Embracing the latest technology innovations is rather inevitable for the retail sector

With more and more customers expecting to be able to order anything they want from anywhere they are, retailers have to come up with some creative customer journey ideas in order to win the customer engagement battle. To do so, embracing the latest technology innovations is rather inevitable.

Meeting the customers’ expectations

Personalization plays a key role in today’s retail sector. According to a research published by EKN, 85% of US customers prefer to receive offers reflecting their past shopping behavior while 96% of them report that they are being mistargeted with useless -for them- offers and promotions.

Rather than manually collecting and analyzing data from social media and other sources, retailers could trust AI and big data analytics to gather and analyze such data in order to get the right insights of what their customers actually expect from them.

Make your customers feel safe

Every customer engagement, whether it is in the store, online or over the phone, will probably give your business valuable information about your customers’ profiles. As todays’ retailers have constantly more and more ways to collect data, and new regulations like GDPR are being put into force, privacy and security has risen to one of the most important considerations for retailers. Your potential customers need to know when, where and for what purposes you are going to use their personal data.

Offering a phygital experience

Whatever the convenience of shopping online, sometimes consumers feel disappointed when the goods they purchased online look different offline. To provide more customer assurance, retail brands, especially the fashion industry, are increasingly turning to VR and AR, with try-on avatars already hugely popular in many countries. Bringing IoT into payments with connected screens (YouTube link) is another example of digitalizing the physical stores.

Whether digital or physical, retailers must reinvent their ways they interact and transact with their customers by developing hyper-proximity, setting an example for transparency and ethics, and proposing augmented offers. The digital and physical retail worlds must meet to serve an ecosystem that is more intelligent and demanding than ever before.