Moving to Smart Retail
Companies with Omnichannel customer engagement retain 89 of their customers, compared to 33% of companies with weak Omnichannel customer engagement. 2 The shopping experience is being redefined by a world where lockdowns, re-openings and new protective health measures are regular occurrences. Digitally savvy retailers are exploring and implementing the reinvention of the in- person shopping experience, the expansion of digital promotions and selling, and the optimisation of operations that depend on trends in different markets. Omnichannel nirvana has been the penultimate goal for many years across the retail industry. Now, many retailers are looking for radical innovations to transform themselves into ‘ Smart Retailers’ , in whatever form that may take for their target customers, rather than just looking at their online-offline shopping preferences.
Retailers cannot create smart shopping experiences without first gathering data and analytics from their customer base online and in-store, clearly defining individual customers’ shopping habits and understanding trends in consumer behaviour. Technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (machine learning) are rapidly being adopted by retailers to gather and take advantage of this data, and they’re using their new insight to re-engineer their businesses to engage customers more effectively and so generate more revenue. It’s clear that online won’t simply replace all physical stores, but will merge with the bricks & mortar experience to give customers more informed choices.
UK Daily retail footfall in 2021 is of the same week in 2019. 3 85
2 Aberdeen Group, 2020 3 ONS, June 2021 Data
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