Imagine walking into a retail store and you are welcomed by a store associate who can identify you based on preferences set on the App, is able to look up your Click and Collect order and while walking with you to pick your order, assists in picking party supplies, ordering the cake with a personalized message (endless aisle) with home delivery scheduled for Saturday. Imagine all interactions you had at the store completed on a handheld point of sale (POS) device paid with a tap or swipe of your card or the store card associated with your loyalty account.
The shift to personalized customer experience is happening all around us with reportable success. Zara and Gap are successfully leveraging augmented reality to transform the customer experience and seamlessly integrating with the POS. FMCG retailers are enabling concierge style tailored recommendations on over the counter health and beauty products. Novelty factor contributing to foot traffic and sales aside, customer interactions captured in these stores provide deep insights on how customers perceive and interact with your brand.
The point of checkout is the few golden minutes in the transaction lifecycle where a retailer has the undivided attention of the customer. Yet even today, many retailers view this point as a ‘point of tender’ with focus on convenience, speed, and efficiency, missing the opportunity to effectively engage with the customer. Customers can walk out of the store without purchasing, and retailers have no realistic way of knowing what they could have done differently to better assist the customer.
What if as a retailer you can extend the golden window from a ‘few minutes’ to a larger part of your buying process? What if as a retailer you can transform a ‘transaction’ to an ‘experience’?
Madan Murphy, Director of Technology at Crimson & Co ANZ, discusses how delivering a personalised shopping experience can lead to an increase in ROI. Read the full article in APAC CIO outlook here.
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