How Retailers Are Rethinking Their Space to Maximize Experience and Flow
Retail in 2022 and surviving as a brick-and-mortar store means keeping up with the consumers and consistently improving the customer’s experience. Keeping up with the consumers means being able to know what is convenient for them and what drives a consumer to make a purchase. In this episode of Retail Redefined, hosted by Melissa Gonzalez with special guest, Nick Delyani, Director of Retail at Xovis NA, takes a seat in the studio to provide valuable insights that span over a decade’s worth of experience in marketing, sales, and creatives.
Xovis specializes in personalized solutions for retailers to track store traffic, data and analytics in a safe, comfortable, and ethical (GDPR Compliant) manner. Xovis uses 3D technology people counting sensors and a cloud-based software for people flow management systems. One unique feature is Xovis’s innovative, flexible dashboards that can serve multiple purposes and use-cases for retailers to properly gauge what exactly is the right targeting methods and customer experience delivery they need.
Going back to the notion of retail’s evolution and shifts in consumer behavior; Retailers have provided an omnichannel of different opportunities to procure products, from curbside pick-up to delivery, self-checkout, and regular cashier checkout. Consumer behavior has sort-of changed to more of an immediate gratification-utilitarian approach. Reiterating what Mr. Delyani said, “how to get the product faster, rung out and move on from shopping.” Nick validly believes that sales associates are the core foundation to a customer’s shopping experience. “Give retail associates more tools, give them data and simple data to digest so that way they can action against it,” said Delyani. There’s a lot of gaps to be filled and elevation of store associates is crucial.
Nick offers some more solid advice for retailers including what is important: The development of your space and does it cater towards what the customer is looking for in terms of merchandising? Understand the experience, could it be efficient or influential? There’s a lot of metrics that goes into the consumer journey and understanding it is the first step in evolving the customer experience.
“The customer experience keeps getting better with more data and that’s what retailers are getting after,” said Delyani. Currently, Xovis can detect footprint from point A to point B of the customer journey, what time the shoppers usually shop, etc. The firmware is AI-based so it’s learning with all kinds of different sample sets addressing the questions of “If they are customers? How do we tell that they’re a customer?” and other metrics involved. Delyani says that there is always room for improvement and investments in new features within their firmware. Next on the roadmap may be object detection to gauge what exactly customers are carrying with them.
