Best Practices For Bridging Retail's Physical-Digital Gap

More than 90 percent of sales still conclude in the physical store according to a new study conducted by Retail Systems Research (RSR). Yet, sales associates have little to no visibility into the customers’ buying history and pre-purchase activities when they set foot in the store. Retailers revealed the biggest problem is with the technology they currently have in place. Overwhelmingly the majority of retailers surveyed agree it’s crucial they unify the online and in-store experience, but not all know how to get to that point.

We had a chance to chat with NetSuite’s General Manager of Global Retail, Branden Jenkins, to get his take on how retailers can provide that seamless shopping experience to their customers.

1. What do you feel is holding retailers back from providing a seamless customer experience across channels?

It is easy for retailers to get caught in the cycle of solving problems channel by channel with different point solutions for each. They may have a bold new idea to enhance a specific channel but no good way to extend that experience to the other channels. This results in a disjointed customer experience and an expensive IT infrastructure to maintain. Instead, retailers should flip that approach and first develop a clear blueprint for the ultimate customer experience that is supported in a unified way by technology.

2. What are some of the ways retailers can overcome the inhibitors that are holding them back from creating a seamless customer experience?

Break free of letting your systems drive your customer experience. Legacy products bolted together may impede your ability to deliver a customer-centric experience. Only a single, standardized view of customer, inventory and order information available in real time can support a seamless omnichannel customer experience. And that requires a single commerce platform that natively unifies your core, back-office systems with your online and in-store systems. This approach, for example, will make things like social, loyalty programs and registries consistent across all of your channels. Finally, retailers must deploy a cloud-based solution to be flexible and agile in order to remain competitive and keep up with customer expectations.

3. How can the POS be used to deliver better personalized service and a continuous buying journey to shoppers?

Retailers have a huge opportunity to transform the POS into a point-of-engagement system that gives store associates real-time access to complete inventory and customer information to engage shoppers, drive more sales and provide a knowledgeable and personalizedexperience. Armed with mobile devices, your sales associates can determine, from anywhere in the store, product availability and estimated delivery dates if the product has to be shipped. They’ll also have access to a customer’s ecommerce shopping cart and wish lists, and can add those items to in-store purchases. On the flipside, staff can add items to an ecommerce wish list that a customer considered but didn’t buy. With this information, you can start building rich customer profiles in real time that your sales associates can access during subsequent in-store visits.

4. How can retailers enable their store associates to better serve the digitally-savvy consumers that shop in their store?

With the proper training, retailers are able to leverage their biggest assets, the store associates, by empowering them with the tools and information to assist and engage shoppers. Having a mobile POS device in hand enables sales associates to engage with customers anytime, anywhere in the store. When a sales associate is in the aisle, talking about the product, make sure they have just as much or more information than the customer. The associate can pull out their device, scan the product, look at it digitally and share the screen with the customer. The customer can pay for it right there via the sales associate’s wireless device and take it with them, or, pay for it and have it shipped if the item isn’t available in-store. That kind of quick, personalized service and value is likely to overshadow the impulse of customers browsing in-store and leaving to later buy online at a lower price from a competitor.