![[Translate to Englisch:] Connected Retail meets Customer Centricity](/fileadmin/hmmh/images/news/hmmh_news_teaser_connected_retail_2017.png "[Translate to Englisch:] Connected Retail meets Customer Centricity")
Connected Retail: Customer Centricity meets Store
If large-scale investor Warren Buffet no longer believes in the stationary trade, then this is really spectacular. How else can we call it, when his holding company “Berkshire Hathaway” sells Walmart shares amounting to 900 million US-Dollars and instead prefers to invest in Airlines? The industrial portal Business Insider even asks, whether this would be a death knell for the entire industry.
PCs, laptops, smart phones, tablets, wearables: Whether for shopping, getting adviced or simply browsing, their options are limitless. Sophisticated product presentations and descriptions, chat bots and live chats replace more and more the seller in the stationary trade. Increasingly free and faster deliveries save time and favour the nerves. In addition, Big Data does not only help to personalize the online shop and find merchandise faster but even provides precise suggestions for something that you didn’t know you were searching for it. The online shop wins the set, one might assume.
However, for some time also an opposite trend can be observed: Going for shopping in the local store has gained again a certain importance to the customer. This, of course, only applies if they can expect an added value. For consumers it is no longer a matter of “Either / Or”. They want both – online shopping as well as shopping in the stationary trade, preferably connected in an intelligent way. This brings the stationary trade back into the game.
In doing so, the famous “Seamless Customer Journey” is, however, still not yet achieved even if the sellers in the store are equipped with tablets, or digital consulting terminals are set up to ensure the extension to the online shop. Options such as beacon installations in the shop, tracking of mobile devices or voice services such as Amazon Alexa enable to pick up the end customer where he most recently did start, pause or finish his/her journey – to wit online.
Via the intelligent evaluation of data, dealers can also finally solve another decisive disadvantage: Up to now, a retailer did not know very much about his/her customers, except for maybe the particularly good ones. Neither did he/she know what the interest of the customer was before, after or during the store visit, or whether he/she compared prices of competitors in parallel with the visit to the store. The holistic collection and recording of behaviour patterns, preferences and needs of customers in the store and in the online shop makes it possible to practically summarize this information to create a personal profile and return it to the customer in the form of real added value.
The prerequisite for this is asking the right questions. The information on the hair colour is of less importance for the multi-media store than the music taste of the customer. Not all data are relevant – all the more important is the right data strategy. In doing so, not only shop owners have the possibility to adapt themselves to the visitors, but also the stationary furniture dealer, the Hifi shop or the supermarkets down the road.
The collected data can already be read in real time and be converted into an interaction at the POS. However, all too often there is a lack of an intelligent data strategy and it fails due to outdated structures, which now need to be broken. If you then also bear in mind that in the future the shopping experience at the point of sale as well as the efficiency of a perfect advice can be raised to a whole new level thanks to Virtual and Augmented Reality, it is better not to write off the stationary trade too early. The digital transformation opens up the opportunity for future-oriented retailers to catch up and compensate one-to-one. They only have to seize their opportunity.
So why do we not finally bring together the best of online and offline in the interests of the end customer? If the focus is really on the customer, it is important to stop thinking one-way and to take new steps. However, this will only be possible if you exactly know both the consumer’s behaviour and where you want to go. The POS is forced to take action, and it only has chance in the future, if they do adjust their services to the needs of the customers, just as online retailers do.
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