better experience. Not only is this more seamless for consumers, for retailers there is a slick function called receit flip which is a two sided color digital receipt  that I think makes a lot of sense for better customer engagement. 

The potential for Retailers here is to create a marketing CTA on the receipt itself, adding another valuable digital touch point in the process. The flip or back side of the digital receipt could therefore be a place to communicate with customers even more seamlessly immediately post transaction.

Use Cases of Digital Receipts 

Retailers could use it for: 

1. Content (e.g. links to video content or UGC content related to the product they just purchased) 
2. Marketing material
3. Branded hashtag or visual marketing contest info 
4. Upcoming in-store events and promos
5. Terms & conditions 
6. Store policies, etc...

The value of these digital receipts is also adding to the customer experience at time of check-out for click and brick interactions as there's no requirement for the customer to give their Email (which is very annoying!). 

David Salisbury makes a good case for why digital receipts are part of the future of Retail. 

 This also means customers have everything they need on their smart phone, and do not have to worry about keeping their physical receipts. In addition, coupons and promotions are readily available to the customer without needing to keep track of a paper receipt, therefore increasing the likelihood of returning shoppers.

Value of Digital Receipts 

The value of digital receipts are multiple, to me such as:

1. Reducing customer friction at the time of transaction
2. Creating smarter purchasing tracking that benefits both customers and retailers 
3. Creating an additional consumer interaction touch point (the flip side or the receipt)
4. No need to take pictures or give Email - seamless click and brick optimization 
5. Consumers want and need a mobile itemized record of their purchases, obviously that's the most immediate pain point that digital receipts solve. 
6. Exact replicates of the paper receipt & more!
7. The value op of retailers to communicate targeted post transactional messages to consumers. 

Retailers need Technology

It's not just about theory or in-store upgrades or good customer service anymore. Retailers need software solutions, to be on the cloud and be doing and marking digital commerce touchpoints with an implementation strategy that takes one more step towards the unified commerce that is coming. 

To be able to differentiate your retail brand, creating memorable unique moments, independent retailers truly have to do the following better than their competition: 

1. Visual channels: Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube. 
2. User generated content that's content of your customers for their peers. 
3. Video content, that's content that performs well for mobile audiences and is more authentic. 

Having a mobile or cloud POS solution, having a UGC/visual/scommerce strategy and implementing digital receipts is more than affordable as the cost of software has come right down where you'd have to be insane not to take advantages of these solutions that increase ROI and sales and help improve the customer experience.