Smart Retail - Before Convincing, Start Connecting

Content:

In last 5 years Indian customers’ experience with purchasing in a retail environment has undergone a massive change. But the first question strikes on my mind while thinking about retail management is “What is the responsible factor behind the change? “

Massive e-commerce boom of course! It is equally encouraging for e-commerce companies to receive such huge response. While, on one hand, e-commerce retailing has started to change the notion of shopping in the country, on the other hand, the traditional brick-and-mortar stores are struggling hard against the rioting success of online shopping.

How to bridge the gap between online and offline retail market?

To bridge the gap between the  online and offline retail market we need to design the customer centric model in which all efforts will be made to provide ease to the customers while shopping from both online and offline market.

In order to make the procedure smart we need to take care of following aspects so that our model should work efficiently as per customer’s ease of shopping. 

• Best time for them to shop.
• Types of offers that influence customers’ decision making process.
• Demography.
• Proffered Product with preferred price range.
• Kind of content they find most interactive.
• Customer’s responsiveness to promotional campaigns.
• What kind of campaign is suitable for which class of customers?
• Time when like-minded shoppers prefer visiting the store.

Connecting the Unconnected

Technological advancement and increasing numbers of tech savvy customers hold both curse and blessing for brick-and-mortar retailers. If they resolutely indulge in making technological advancement work for them, then they will have attention of the large tech savvy customer base. Failure to do so would only quicken their defeat against online competitors.

Customer Centric approach

One-stop solution for the retailer to overcome and understand customers’ needs which include following techniques that will create a win-win situation for retailer and the customer.

1.     Customize the Shopping Experience

“Always Listen – What your customers are saying?” At a time when it’s easy to have a two-way dialogue with your customers, it’s important to truly listen. When listening to your customers, take into account what changes your organization should make from this feedback, and then follow through. Your customers are the lifeblood of your organization, and not dealing with the reasonable requests could cause backlash.

2.     Achieving Shop-ability

 To ensure that your store is shop-able, your store, staff and assortment needs to team up impeccably. Then, retailers must know how to improve their store. This is when new, advanced technologies and retail analytics will help you to a considerable extent. Analytics would give you a better insight as to how your shoppers response or behave when choosing products from the shelves. This means you will able to identify precisely what to improve on.  

3.     Improved Customer Service

Customer service is also changing with the lapse of time. Today, customer service executives have the required data essential to answer customer queries and resolve their issues. All of this information is available at their fingertips! This has two distinct benefits such as

• Customer service representatives can multitask.
• Resolving problems much faster than expected.

4.     What Purpose is served

‘Smart Retail – Smart India ‘The purpose of smart retail is to provide instant accessibility to the customer so that it would be convenient for them to buy any product online or offline. Eventually the customer will save time and will prove to be the efficient way which in turn serve our purpose of doing the thing in the smartest way i.e. smart retail and smart India.

Conclusion:

Retail management in an efficient manner will play an important role as smart retailing in Indian market will serve as the time consuming, transparent and reliable technique or practice. 

About Author:

 Himanshu Suryavanshi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: 

himanshu.suryavanshi@spluspl.com