In recent times we have witnessed the transformation of the consumer with an accelerated digitalization, caused by the growth and emergence of new technologies and the confinement and pandemic effect, which forced many brands to start operating under multichannel strategies.

While store visits fell and the e-commerce boom began, the reopening of physical stores has allowed us to see how people have started to return to the stores. The reopening has created a new opportunity: facing hybrid consumers looking for consistency between what they know about our brand and what they expect to see in the store.

When we talk about hybrid consumers, we refer to those who know the brand and how it operates, both digitally and physically—an informed consumer looking for the same shopping experience across all channels.

According to a study by Káwesqar Lab, at least 89% of consumers will continue to use the physical format to shop, and within this, 66% will opt for mixed formats, shopping omnichannel or hybrid (Ecommerce Tracker Lab June 2021 – Kawésqar Lab).

Moreover, we know that June has been the month that has registered the highest number of visits in shopping centers in 2021, increasing by 3 points the qualification of affluence to stores (source: Getin Study “the renaissance of physical stores 2021”).

This new context and changes in the consumer’s shopping style result in a direct challenge in productivity, stock assurance, and implementation to meet the current needs of shoppers and increase our average tickets.

Stock challenges

Considering the new consumers, the stocking challenge means that each store must ensure the availability of key items. For example, having stock of sizes according to the demand of the geographical location of each store, having the color curve for each product, and finally that those critical SKUs for the season or that are in online presence, are also available in our physical stores.

So, the stock challenge goes beyond just “having products” but must generate an intelligent planning and demand projection system, together with a sound logistics system that coordinates all processes efficiently. This requires technological platforms to support the operations as a whole, helping to systematize compliance at all levels in the store.

For stores, the challenge goes beyond the basic concept of the system’s stock. To achieve sales, the product must be available at the customer’s fingertips. It is essential to ensure that all the efforts made to ensure assortment are reflected in the consumer’s eyes, avoiding display shortage in the store. In other words, products should not be hidden or forgotten in the backroom but should be correctly displayed on the tables, wall displays, and cabinets, allowing them to be sold at the right time.

A technological tool, such as ShelfManager, can support stores in identifying the need for replenishment on the sales floor at SKU level so that the product is always available in front of the customer.

Implementation challenges

Currently, the average time customers spend in a store is 11 minutes per person (source: Getin Study “the renaissance of physical stores 2021”). The big questions to ask ourselves are: How do we implement with the customer journey time in mind? How do we win over the customer in less than 11 minutes?

If we think about the customer journey and take advantage of every minute of their visit as an opportunity, it is essential to consider the role played by promotional activation. This must be aligned across all communication channels in line with the company’s strategy. In addition, unique in-store opportunities can be generated to confirm and leverage the consumer’s decision to visit our stores physically.

Implementing on time and efficiently starts by ensuring communication with the store so that guidelines from different business departments, such as marketing and visual merchandising, reach the store and are correctly implemented.

In contrast, we often encounter problems of visibility and actionability to correct possible errors in these implementations, such as lack of product, POP material, or poor execution of the planogram or display, among others.

Platforms such as Frogmi allow us to send implementation tasks with all the relevant information to be executed in-store, guiding them to ensure the reception of the information and proper execution.

Considering the rise of hybrid consumers, stores must keep up with the pace of promotional activities in the digital world. Hence the growing relevance of communication to and from stores.

Technologies such as Frogmi allow HQ to receive real-time results, with valuable information such as photographic evidence. In addition, since Frogmi is a web-mobile platform, it is possible to access this information from wherever you are, thus eliminating the need for physical store visits by the areas in charge to corroborate the execution.

​​ An example of productivity with an omnichannel focus.

Based on the above, we know that increased competition and omnichannel demand greater flexibility and agility in promotions and activations, along with the need for fast and effective communication.

One retailer that today is betting on introducing Frogmi technology to its processes and workflows is La Polar. Its Operations Manager, José Ramón Sánchez, states that “The teams feel more satisfied, the level of service has improved, the products codes match, the process iteration is reduced by half, life is simplified, and everything is faster.” 

The contribution of technology to support retail strategy is driving and achieving faster and more effective communication, impacting team productivity. It enables staff to carry out all planned activities quickly and effectively while at the same time generates real momentum for the store’s omnichannel strategy.

Companies today have more channels of interaction with their customers than ever before. Traditional ones, such as physical stores, have been joined by digital ones, such as apps, social networks, and online sales. The challenge now is to bring them all together. Their integration into a single system is the goal of omnichannel, a strategy, increasingly in vogue, that allows the consumer to move seamlessly from one channel to another during the buying process and obtain the most satisfactory experience possible.

Óscar Katime, partner in charge of Innovation at the EY consulting firm, lists its benefits: “With omnichannel, a better service is provided, and this will enhance market positioning; which, in turn, will make the company more accessible, closer, transparent and friendly. An increase in the number of transactions, therefore, will be the consequence.” In addition, brands will gain valuable insights into their customers’ habits through this integration.

The opportunities for organizations to drive this strategy are multiplying in the face of the rise of the hybrid consumer, who combines traditional and digital shopping. “In 2020, 52% of citizens said they go to the physical channel and the internet interchangeably, but in the future, this percentage is expected to be 78%,” says the president of the Spanish Confederation of Commerce (CEC), Pedro Campo, referring to the conclusions of the organization’s last congress.

The physical store represents the traditional place where companies offer their products and services and carry out transactions. Still, few businesses today can do without digital channels, which multiply the opportunities to interact with the consumer. Victoria Labajo, professor of Commercial and Retail Management at Universidad Pontificia Comillas ICAI-ICADE, mentions the most common: “Websites [which have virtual mailboxes and chatbots], commerce through mobile devices, sales platforms and applications, social networks and marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay. In addition to product aggregators [sites that compare different brands of the same type of product, such as ShopAlike] and promotional flash sale platforms [that offer discounts for a limited period of time].”

If managing several of these channels at once is defined as multichannel, omnichannel is merging all of them into a single system. In this way, “they are presented perfectly integrated into the same shopping experience, or some of them are combined at different points in the process,” explains Labajo. For example, “in the physical store, digital touchpoints can be incorporated: tablets to check stock or for customers to consult the catalog or search for product information, as well as augmented reality applications, such as virtual fitting rooms, among others,” the professor describes.

For Luis Soler, Consulting Partner at Deloitte, a clear example of an omnichannel business model is “the restaurant with its own website, which takes orders by phone, has a presence on home delivery platforms and, of course, has tables on its premises.” Consumers thus have multiple ways to make reservations and orders and get helpful information about the business.

Communication with the customer by all possible means

Communication is a key factor in omnichannel. When referring to it, the director responsible for Digital Business at KPMG in Spain, Benjamin Evans, mentions several essential actions that are part of its digital aspect: “Display advertising [ads that combine images and text, and that are shown on the top or side of pages in the form of banners, in Spanish, pancartas], search engine marketing [search engine ads, SEM for its acronym in English], email campaigns, push messages on the cell phone [those that arrive from an application, even if it is not being used at the time] and social networks, among others.” Likewise, the typical traditional channels for developing a communications campaign are print, outdoor ads, radio, and television, he adds.

A combination of both worlds that this expert brings up is the gradual transformation of a medium like television into something more personalized and interactive thanks to Smart TV (connected TV). “Increasingly, users will see ads on the screen that will lead to a landing page [a web page accessed from a link] by pressing a button on the remote control,” Evans predicts.

In any case, what must be taken into account, stresses Erik Rigola, digital strategy specialist at the consultancy RocaSalvatella, in the Banco Sabadell Podcast “Simple ways to sell online,” is that “there are not only digital or only physical consumers, but omnichannel consumers, so it is not so important the channel through which the customer acquires the product but the shopping experience that is provided.” 

https://www.ivoox.com/player_ej_72344830_4_1.html?c1=006dff

For Evans, the center of the strategy will always be the user. “And you have to accompany them throughout the buying process to make it easier for them to get to know the product, the brand, or the company, but especially to make them feel the most important thing,” he adds.

Inditex represents one of those cases in which omnichannel is a success, Labajo believes. “Despite having arrived at e-commerce later than some of its competitors, this firm is committed to integrating digital and traditional, and it has achieved this by favoring the generation of traffic to physical stores from its online channels by prioritizing the collection of orders in its stores. And all of this is supported by the application of the latest technologies in logistics, radio frequency control [for stock registration] and augmented reality.”

A useful strategy for any company

Experts agree that the size of the company does not matter when it comes to implementing omnichannel. “In fact, it will be easier to implement it in a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) or a start-up, since it will not have all those layers of bureaucracy, processes, and policies typical of large companies that make it difficult to redesign the customer’s shopping experience so that it can jump nimbly from channel to channel,” says Katime, a partner at EY.

This expert believes that few companies focus correctly on this strategy, whose objective should be to eliminate frictions and barriers that the customer may encounter. “If the driving force behind implementing it in the company is only to sell more, it is implicitly saying that it doesn’t matter what the consumer thinks, and this is what unfortunately happens on many occasions,” he stresses. The increase in sales, far from being the ultimate goal, is just one more benefit that comes as a result of its correct application.

The omnichannel in small commerce

The adoption of this strategy is an excellent challenge for all types of businesses. According to Deloitte’s Soler, its implementation requires learning how to efficiently exploit the data provided by the channels to make decisions, adapting and making the supply chain more flexible, innovating in customer interaction, and training personnel.

Faced with the onset of the pandemic, retail, however, has had to make a virtue out of necessity. “During the strict confinement, many entrepreneurs launched sales through websites and social networks, implemented new forms of payment such as Bizum, sold directly through WhatsApp, or increased their presence on platforms such as Instagram, making live broadcasts with their customers,” Campo points out.

“Now it’s time to analyze these tools, which are quite widely used in companies, especially to deal with queries and gain visibility,” admits the president of the CEC. However, “the purchasing process usually ends in the physical store,” emphasizes the expert, for whom this is the essence of this type of business. For this reason, retailers advocate an omnichannel system in which the traditional and digital channels complement and enhance each other without one replacing the other.

Original source: El pais.com

Department store sales have increased considerably in recent times in several countries. In Mexico, they had a rebound of 21.1% in June 2021 compared to the same month of the previous year. In Chile, there was an increase of 27% in sales in the first five months of the year, according to data from the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, becoming the country with the highest growth worldwide. 

The encouraging figure recorded in Chile, which led it to surpass countries such as China, Ireland, and the United States, was due to various economic aids provided as a result of the pandemic and, above all, to the sanitary protocols established by the trade, which managed to give confidence to customers. This last factor has also been a determining factor in Mexico, where consumer confidence has returned to pre-pandemic levels, increasing by 12.5 points compared to the previous year and directly influencing the return of people to the stores. 

However, this growth brings a series of challenges for stores. Technology and an omnichannel strategy play a fundamental role in maintaining it in the future

After more than a year of confinement, quarantine entries and exits, the global consumer has been changing its habits, customs and ways of buying.

No one is indifferent to the fact that we are experiencing a major digital revolution, accentuated and accelerated by a pandemic year. Many companies were forced to jump into a new digital space or transform their business models.

Last-mile applications, new service technologies, and new ways of relating to each other have gone hand in hand with the challenge of generating rapid technological adoption by all types of businesses, especially in one key industry: retail.

A productivity challenge

According to a McKinsey study, 51% of working hours are spent between information search and data analysis processes. An alarming figure when we talk about sales-floor and mass consumption, where time and agility are critical.

Digitalization and advances in e-commerce have created the need to improve processes within physical stores to respond to the new and rapid demands of consumers. However, the reality seems to be very different.
Even large retailers or relevant store chains still have processes based on traditional and linear forms of communication. For example, they manage their incidents through e-mail or instant messaging to the areas in charge and use physical control forms.

Although this traditional way of working may be widely used, it is far from efficient. It generates incidents, late solutions to daily requirements of the store operation and does not respond to the demanding and digital consumer we face today, directly affecting satisfaction and customer experience indexes, among others.

Towards a new retail

According to the same study by the previous consulting firm, at least 30% of the activities performed at the data compilation and processing level can be automated, which translates into a substantial improvement in the execution time of tasks and incidents.

The transformation of physical stores requires a significant technological and automation component. It needs to leave behind the traditional forms of retail sales to digitize all processes, from the supply chain to the implementation of commercial actions in stores. 

It is essential to consider that the automation of retail processes positively affects the productivity of store workers and allows detailed monitoring of operations, and above all, generates indicators that are of great value to the business.

Implementing an automation platform such as Storework enables companies to track in real-time all incidents in physical stores and from anywhere in the world. In this way, the central offices can control any problem in the chain and solve it quickly. 

These incidents are also stored in the form of data, generating reports on problems, frequencies, areas and automating future improvements, among other solutions.

In the face of this digital transformation, the new retail must evolve its processes towards sales-floor that generate an omnichannel manifestation of its brand, with efficient and seamless management for its employees and customers.