Making the Most of the Retail Moments that Matter

Experience is everything in retail, which means retailers are under even more pressure to differentiate. Right now, it’s critical to make the point of customer interaction as strong as possible.

In the digital age, retail is positively the hot ‘testbed’ for customer experience, and it tends to see consumer innovations, both the ambitiously big and the incrementally small, quicker and more robustly than in other sectors. Optimizing business performance has never been more important.

The events of 2020 have only served to accelerate the importance of customer experience, but also to put a renewed importance on the moments in which retailers’ staff and customers meet. Right now those moments are limited, both in terms of frequency and duration, so delivering a unified experience for customers is critical.

In short: retailers need to make sure every moment counts. Whether it’s having the best eCommerce experience, the smoothest supply chain or the more dutiful deliveries, what’s key with customers is to not let any second go to waste. To make the most of every moment a customer is instore, retailers need to empower their front-line retail staff to have the knowledge and flexibility to deliver a great, value-added experience for customers time and again.

Right now, with customers infrequently visiting stores, it’s important that when they do make the effort to come inside, they receive the very best experience. For many of the people who do make the visit instore, it’s the only time they’re getting out that day, so their shopping experience has doubled up as one of their key social engagements. So, it’s important for retailers to ‘bring the magic’ if they can.

Customers today are digitally empowered and well-informed. They take the time and energy to research the products they want. Front-line retail associates can feel left behind if they don’t have all the information customers do. Associates need to answer customer queries quickly and make sure every experience is a value add.

Getting it together

So what does this ‘magic’ look like? The retail workforce needs the right platform to bring it, and keep bringing it. Empowering the workforce through outstanding digital engagement will support and improve those all-important moments of interaction:

• Provide real-time access to customer information as well as produce and inventory data
• Improve conversion rates - provide more info on product specifications
• Offer accurate and seamless click & collect
• Enable personalised offers and services - access customer preferences and purchase history
• Save the sale - order out-of-stock items from endless aisle applications
• Provide the store associates with a reliable, secure communication platform to share critical information amongst each other and with the store leader.

Honeywell recognized that retailers wanted a single platform for all mobile devices – enabling rapid deployments cost-effectively, ensuring robust performance and security, and being above all adaptable to changing needs. With these in mind we developed Mobility Edge? a unified, dynamic platform for retailer mobile computing that can be used across the retail supply chain, designed to:

• Accelerate deployments by configuring only once across the retail enterprise
• Optimize business performance by knowing your associates have functioning devices
• Extend lifecycle by reducing the total-cost-of-ownership by up to 50%
• Strengthen security to protect your associates and customers

It’s about connection and control; about making sure the workforce feels empowered and supported, with accurate real-time information. Having all devices on the same core platform means a retailer’s one-time investment in setup, deployment, and provisioning is reusable across all devices and the entire retail enterprise. A unified platform, coupled with an agile approach, delivers more secure and reliable solutions across retailer operations, for all the moments that matter to customers.

In our retail solution, rugged mobile devices ensure associates are able to carry a retail businesses’ most critical information with them at all times. Mobile devices are also a key part of connecting retail operations online and offline - the same information customers viewed about a retailer online can be made available to the retailer’s staff instore. All of this leads to customers having consistently great experiences.

Retailers need to be thinking about what future ‘moments’ will look like, too. Connecting everything holistically through edge computing will revolutionise what retailers have come to expect from the store and lead the way to ‘future-ready’ innovations and new revenue streams. The store will become fertile ground for data and insight harvesting enabling retailers to get quicker and more granular understanding of their customers and thereby optimise store layout and promotions accordingly. Edge computing makes ‘real-time’ data collection a reality and can support innovations in automation – for example, automatic reordering without the need for manual intervention or validation.

So what does “life at the edge” mean? It means faster deployments, smarter operations, investment protection and the most secure OS on the market.

If you’d like to know more about how Honeywell is helping retailers deliver outstanding moments for customers and the workforce alike, I’d very much welcome the opportunity to extend the conversation so do get in touch by sending me a message or phoning the number on my LinkedIn profile. If this article has touched on some of the challenges you are feeling right now, you’ll find more compelling content at the Future of Retail.