It is so hard to gain the customer attention and endure it for long. In the era flooded by data from social platforms, customer interactions, and offline marketing channels, it is hard to track a customer with individual attention. This makes marketing tasks complex, incomprehensible and at times vague.
When it is so hard to seek the customer attention, it becomes arduous to convince him to buy from the brand. This has elevated the fierce battle among competitors to make their presence felt.
While retail customers are responding to the technological advancements, retailers are shifting their goal-posts of customer satisfaction. It might be innovative product personalization techniques or time/location specific delivery options, retailers are making use of technology to offer seamless shopping experiences.
Following are the top 5 contemporary technology trends driving the retail space:
- AI Based Automation
Retailers have access to intelligent automation tools which help them channelize and manage the complexities arose from digital transformation. Artificial Intelligence has propelled their usage and has urged technology to collaborate with big data and customers.
Apart from customer space, AI partakes in automation of Retail — IT activities such as deployment and testing. It makes the real-time feedback loops cost-effective and efficient in agile working conditions.
2. Highly Targeted Delivery
In the competitive framework, the customer is demanding speedy deliveries and as a result, he is becoming impatient with the online shopping journey. Retailers are hence converging their focus on improving the speed of delivery so that they can blur the lines separating offline and online shopping.
Drone delivery is the crucial step in revolutionizing the online shopping delivery. It eliminates the human intervention, reduces the urban traffic issues and makes the delivery model efficient.
US shoppers like the fast and free delivery options. Many buyers have shown the interest in fast delivery options like Amazon Prime, even though the services are not offered at free of cost. Drones can offer targeted delivery which can sieve through the current delivery models and can bring the wave of change in the shopping preferences.
3. Unique In-store Experiences
Online shopping has a segment of buyers who believe that the offline shopping experience is superior to online buying. These are the people who refrain from buying online. But this chunk of buyers is depleting with the rise in the trust component of online shopping. This has made retail stores to think of new ways of luring the customers.
Another argument largely heard from many online buyers is that buying in the stores offers a unique ’Shopping’ experience. It is fairly true since in-store experience has some advantages over online shopping.
Of late, the proliferation of retail technology has given a ray of hope to these store owners to try new techniques. Because it can be the exclusive way to make a customer check-in to the store instead of buying online.
Most important transition in revolutionizing the in-store experience is omnichannel marketing i.e bridging the amenities of offline and online shopping. For example, few retail stores are providing tablets to search for the specific product on the shelves. Virtual Reality is used to enable the customer to make a qualified decision.
4. SaaS Based Start-ups
Disruption is spreading as a phenomenon. Many start-ups have influenced the retail value chain by offering many innovative dashboards which make prediction easier. However small a startup might be, it is crucial for retailers to pay due attention to grasp from where these innovations are coming.
In most of the cases, it has come from lean start-ups offering products or platforms as a service (PaaS / SaaS) and subscription models.
Retailers should be vigilant on the collaboration of their competitors with the start-ups which can add to competitive advantage. Macy’s, for example, partnered with Shopkick and installed beacons in stores to detect shoppers’ locations and send push notifications to customers’ mobile devices. Target is collaborating with Facebook and Instacart to improve the customer shopping experience.
5. Trust Issues in Data Utility
Current business structure faces a major threat of privacy issues and security breaches. These vulnerabilities are on constant raise as many retailers are going an extra mile to influence the customer buying. They face the burden of increased possibility of their payment gateways getting hacked. Half of the security breaches in recent years have happened in the retail industry.
Retail technologists are coming up with many enhancements to reach customers and augment the buying experience. Since the number of channels and their intricacies raises exponentially, the risk of security breach increases.
This makes the customer skeptical while sharing his data with the retailer. But, since data plays a significant role in plotting customer journeys, retailers cannot ignore fetching the data. The challenge arises when the customer has no intent to share his information but wants to buy from the specific retailer. It can result in a huge waste of marketing budgets.
The solution for this is still subjective as it depends on the extent of trust a customer has on a retailer. The retailer has to make sure that he vividly notifies the customer that his data ’will not be misused in any form’. If not, in an attempt to get closer to your customer, you are distancing yourself from him.
