Retail Week readers will need no introduction to the NRF Big Show, the annual gathering of the retail technology world which takes place in New York every January.

Retail Week readers will need no introduction to the NRF Big Show, the annual gathering of the retail technology world which takes place in New York every January.

Having attended for a decade, I consider myself something of an NRF veteran – as Tesco Chief Information Officer, it’s an invaluable way to meet all my suppliers in the space of two days, and this year’s show felt to me like the biggest and busiest yet.

NRF isn’t new – it’s actually been going for over a century. Back then, it was about coathangers and the other pieces of equipment you need to run a shop. Today it’s all about technology. But the type of technology it showcases has been changing, and this year I noticed a very tangible shift.

If you were to go back two or three years, the majority of the products on display were about making the business more efficient, whether through the supply chain, cash management or the back office. All useful stuff, but not technology which made a tangible difference to the customer experience.

What’s struck me about this year’s NRF is the huge shift from technology with an operational focus to technology which benefits customers. This year the Javits conference centre was awash with digital displays. These first appeared two years ago and were stunning, but the technology has really developed and I saw a lot of innovations this week which I can see having a genuine positive impact on the customer experience.

Let me give you a couple of examples. I was particularly struck with what appeared to be a full length mirror, but was actually an LED display with a camera mounted on top of it.

When a customer tries an outfit on, the screen enables the customer to compare that product with others, to try the product in different colours without changing into them, and also enables the customer to get a 360 degree view of how the product looks on them. It could potentially spell the end of the age old question “does my bum look big in this?”

RFID – a subject which seems to have been discussed on the pages of Retail Week for decades – is also evolving to be a customer focused tool, rather than one which was primarily seen as being a tool in the supply chain and logistics.

I was very impressed with how one vendor had brought RFID into the changing room. The changing room has a screen which the customer can see, and when a customer tries on a particular product, the screen recognises the product and the customer is shown suggestions of other items which would work well with the product being tried on.

Multichannel inevitably was a major focus of the show, and one feature which I hadn’t seen prominently before but which was widespread this year were lockers, reflecting the growing importance of click and collect to customers. Here again, the technology is becoming more sophisticated, with digital displays which do much more than simply allow the customer to enter a code to retrieve their order.

For us at Tesco, we see the main purpose of technology as improving the customer experience. So it was pleasing to see how the vendor community has shifted its focus in recognition of how, in today’s competitive and multichannel environment, technology can be a real differentiator with the customer. More than ever, for both retailers and vendors, a commitment to innovation which benefits customers is vital, and so it’s pleasing to see that shared commitment in action here in New York.

Mike McNamara, chief information officer, Tesco