After growing accustomed to the convenience of online deliveries over the past two years, consumers now need compelling reasons to look up from their screens and retailers face a battle to bring shoppers back to physical locations. Retail Week looks at the cutting-edge tech that could help them win the fight.

  • Retailers are findings ways to merge both digital and physical experiences, primarily via smartphones
  • Data accrued through loyalty schemes will prove crucial to enhancing the in-store shopping journey
  • Frictionless checkout is high on the agenda, with Sainsbury’s, Tesco and WHSmith all following Amazon’s lead

To entice their target consumer inside once more, retailers need to eliminate friction, successfully utilise the swathes of customer data they have collected and create memorable experiences. However, they must first tackle the basics before truly ushering in the era of the tech-powered store.

Luckily, a wealth of tech solutions are emerging to create the seamless in-store experience that will lure shoppers back.

Perfecting the basics

M&S List and Go technology

M&S is trialling an AR app called List & Go 

Retailers are now focusing on understanding fundamental technology requirements before investing in store transformation. Stores first need to provide customers with the possibility to merge both digital and physical experiences. 

Director and publisher at Retail Technology Miya Knights believes more retailers need to take note of how the smartphone can be added to the physical experience – and as an ally, rather than an opponent.

“Stores are still largely digital black holes,” she says. “If you do take your phone out in store, you’re doing it to compete with the retailer.”

Nike has led the way here, suggesting that smartphone usage could soon be common across a variety of stores. In its New York House of Innovation, loyalty-programme members can reserve items via phone and then collect them from a locker in store by scanning a code, again from their mobile device.

Shoppers can also scan items on a mannequin to see if their size is available or request to try them on, as well as paying via their device.

These simple steps bring something every customer already has – the humble smartphone – into the heart of the shopping experience.

Marks & Spencer has launched an ongoing series of trials to allow its stores to work more intuitively with customers’ smartphones.

Its Scan & Shop service allows consumers to pay directly on the app and scan a product’s QR code to see if an item is available in the right size – either in store or online.

“Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen increased customer use of digital, interactive shopping – whether that’s payment methods or QR-code-based solutions in store”

Sacha Berendji, M&S

M&S reports that more than 10,000 customers a week used the barcode-scanner service in the run-up to Christmas. The retailer is now trialling an AR app called List & Go that allows shoppers to upload a list and be guided to where each product is in their local M&S.

Speaking around the launch of List & Go, M&S store development and IT director Sacha Berendji said: “Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen increased customer use of digital, interactive shopping – whether that’s payment methods or QR-code-based solutions in store.”

M&S has chosen 10 stores to test innovations in before unveiling them across the network, illustrating the need to adapt new technologies to the in-store experience before making them available to the masses. 

“During this time, we’ve launched a wave of new initiatives to make shopping at M&S quicker and easier for customers, from rolling out our mobile shopping service Scan & Shop to launching our new digital click-and-collect format,” Berendji added.

Boots is also introducing new initiatives to perfect what it can offer in store and ease existing issues.  

Its chief information officer Rich Corbridge says: “In reality, our stores have been somewhat neglected, particularly around tech.

“Stores were starting to struggle with the things we were giving them and asking them to do, and the pace of change.”

In a bid to address this, Boots has now created a 2022 in-store tech strategy, finalising it over the course of 36 hours.

On a Thursday in March, members of the IT team visited Boots stores across the UK and Ireland, speaking directly to the employees about their tech needs.

These conversations in 320 stores resulted in 6,000 data points and formed the basis of the year’s strategy, which was signed off on the next evening.

Face-to-face visits will continue, while partners such as IBM and Microsoft will be able to sponsor a store to trial technology and learn what store teams think of new ideas.

Furthermore, a newly created online portal will allow team members to log issues in store instead of calling for help.

Solving existing issues and honing in on the basics will allow retailers to be truly ready when it is time to create the next generation of in-store tech.

Personalisation

Once the existing tech is optimised, retailers need to be ready to serve each individual customer.

“The phone is so much smarter. It knows everything that I do, my preferences – it will know what I’ve eaten, how well I am,” retail futurist Howard Saunders explains.

“None of that is known in store, and when it is it will open up opportunities. You will click when you go into the store and see what the store thinks it wants to sell you. It’s a whole new area waiting in the wings.”

This points to what retailers will soon be able – and expected – to do from a consumer perspective. 

Boots is among those preparing to level up its connection with customers, with Corbridge eager to expand on the retailer’s personalisation.

“We are starting to serve ‘offers for you’ rather than ‘offers for people like you’,” he says.

Checkouts in a Boots store

Boots is looking at ways to bring more personalisation into stores

“A huge amount of time and investment has gone into that personalisation over the last 12 months and bringing that into the app, so when you are in the store you simply scan the shelf-edge and find out the offers relating to that thing you’ve just scanned.

“The app learns that you’re interested in that type of product and surfaces offers to you related to the product you actually buy, rather than it being the quite generic way personalisation has been done in the past.”

This personalisation could even extend into health, with Boots exploring opportunities to utilise information related to healthcare to provide focused care for individual customers. 

The highest level of personalisation in store can only be achieved through the collection of swathes of data possessed by the retailer, which is offered willingly by loyalty-card customers.

Investing in loyalty now can be a key step in preparing to offer a leading tech-powered experience in the future.

“I didn’t think we would get to personalised pricing as quickly as we have,” Knight remarks. “Clubcard dived straight in there.”

She also cites Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Waitrose as other retailers that have embraced personalised offers for shoppers.

Smart mirror in Browns store

Smart mirrors at Browns can connect to a customer’s online activity

“These are mass grocery loyalty schemes. The more customers you have, the greater the scale in which you operate, the more it is worth investing in loyalty to know what your customers want.”

Using customer data collected online and connecting it to store visits will be the next chapter. 

“We know that a lot of internet browsing happens when stores are actually closed. How many times do we do that and leave everything in a cart?” asks Lara Marrero, global leader at Gensler Retail.

“Imagine being able to go into a store and have your Apple Watch send you a nice light tap saying: ‘You were browsing this the other day. Do you want to see them in person?’ And you click a button and it will navigate right to where the product is. It will tell you if it is in your size and you could even reserve a fitting room.”

“[Browsing] just starts online and it picks up in store,” she concludes.

This may sound like a futuristic vision but the tech is already live in Farfetch-owned Browns at its Mayfair outlet. The luxury retailer’s app recognises shoppers who arrive in store and will show them what items are available from their online wish lists or ‘recently viewed’ items.

Store staff play a complementary role to the technology, working with shoppers to locate their online searches.

Farfetch executive vice-president for future retail Sandrine Deveaux explains: “The technology empowers sales advisers to deliver a highly personalised experience for each customer by providing access to customer data beyond their profile, intent signals such as wish lists, browsing and in-store interactions and access to inventory across all stock points, as well as operational tools for fitting-room mirrors, customer check-in notifications and remote payments.”

Payment 

At the heart of the ultimate in-store tech experience is seamless payment for the future customer.  

Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology has become pivotal to discussions around reducing friction during payment, and other retailers are now sitting up and taking note.

Sainsbury’s and WHSmith have teamed up with the titan to bring the tech to their own outlets, while Tesco and Aldi are experimenting with similar formats.

Boots is also interested. “From an innovation point of view, we are looking at Just Walk Out, we are looking at scan-and-go on the app,” Corbridge says.

“For now, we will see checkout-free technology in stores with the highest traffic, highest margins, highest frequency. All of this mitigates the cost”

Miya Knights, Retail Technology

However, forward-thinking tech comes at a price. 

“For now, we will see this kind of checkout-free technology in stores with the highest traffic, highest margins, highest frequency,” Knight points out.

“All of this mitigates the high cost of the technology.”

Knight envisions a future with a more hybrid approach, pointing to the larger grocery stores Amazon opened in the US last year with both tech and tills.

“They use [Amazon] Dash Carts and they have traditional checkouts so they spread the costs and they are less of a barrier to entry,” she says.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) presents a further opportunity to speed up the checkout process.

Each item is tagged, allowing it to be tracked. When brought to a special self-checkout, the items can then be dropped into a basket, the tags are immediately read and the total cost is displayed. This tech has been used by Zara, Decathlon and Uniqlo

However, too much responsibility is not always welcomed by the consumer.  Marrero eschews checkout solutions that insist customers remove security tags, for example. “They’re devaluing [the experience] by making you do something,” she says.

The potential to transform the store already exists. First, retailers need to incorporate smartphones into the daily shopping trip and perfect existing in-store tech investment. Beyond this, the opportunities to provide seamless experiences that merge the physical and digital are waiting to build the next generation of stores.

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