How Intelligent Automation Reinvents CX In Retail
By Kate Prohorchik, Iflexion
Consumers have accumulated enough frustration from standing in long queues and failing to find the item they specifically came for. One of the markers of the high frustration level in retail is that shopping is increasingly shifting online. Brick-and-mortar stores need to face the fact—without proper solutions, they risk becoming extinct.
To find a way out of the situation, retailers need to solve two major challenges: to reduce the time spent by customers in shops and enhance the in-store experience. The aggravating factor here is sky-high customer expectations formed by online shopping and innovative strategies of retail giants. The only way to match such expectations is to employ process automation to both back-office and customer-facing processes.
In this article, we will talk about automation opportunities that enhance the in-store experience—a staple of successful brick-and-mortar reinvention.
Automation Throughout The Customer Journey
According to IBM’s report on the AI revolution in retail and consumer products, 79% of retailers are expected to be using intelligent process automation by 2021. While smaller physical stores have just started their automation with self-checkout options, retail behemoths entertain their customers with robot assistants and try to kill the concept of queues. Let’s look at how intelligent automation can enhance the entire customer journey, from the moment customers enter a store up to the moment they exit its doors.
Proximity Identification
By using a combination of beacon technologies, mobile apps, and data, stores can identify their app users as they pass by or walk along the aisles. Depending on their location, customers can get notifications about promo offers or personal discounts on their smartphones. Some self-service stores already activate customers’ loyalty accounts based on facial recognition.
In-Store Navigation
A set of connected devices can serve not only for wooing customers to the store and upselling related items but also for guiding visitors to departments or specific products. Some retailers, such as Lowe’s, go even further and equip their stores with robot assistants that can accompany lost customers to the needed section or provide additional information about products.
Cameras and beacons tracking customers’ behavior all day long collect a good amount of data that can be further used for enhancing navigation, measuring footfall, and registering peak times.
Product Augmentation
Most customers research additional information about products while in-store. The shops can save their customers’ time by accompanying each product with a barcode or a QR code that can be scanned for more information to be displayed in the brand’s app or on special screens installed in the aisles. The app can also offer recommended items that go well with the researched product.
To speed up the selection process, brands can add AR features, such as color matching, interior visualization, virtual catwalks, and smart mirrors in fitting rooms.
Smooth Browsing
Stores can leverage cameras and sensors to timely replenish empty shelves, spot damaged goods or spoiled food, identify areas in need of cleaning, control temperature, and detect any other situations that can affect customer experience. One of the recent examples is Walmart’s grocery store on Long Island with thousands of cameras suspended over the aisles and sensors on the shelves. No bruised banana shall pass this kind of control.
Automated Checkout
To beat long queues, many retailers, such as Zara and Urban Outfitters, introduced self-checkout kiosks where customers can scan items’ barcodes, pay by card, remove tags, and leave the shop.
Meanwhile, Walmart and Target enable checkout via smartphones, and self-service shops, like Amazon Go, go as far as to have no checkout stations whatsoever. Instead, they leverage an advanced system of sensors that read product data and bill customers’ accounts accordingly upon their leaving.
Are There Any Risks Associated With Intelligent Automation?
Any sophisticated technology is ambivalent, which applies to intelligent automation too. While it helps provide memorable customer experiences, it also poses several adoption and ethical issues.
Employee Buy-In
Customer-facing employees need to know how to interact with automation technologies to provide a barrier-free experience. It means that frontline staff should be trained both to use in-store automation tools and know how to act in case they break down or fail to help customers.
Employers also need to prevent the situation when their staff view technologies as a threat to their jobs. Instead, managers should reinforce the idea that employees’ time is an asset that needs to be dedicated to more critical tasks. Such an approach will help onboard employees for the transformational changes.
Customer Privacy
Customers can perceive in-store automation as a source of anxiety and insecurity. According to Capgemini’s research on smart stores, two-thirds of customers choose privacy over improved experience in a store equipped with automation. Store visitors are mostly anxious about facial recognition technologies as well as cameras tracking and recording their movements. As a result, they can avoid visiting such stores altogether. To make consumers friendly toward smart stores, retailers need to think about better transparency and opt-in/opt-out options.
Robots Vs. Humans
The more automation technologies are advancing into different verticals, the more employees might worry about losing their jobs to machines. It’s understandable: robots save time and money as they don’t need to be paid, they don’t get sick, and they don’t need to rest.
That’s why employers should always remember about the ethical part of technology implementation and use automation wisely. Technologies don’t take away responsibilities, they create new opportunities. Once a process gets automated, employers should reskill their staff to perform other valuable tasks as well as to supervise the machines, working in harmony with them.
Intelligent Automation Is Here To Stay
Though intelligent process automation is currently seen more as a global experiment with a yet unknown long-term effect, it’s clear that this experiment will only get more ubiquitous.
Automation presents unbeatable opportunities that make our lives much more convenient. While retail employees get rid of time-consuming and monotonous tasks, store visitors may soon forget about queues and out-of-stock products and experience personalization at an individual level. To make it a reality sooner, retailers should think about dealing with the issues of privacy and ethics in the best possible way.
About The Author
Kate Prohorchik is a Technology Observer at Iflexion. She combines business development, marketing, and sales backgrounds in the retail IT industry. For the last 8 years, she’s been helping brick-and-mortar as well as digital retailers embrace disruptive technologies and adapt to the new customer-centric reality. Now her expert voice finds its way into her articles on the transformative effects of digital innovations in the retail industry.