Retail, whether in textiles or food, constitutes one of the most critical sectors in the economic sphere at a national and international level. This sector is constantly evolving because it has to adapt continuously and permanently to the needs of its customers. For this, they invest a lot of budgetary and resource efforts in IT, thus putting technology at the service of people.
To comply with what is demanded by the actors involved, the technology and innovation departments are in continuous search of new solutions that enhance their logistics, how to show their potential customers the attractiveness of their products through different channels ( physical and online), as well as making the shopping experience of consumers as attractive as possible.
Without forgetting this constant search for new solutions, the main objective of the retail sector is without a doubt that its technological infrastructures, both in physical stores and online, are available 365 days a year to support a business that does not understand stops. And that lives its peaks of activity in contrast to the traditional holiday periods of the labor market.
What Are The Needs Of The Retail Sector
For years, the leading manufacturers, consultancies, and technology integrators have focused on creating an ecosystem that can satisfy all customer demands—relying on solutions, services, and products in onsite and remote IT infrastructures such as Cloud, Cybersecurity, Systems, Communications / Networking, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Digital Marketing, RPA, etc.
Within this general portfolio, we could focus on some specialized solutions for retail, with the particularities that each type of product implies and never forgetting that we must facilitate the sale and never interrupt the service.
- Monitoring Of Stock And Environmental Conditions: It is not enough to know precisely the product we have and how it is stored through the use of pallets, shelves, trolleys, etc. To ensure that it reaches the end customer in perfect condition, it is necessary to know the needs of conversation (especially in perishable products or food) in which we store it, for example, in a new area, or transport it.
- Real-Time Monitoring Of Customers Within The Store: From defining the path that our client travels to making the purchase both in a physical store and in an ecommerce to find the key points of the process, to functional solutions with which to control capacity.
- Beacons: Improve the customer’s digital experience within the store by learning from the information provided by online-offline monitoring and integration to improve the shopping experience. Our digital sales channel will increase its weight exponentially in the coming years, but the data generated is also applicable to our physical store. Communication and decision-making must be two-way.
- Customer Service And Support: Omnichannel is the keyword when it comes to customer service. From chatbot solutions to being able to communicate from any digital messaging or social media channel. The retail sector has reinvented itself to be in permanent contact with the consumer.
- B Impact: Our technological solution in Power BI, B impact, will allow you to collect information about the interactions in all the channels of your business to characterize their behaviors and analyze the consumption, habits, and preferences of users.
- Augmented/Virtual Reality: The way of presenting the product to the consumer has changed with the application of new technologies allowing the visualization of main functionalities and characteristics in a more realistic and close way in different formats. A change in perception facilitates the purchase process.
- Digital Signage: This new way of presenting our catalogs and advertisements gives us greater flexibility for the customer and a visual presentation adapted to the screen format that consumers have become accustomed to.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Building customer loyalty so that the relationship with consumers is prolonged according to what is planned for our product type is vital for successful marketing strategies in the retail sector. Any plan should include this metric and assess the technology to meet or even exceed initial expectations.
Integra Strategy and Technology are positioned as one of the high added value technology partners for the retail sector, combining these technological capabilities, both general and specialized, and always offering a tailor-made solution for each business.
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