Retailers understand all too well the value of making meaningful connections among customers, employees and inventory to ensure a positive shopping experience and gain a competitive advantage.
Retailers thriving in today’s challenging market also understand the delicate nature of these relationships and are turning to innovative in-store technologies — from video to RFID — to cultivate them. And while each technology provides real-time and actionable insights on its own, combined they can deliver significant near-term benefits including measurement of conversion, merchandise availability, real-time shrink, staff optimization and more.
Today, retailers are realizing the increasingly significant role of innovative technology and integrated in-store data to power positive connections within the retail ecosystem and optimize store performance.
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Inventory: The Foundation For Success
While much can be said about optimizing store operations and ensuring a memorable customer experience, none would be possible without inventory. Real-time, accurate inventory visibility can enable a positive customer experience and is central to bridging successful connections within the store environment.
For example, a store associate relying on insight from an inventory intelligence solution can effectively track items from replenishment to the store floor, to ensure near-perfect inventory accuracy. Armed with this insight, the associate is in a better position to ensure a positive connection is made among customers and inventory, critical to a memorable shopping experience.
Integrating this intelligence with complementary in-store technologies, such as traffic intelligence or loss prevention analytics, empowers retailers further by delivering unprecedented insights into issues that may hinder critical connections or impact store performance. By integrating shopper behavior and inventory intelligence, retailers better understand the effect of out-of-stock conditions on shopper conversion and can make an accurate correlation of shopper dwell time to item sales.
By combining inventory intelligence and loss prevention insights, retailers can gain visibility into item-level theft patterns of organized retail crime groups, and percentages of shrink due to internal versus external theft. By maximizing existing investments in store security and performance solutions, and integrating this critical data, retailers are realizing benefits far beyond their initial use case.
The Digital Employee
Leading retailers also are realizing the tremendous influence store employees can have on the in-store experience and their ability to make meaningful connections with customers. A confident, well-informed associate can be the difference between a happy, satisfied shopper and a lost opportunity. Retailers are focusing on empowering and educating their associates with real-time, actionable insights from in-store technologies to engage shoppers and increase conversion rates.
One of the best, yet most overlooked, opportunities to leverage the power of the digital employee is in the fitting room — often a source of lost opportunity for many retailers. Integrated inventory and traffic intelligence empowers store associates with insight into specific items taken into the fitting room. Armed with this knowledge, store associates can offer recommendations on complementary items, customizing the shopping experience and increasing conversion rates. Further, when inventory intelligence and loss prevention insights are seamlessly integrated, an associate can ensure all items are removed from the fitting room and are put back on the selling floor, minimizing the risk of shrink and ensuring on-floor availability.
By relying on valuable integrated in-store intelligence, today’s associates secure an integral role in the customer connection, fueling a more productive and positive in-store experience and building a foundation for brand loyalty.
The Customer Connection
With insight into customer behavior, retailers are empowered to enhance, engage and boost shopper loyalty. Relying on sensors and video solutions to gather in-store shopper intelligence — the way she walks into the store, how long she dwells in front of a particular fixture, how she travels through the store — retailers can identify opportunities to improve store performance and better connect with customers.
By integrating this insight with other in-store technologies, such as workforce management systems or inventory intelligence solutions, retailers can more strategically staff the store during peak hours, manipulate store layout to mirror shopping behaviors, and/or measure the impact of advertising and promotions. As a result, a more effective connection is made among customers, employees and inventory to ensure a positive experience.
Conclusion
The role of innovative technology that connects critical entities within the retail ecosystem is essential for long-term success in today’s competitive market.
In-store technologies have created enormous efficiencies within the retail enterprise and facilitated connections among customers, employees and inventory. While in-store insights are valuable on their own, the true business benefit can be realized when these disparate insights are connected. Empowered with this integrated insight, retailers gain enhanced visibility into what’s happening in their stores — and why — to strengthen operations, improve profitability and gain competitive advantage.
Kim Warne is Director of Global Marketing at Tyco Retail Solutions. Warne has led various retail marketing and business development groups for Tyco over the past 15 years. Her experience includes Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS), source tagging, video, traffic intelligence and RFID-based solutions. In her current role, Warne is responsible for bringing Tyco’s complete portfolio of loss prevention and retail performance solutions to the global retail market. Before joining Tyco, Warne spent 10 years in retail operations and consumer goods marketing.
