New in Infinity – April 2022

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you unify your physical and digital channels, increase your team’s operational effectiveness and differentiate the customer experience.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY API

Access real-time order data

Order information is now available in real-time to streamline fulfilment execution. Infinity now allows services to subscribe to changes in order status, such as dispatch or voiding. The updates can be used to integrate order data with other systems, such as ecommerce sites to provide dispatch or cancellation email updates to customers, ERP systems and buy-now-pay-later financing schemes.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Increase accuracy of data capture during complex sales

Infinity now gives you the ability to capture extra information for highly complex sales transactions, with validation during the process to ensure data accuracy. Businesses with complex item data requirements can configure rules and validations to capture specific information before a product can be added to the sale. Extended rules can also be configured for payment processing, receipt printing and exclusive selling rules.

Using this new functionality, a business might decide to take payment on behalf of other businesses (such as power companies and local authorities), requiring highly accurate information to be captured at the time of payment. By configuring the rules required by those other businesses, you can be confident that all information is being captured and all necessary business processes are being followed.

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INVENTORY

Faster adjustments of non-stock products

Head Office and branch users can now easily find non-stock products with negative stock on hand and correct the stock automatically to zero. Instead of having to identify items manually and create a stock adjustment for each one, users can now save time by finding all non-stock products with negative inventory and set them all to zero at once.

Give branches more local purchasing flexibility

If your stores have multiple regional supplier contacts, your staff can now directly email their local sales rep rather than having to go through a centralised contact for all stores. Branches can also now create customised supplier email addresses for sending purchase orders, giving them even greater control over the local purchasing process.

Increase accuracy of cost updates

Branch users can now update the cost of an item on the master data automatically during the invoice matching process, allowing them to avoid the pitfalls that come with manually inputting cost updates and ensure data integrity.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Automate store notifications when branches re-assign orders

Infinity will now prompt your store staff when an order line has been re-assigned to them from another branch and is awaiting processing (for customer collection in store or ship-from-store), ensuring that all parts of a customer order are processed and fulfilled in a timely way.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Assess profitability of promotions

When you create a pricing promotion using Infinity’s pricing wizard, you can now see the worst-case scenario for gross profit percentage. This allows you to easily gauge whether promotions are financially viable and gives you greater control over profit margins in your business.

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REPORTS & ANALYTICS

Give store staff more returns visibility

You can now provide your branches with more information on returns. If goods are returned to your store but originally sold at another store, store staff can now see details of the return transaction, and not the details of the original sale transaction.

If the goods were both sold and returned at the store, they will see a range of details about the transaction, such as the date the goods were sold and returned, the return price and quantity, the reason for the return, the store operator who processed the sale and the return, and the receipt number.

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POINT OF SALE

Increase stock visibility during sales process

Infinity’s Advanced Item Search now allows you to see stock levels and pricing at nearby branches. This gives better visibility during the sales process to businesses who source inventory from other branches. For those businesses that capture sales orders through a call centre, the inventory and pricing will default to the branch that the current customer belongs to.

Easily adjust your returns policy

If your business uses Infinity’s extended returns function, you now have greater flexibility over your return policy. You can choose to allow goods to be returned to any store. Alternatively, you can simplify the return process by only allowing customers to return goods at the store they made the original purchase.

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TECHNOLOGY

Increase email security

Infinity now supports the use of TLS 1.2 and a wide number of common SMTP ports to send emails. TLS 1.2 allows for better encryption and, in turn, improved security when sending emails via Infinity.

Support for Microsoft Edge browser

Infinity now supports using the Microsoft Edge browser engine technology to display external websites where support for Internet Explorer 11 has been removed.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

NPD modernises its retail experience with Triquestra

Fuel and convenience retailer, NPD, has selected Triquestra to transform its retail system and provide a hub for future innovation. Triquestra’s Infinity unified commerce solution will be installed as NPD’s point of sale in stores to improve the customer experience and support retail operations excellence and profitable growth.

Following rapid New Zealand expansion over recent years – including the launch into the North Island market in 2021 – NPD has 95 sites nationwide. With ambitious growth plans to launch 32 new sites over the next three years, the company prides itself on offering an exceptional customer experience.

“We have a strong focus on innovation as we grow our network and expand our retail offering to meet changing consumer needs,” says Lewis Preston, Retail Operations Manager at NPD. “Our architecturally-designed cafes are inviting and spacious, and we offer a forecourt service to ensure customers are being looked after as soon as they arrive. What really sets us apart is our incredibly popular range of café products which are all freshly prepared on site.” 

According to Louise Mitchell, NPD’s Senior Category Manager, the team are looking forward to the move to a modern technology platform that will streamline processes, gather deeper insights and provide great customer experiences.

“Infinity will play a key role in delivering a fast and efficient service to customers, while also helping to better manage our pricing and promotions and operate our business in a more profitable, data-driven manner.” 

It was important to NPD to partner with another New Zealand-based company. “As a Kiwi owned and operated business, we really pride ourselves on supporting local businesses and communities,” says Louise. “The Triquestra team’s responsiveness and flexibility gave us the confidence that we’ll get the swift, on-the-ground support and reliability we need.” 

Infinity’s analytics capability was another key factor in the decision. “We wanted to eliminate labour-intensive manual reporting and give our management fast and easy access to real-time business intelligence to support their decision-making,” explains Lewis. 

NPD is looking forward to better inventory and order management to increase stock accuracy and reduce admin time spent on sales, transactions, stocktakes, receipting, cash balancing and reordering. 

 “Right now, we have one retail price point for all of our sites nationwide,” says Lewis. “With surging inflation and rising costs, this negatively impacts the profitability of our sites in expensive regions.  

 “We pride ourselves on bringing genuine price and service competition to the fuel market. With Infinity’s ability to customise products, prices and promotions by site and region, we can provide our customers with even more value,” he adds. 

 “And we expect Infinity’s user-friendly interface to speed up our service at the till,” says Louise. “That will be amazing for both our staff and our customers.” 

 “There is tremendous pressure on fuel retailers to create new business models and revenue streams to replace traditional sources of revenue,” says Triquestra CEO Kelly Brown. “Retailers that become destination stores with more of what customers want are best positioned for long-term profitability and customer loyalty. We’re proud to partner with an award-winning convenience retail leader like NPD that is innovating to differentiate the customer experience.” 

Infinity will be implemented in a phased approach starting in mid-2022, with deployment and support provided by Triquestra’s implementation partner, ECL Group.

If it’s time to upgrade your point of sale to one that will scale and adapt to shifting consumer expectations and new technologies, contact us.

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New in Infinity – February 2022

Here are the latest enhancements added to the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and create fast, omnichannel experiences your customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY API

Incentivise loyalty members to buy

A new API lets your online customers see potential loyalty points earned on items, giving them an additional incentive to make a purchase.

Easier retrieval and display of alternate prices

The Products API now allows you to retrieve an item’s standard selling price and alternate selling price, per store. This is useful if you want to display information such as ‘was/now prices’ on your ecommerce portal or any other system that consumes the Infinity APIs.

Give customers real-time RRP prices

The new Product Price List API enables you to display comprehensive, accurate RRP prices to customers by retrieving from Infinity a real-time view of a full price list for one item in all branches, all items in all branches or a combination of both.

Easier access and display of custom data on debtors

The Accounts Receivable API now enables you to retrieve, manage and create business-specific information about your debtors that is contained in custom fields. You can use this custom data for either display or functional purposes within your system.

Retrieve and identify more pricing information

The Products API now includes more pricing data in responses, so you can retrieve and identify more pricing and unit information relating to products.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Improve mobile user experience when creating purchase orders 

Staff creating purchase orders on a mobile device can now receive additional notifications when finalising the order to help minimise potential errors, saving your business time and admin costs.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

Easier access to loyalty point movements for marketing

You can now access information on loyalty points earned or consumed on sales transactions, offering additional marketing communications triggers and data analytics around loyalty point movements.

Give customers and staff access to historical loyalty balance transfers

You can now see where a customer’s loyalty balance was transferred from or to in their transaction history, helping customers understand how their balance has been consumed and making it easier for your support office to understand historical transactions when resolving issues.

Faster retrieval of refund transaction details

Line description details for refund transactions are now included on debtor statements, letting you quickly and easily see which items were refunded.

Easier access to product refund or replacement details

The Sales and Credits function has been enhanced with additional fields to give you more options when searching for customer transactions. This interactive function lets you search for historical transactions and can help resolve post-sale queries such as determining whether a product is eligible for a refund or replacement.

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REPORTS & ANALYTICS

Increase visibility of stock value at each location

The Item Location Report has been enhanced with additional information to allow you to understand the dollar value of goods at each location, giving your finance team greater visibility over your stock.

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POINT OF SALE

Remove the risk of illegal age-restricted sales transactions

You can now configure Infinity so that age-restricted items can only be sold by store staff above a certain age, protecting your business from the risk of illegal transactions. 

Faster access to ePay gift card details

ePay gift cards can now be swiped through Vault EFTPOS terminals, giving your store staff a quick alternative to scanning or manually entering the card number when selling a gift card or checking a gift card’s balance.

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TECHNOLOGY

Reduce the time to install new back-office and PoS terminals

The Infinity setup process now allows for bulk copying of certain tables when building a branch linked to the Head Office. This will reduce the amount of time it takes to perform the first linking cycle after Infinity has been installed on a new machine in businesses that have a large amount of data in those tables.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – November 2021

Check out the latest enhancements across the Infinity platform designed to help you and your team work more efficiently and create the fast, frictionless experiences customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY APIs

Easily validate customer addresses

Infinity is now integrated with the Addressify and NZ Post address validation services. This prevents customers from providing inaccurate or incomplete address details, giving you the confidence that web and store orders are linked to the correct customer address. It includes validation of addresses for loyalty customers, orders and quotes, and customers stored in Infinity Loyalty. To use this feature, you’ll need a service agreement with Addressify and/or NZ Post.

Increase efficiency when receipting multiple POs

A new API allows your external suppliers to create a group of purchase orders (or purchase order lines) to make it easier for you to receipt multiple purchase orders at once. Suppliers can generate an Advanced Shipment Notice to provide information about the items included, and their related purchase order lines, so you can be prepared to check and accept delivery.

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INVENTORY

Increase accuracy of inter-branch stock transfers

Your stores can use the new Inter-branch Transfers Report to check for any variances between stock sent to them from another store and the stock that arrives. The report helps reduce inventory leakage between branches and force better stock management practices. It’s particularly useful for retailers who sell high-value items that are routinely transferred between branches. Stores will only see stock movements to or from their own branch.

Simplify stock receipting

You can now configure Infinity so that whole numbers (1,2,3) rather than decimals (1.00, 2.4) must be used in stock receipting. This simplifies stock receipting if you only use whole numbers in stock management and reduces the opportunity for time-wasting errors and confusion. 

Comply with AGDC data requirements

North American cigarette retailers can now use Infinity to meet AGDC (Altria Group Distribution Company) scan data requirements. You can report sales to tobacco companies directly, and then receive reimbursement from them, using an automated process that identifies eligible sales transactions and generates weekly reports in a AGDC compliant format.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Full visibility of orders

The Click and Collect Dashboard has been renamed the Orders Orchestration Dashboard to better reflect the wide range of customer order scenarios that it manages, including collection and delivery via store-to-door, drop shipping and click and collect.

Email customers order information

If you capture transaction data in the TH_FieldText fields, you can now include that data in the email that is sent to customers with their transaction receipt.  This allows you to include additional, business-specific information in the email that your customers receive.

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REPORTS

Give fuel sites better AA Smartfuel loyalty reporting

Fuel stores have three new reports that enable them to see transactional details for the  AA Smartfuel program, more easily gauge how the program is performing and assess ways to improve its productivity. The reports include analysis of fuel discounts accumulated by customers, fuel discounts redeemed by customers and non-fuel product sales that qualified for shop-sponsored cents-per-litre discounts.

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POINT OF SALE

Give your customers a single receipt

If your business uses PC EFTPOS NZ, you can now take advantage of the ability to only print one receipt, saving on paper and giving your customers the option to make a more sustainable shopping choice.

And if you want to go paperless and eliminate all paper receipts, Australian retailers can use Slyp Smart Receipts to send digital receipts direct to the customer’s banking app.

Let customers mix and match their loyalty accounts

Fuel retailers who use Infinity Loyalty to offer cents-per-litre discounts via an app can now allow their customers to group together loyalty accounts using the app and redeem saved cents-per-litre discounts from any of these accounts during a fuel purchase. This allows fuel customers who have multiple accounts amongst family members to mix and match how they use their accounts, reducing potential confusion about where their saved cents-per-litre discounts have gone.

Analyse historic foot traffic in stores

You can now record the foot traffic in your stores retrospectively, instead of just on the current day, giving your staff greater flexibility in record-keeping and providing a more comprehensive, reliable picture of the numbers of customers entering your stores. The foot traffic functionality is also now available in Restricted Back Office.  

Allow customers to change their minds during refunds

Your store staff can now cancel out of a refund to Afterpay and Zip, giving customers the opportunity to reverse their decision and preventing unintentional refunds to these two payment methods.

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TECHNOLOGY

• Stock information can be shared throughout your solution infrastructure more readily and seamlessly. The Cloud Events Service now publishes notifications about purchase orders, goods receipts and goods receipt cancellations, in addition to sales invoices. That means external systems, such as ERPs, use near real-time stock management information from Infinity rather than having to use custom integrations, flat files or pulling information using API.

• We’ve renewed Infinity’s certification with Quest Payment Systems in New Zealand, giving users of the Quest pinpad configured for use with Paymark the ability to integrate their EFTPOS solution with Infinity POS.

• Infinity now allows you to proactively prevent accidental mass data updates which can impact the Linker performance and reduce the real-time accuracy of information. Additional protection on the AKPOS database triggers blocks if updates to more than 20,000 rows are attempted within a single update. Block triggers can be removed as well as added.  

• To help retailers improve their security compliance, Infinity Web Integration and Infinity Loyalty now support the ability to work with TLS 1.0 disabled. This enables businesses to disable the now obsolete TLS 1.0 protocol and reduce their security risk profile. 

• Infinity Quickfire has been modified so that you can now automate upgrades by performing a silent upgrade of Infinity ETL and the Infinity Cloud Events Service using the Command line.

• The Infinity Gift Card API has been converted to a REST API for easier integration.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – May 2021

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team deliver the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY API

Better management of products sold 

The Products API now supports an expanded range of Infinity’s standard product management functions. The additions increase control over the selling of certain products, to ensure that business rules can be met and the correct products are selected while processing transactions. 

 You can use it to define and view: 

• The sites where a product can be sold.   

• The date range between which a product can be sold. 

• Whether the product must be the only product in a transaction. 

• Whether each unit of a product must be on a different transaction line. 

• Whether the product can only be paid for using certain media. 

 Make future product changes 

The new Products Planned Changes API allows you to take advantage of Infinity’s batch updates function to make changes to products that will take effect at a future date and time. Customers whose master product details are managed in systems outside Infinity can use it to create, overwrite, retrieve and delete future-dated changes. 

 Offer multichannel payment options 

Infinity Sales Orders API now supports websites sending payments for existing orders. Customers can pay for their in-store orders online, giving them more flexibility when managing their orders and offering a seamless purchasing experience.  

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INVENTORY

Tailor labels printed for stores 

Infinity Labels now allows retailers to change the order that labels appear on screen, meaning you can print labels in the order that makes sense for your store layout. For example, you can decide to sort labels by description rather than by SKU. 

Easier de-allocation of stock from locations 

Finding items to de-allocate from a location has become easier and less time consuming now that stock items that are listed alphabetically on the Items Location screen, are also listed in that order on the De-allocate screen. To reduce errors and increase accuracy when de-allocating items from locations, Infinity can be configured so that all items are deselected by default and users need to select the items that are to be de-allocated. 

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Tax-free items retain status throughout order process 

Infinity can now process tax-free sales orders from creation to completion. Items logged as tax-free through any channel will retain their tax status throughout the lifetime of the order. 

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase promotion options for branches 

Businesses that use branch clusters in conjunction with rules-based pricing can now configure Infinity to add items to pricing groups and promotional rules even if those items belong to a higher level cluster than the local branch, or belong to no cluster. This gives you greater flexibility in the promotions you can offer your customers. 

Remove inactive items from searches for more accurate promotions 

The Rules Based Pricing item search experience at the Back Office has been improved so that users no longer see a list of search results that includes inactive items when they are creating a promotional rule or adding items to a pricing group. This ensures that the correct products are added to promotions and prevents confusion when unexpected products are listed. 

Increase the number of discount options you offer customers 

Businesses that use customer discount groups as a way to group customers can now use these discount groups to create pricing rules for the TRADE condition type when using the standard rules-based pricing procedure. This extends upon the existing customer category options already available so that a customer can belong to two different groups, with pricing rules able to be defined for each.   

For example, a trade customer can receive a standard discount because they are a gold-tier customer, as well as discounts on a particular range of products because of their business type and discounts on a set of products that they have negotiated directly because of a piece of work they are doing. 

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POINT OF SALE

Deliver staff reminders more frequently 

You can now update the reminders your store staff see throughout the day so that they keep pace with the changing needs of your business. Until now, reminders would be updated only when users started up the POS. Now when you add a reminder at the Back Office or Head Office, it will load at the POS when the operator logs in and after a transaction is completed.  

Control the visibility of branch stock levels 

Multi-branch businesses that include standalone outlets can now prevent those outlets from seeing stock levels at other branches, allowing you to maintain branch confidentiality across your organisation.  

Tailor the way you view search results 

You now have a greater choice of how you view Advanced Items Search results at the POS. Instead of viewing search results as thumbnails you can now choose to see all results in a list, which is useful when dealing with numerous results. You can also customise the columns listing the search results and the search criteria in a way that makes sense to your business and add search filters for these columns. 

Improve visibility of cash positions in stores 

If your business uses MESM Cash Management, you can now use it to receipt cash from the bank for your float and deposit cash in the bank, giving your Back Office staff an easy way of recording these transactions. You can also keep on top of your current cash position by seeing the amounts at all cash drawers as well as in the safe at a glance. 

Increase control over returns refunds 

The Returns Extended functionality can now prevent POS users from editing the unit price when completing a returns transaction if they do not have the authority to do so. If the unit price needs to be changed, the operator will need to get permission from a more senior staff member, thereby helping to prevent incorrect refund amounts from being given. 

Give customers BP fuelcard payment option 

If you are a New Zealand fuel retailer using PC-EFTPOS, you can now offer BP fuelcard as a payment method, allowing you to add more customers to your customer base.  

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ADMINISTRATION

Increase security by increasing password strength 

Access to POS, BOS and HOS can now be made more secure through the use of password policy complexity. When implemented, your users must create strong passwords with at least three different types of character (they can use upper and lower case letters, numbers or special characters). 

More control for head office when closing branches 

You can now disable branches centrally from Infinity Head Office, allowing you to: 

• Reduce the reliance on manual tasks when closing a branch. 

• Gain greater control and flexibility when it comes to branch management. 

• Shut down a branch more quickly, safely and efficiently than ever before. 

Your staff have to be specifically given permission to do this, meaning that admin users can enjoy greater control over branch management while other users cannot accidently close a branch. 

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TECHNOLOGY

SQL 2019 users will no longer get a "Login failed for user error" when the correct SQL user and password are entered. This applies for the following scenarios: 

• When upgrading Infinity and the SQL user connecting to the database is not the standard Infinity SQL user. 

• When the Infinity SQL user already exists, you are installing Infinity again and the correct SQL password is supplied during installation. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

4 ways to create an experience-first future for customer loyalty

Updated July 19, 2019

Are you looking for new ways to build trust, loyalty and repeat sales?

Creating delightful, personalised customer experiences is the third stage of your four-stage unified commerce journey. Here we look at how to invest in fresh, value-added experiences that appeal to today’s consumers.

To learn more about the first and second stages of unified commerce, check out our earlier blogs on how to get an accurate and single view of your inventory and extending your brand experience across all channels.

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Today’s retailers know that changing customer behaviours and disruptive technologies have altered the dynamics of customer loyalty.

While loyalty used to be closely linked to price and proximity, now it’s awarded to the brands that offer the best experiences and personalisation. Customers want individual content, communications, offers and rewards based on their preferences and purchase history. They expect to be recognised across all channels, no matter whether they walk into a store, phone a call centre or shop online.

Is customer experience important to decision making?

And when 73% of people say customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions (just behind price and product quality), that’s a massive opportunity to create more authentic and frictionless experiences that strengthen your customer connections.

However, many retailers struggle to get this connection right.

There’s a growing disparity between rising consumer expectations and the reality of what they encounter online, on apps and in stores. According to Accenture, 50 percent of consumers say they turned to a competitor after having a bad customer experience. And 41 percent say they stopped shopping with a company because of ‘poor personalisation.

And after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and heightened awareness of consumer rights via GDPR, data privacy and security are more important to consumers than ever. Retailers now face a ‘privacy paradox’ - they’re caught between the need to use data to provide better consumer experiences and the risk of violating consumer privacy.

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So how do you create meaningful relationships without overstepping personal boundaries?

1

Transactional rewards are out, experiences are in

As consumer spending shifts toward experiences rather than physical goods, customer loyalty programmes also have more success with experiential rewards. Look beyond rewarding transaction frequency and instead identify and bolster the factors that influence consumer preference for your products and services.

Who’s doing it best?

Sephora’s Beauty Insider Program has over 10 million members and helped propel Sephora to the number one speciality beauty retailer in the world.

Why? It’s the experiences that the program offers at all levels. These include personalised product recommendations tailored to each customer based on shopping history, through to exclusive products and events, invitations to the Sephora Beauty Studio and early access to products and sales.

Not only do these offers motivate customers to purchase more products, they also make customers feel valued, foster loyalty and turn shoppers into brand advocates.

Here’s how you can do it:

Implement a fully integrated loyalty programme that gives you a 360 degree view of your customers. By looking at their purchase and browsing data, you can work out which types of experiences motivate them and develop timely, relevant and tailored rewards that surprise and delight. Be sure to offer personalised experiences across all your tiers, not just the top levels.

2

Immediacy counts

Customers want faster and cheaper purchase delivery to the location of their choice, including on-demand or same-day. This desire puts huge pressure on retailers to have a real-time view of inventory and the fulfilment capability to get orders turned around on a faster scale than ever before.

Who’s doing it best?

Multi-store bricks-and-mortar retailers that are taking advantage of their store networks to compete with Amazon and the online giants. While many eRetailers rush to build distribution centres, beef up their data analytics to anticipate orders and even test delivery by drone, bricks-and-mortar retailers already have the power to enable same-day delivery.

By turning their stores into customer-facing fulfilment centres that deliver purchases from stores to consumers in a few hours, they are creating a new retail battleground.

The savviest retailers are combining drop shipping with third-party logistics (also known as '3PL') to offer warehouse-to-door or even manufacturer-to-door. They no longer need to transport and store inventory in a costly warehouse and can efficiently and quickly scale by adding new suppliers and products that help win new customer business.

Here’s how you can do it:

With a unified commerce platform, you can choose the logistics and fulfilment options that are most efficient for your customers and most profitable for you.

Infinity’s order management system provides visibility across channels and ensures consistent and accurate stock, customer, purchase history and loyalty information in any channel. You can then offer same-day delivery by using APIs to partner with fast-shipping providers that let you connect to existing courier services and optimise delivery routes from your stores.

3

Create experience-first stores

Consumers no longer view bricks-and-mortar stores as primary shopping destinations but just one of many distribution points. That means to attract customers into your stores, you need to offer fresh, value-added experiences.

Who’s doing it best?

Target’s mobile app is a good example of how to combine mobile and in-store experiences. The app uses GPS to help in-store customers find what they’re looking for quickly. And beacon technology can alert shoppers to discounts as they move about.

Physical stores are evolving into showrooms that feature merchandise to be touched, felt and tried on, then ordered and shipped to shoppers' homes. Showrooms have always been popular with certain industries (such as bespoke clothing or furniture), but the format is taking off with online and bricks-and-mortar retailers as well.

Samsung’s ground-breaking flagship experiential store - Samsung 837 - goes even further. It’s a 56,000 square foot playground with interactive art, virtual reality, lounge areas, a recording studio and a three-story, 96-screen display wall. It doesn’t try to sell visitors anything - instead it encourages them to explore, learn and have fun. By focusing on activity, not product, the store has attracted accolades and been labelled one of the world’s top three brand experiences.

Here’s how you can do it:

By providing a single view of inventory and customer data, unified commerce gives you the freedom to design and implement new in-store customer service technologies and experiences. Imagine the customer satisfaction when you can offer shoppable screens, connected change rooms, or mobile apps that self-checkout. They all let customers easily locate products, find their order status or get personal recommendations.

4

Automate transactional interactions and solve customer problems

Retailers are using new technologies such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID technology to not only automate parts of customer service to cut costs but also increase customer satisfaction.

By digitising services across all channels and touchpoints, they are increasing convenience, customisation and control over their customer experiences.

Who’s doing it best?

Many retailers start online, building websites that provide individual product recommendations based on a combination of the customer’s behaviour, CRM data and AI. They then create customer communications that include personalised recommendations, with emails released at a specific time when each individual is most likely to engage with the communication.

Sephora’s use of AI and VR spans online, in-store and app shopping. Knowing that the vast choice of products can be overwhelming for customers, Sephora developed a variety of tech options to make shopping more fun and more efficient.

Customers can try on makeup virtually using AR, match their skin tone to a foundation with AI and sample a fragrance via a touchscreen and scented air. And this is just the start, with Sephora saying that five or ten years from now every aspect of a customer’s experience, from what they see to the products that are recommended, will be customised, based on face shape, sales history and stated preferences.

Here’s how you can do it:

You can use APIs to easily create or add new apps, systems and services, fast. You can partner with startups and tech companies outside the retail industry to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that would be unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model. You’ll also need to cultivate the necessary digital skills by partnering with or hiring talent from marketing, product development and technology industries to help source, develop, evaluate, test and ultimately launch new offerings and technologies for shopping in-store and online.

Now...

How will you create an ‘experience-first’ future?

Consumer expectations are driving today’s retail successes or failures.

The most successful retailers are digitising their entire business strategy, using new technologies to create in-store, in-app and online solutions that simplify and enhance the shopping experience.

Stay focused on your customers and their pain points. If what you're creating doesn't make the shopping experience faster, easier or more fun, then it's probably not worth the investment.

Our next blog is about stage four of implementing a unified commerce platform - how to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to deliver truly innovative offerings to customers and build a competitive advantage.

If you’d like help to build genuinely meaningful customer experiences, get in touch. We’d love to help you achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

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