What is the interest of the Digital In Store for your business?
90% of retail sales are made in stores and 45% of these sales will be influenced by digital in 2020 (source: ecommercemag.fr). Consumer uses are changing and mobile devices are widely integrated into the customer journey. How can companies follow the trend and offer services that adapt to all of these developments? An effective “Digital in store” strategy could be the solution! Some ideas in this article.
The Digital In Store (or Digitization of points of sale in French) is the fact of integrating digital tools in store in order to help the seller and enrich the customer experience. In concrete terms, digital in-store encompasses a number of tools such as tablets for sellers, interactive terminals, beacons, etc.
All of these tools, available in stores, support Internet users' buying process. The latter derive certain benefits from it: saving time, discovering new products, personalized promotions, recommendations based on centers of interest, etc.
By developing a Digital In Store strategy, the objectives achieved can be multiple: customer loyalty, increase in point-of-sale traffic, increase in the amount of average basket, improvement in customer satisfaction, etc. Offering a connected store allows merchants to better control the customer journey, to get to know customers better and thus to offer greater benefits, with greater added value in the minds of consumers.
As a merchant, your primary goal is to get digital accepted into the customer journey. Once the first impression has passed, consumers must take ownership of the technologies you offer in order to succeed with your Digital In Store strategy.
We invite you to discuss 3 advantages resulting from the implementation of digital tools in stores.
Improve in-store flow management
We all know that in stores, the big problem is linked to the problem of managing customer flows. How to help consumers in their journey? How do you make sure they don't waste time waiting to pay?
Some tools can help you deliver these benefits. For example, you can offer an application that will queue for the customer. Indeed, thanks to a virtual ticket, you know what time you are going to checkout. The “digital tickets” allow consumers to continue walking around the store while queuing when their shopping is almost done. The gift of ubiquity you know?
Finally, with the aim of improving traffic flows at physical points of sale, you can implement a solution allowing you to trace the customer journey in-store. In this way, you can optimize the point of sale according to the most popular routes and place the right products in the right places, which will facilitate the purchase of complementary products.
Optimize customer satisfaction
Offer all kinds of ways to allow your customers to rate you and give you their opinions. For example, you can set up interactive terminals that ask visitors to rate their visit. It is even now possible to ask them to rate their in-store experience using the bank card reader, just before payment. The rating is then anonymous and the response rate is necessarily high since customers must give their opinion before paying. Be careful then not to ask too many questions so as not to deteriorate the experience by wasting consumers' time. The interest? The answers can be consulted quickly from a database.
Managing the most sensitive step more easily: payment
Currently, mobile payment is still tedious. Indeed, it is a question of recording his bank details on his smartphone, so that it is then possible to pay in different shops thanks to the contact of the smartphone with the terminal allowing the payment (often, it is the NFC technology which allows this technique). Few solutions are on the market at the moment (only Apple Pay, Android Pay and soon Samsung Pay to mention only the most important ones).
Innovations are going well on this payment issue. Some try to offer payment through selfie authentication (example of Amazon and facial recognition). However, not everything is fully developed yet.
Facilitating payment can also involve placing sales assistants in stores equipped with tablets and able to record the sale directly. Instead of queuing, customers can simply approach a salesperson. A valuable time saver that is highly valued and recoverable for your store! Other solutions such as payment via an interactive terminal are also possible. The customer is then called upon to carry out his “check-out”.
