Who cares where they buy from, as long as they get the best deal? Why bother about service, as long as delivery is fast and secure?
Smart retailers realise there are still ways to differentiate to boost business, even in today’s online environment. And the best way is the oldest way: understand your customer and give them what they want.
Authored by Ali McKeand CTO Office – Chief Technologist, Innovation
Retailers can use today’s network technologies to unlock new and exciting relationships with customers in the same way that shopkeepers did on the shopfloor 50 years ago. CAE retail partners are profiling individuals, tracking their personalised journeys and deploying network driven interactive marketing.
They’re building 360 degree ‘hyper personalisation’ customer preferences and purchasing history to get holistic views of likes and dislikes. Decisions about service, offerings and investments for the future can then be firmly founded on data evidence.
The key message is that a complete view of the data offers deeper insights across digital and physical channels. But gathering vast amounts of data isn’t enough – analysing and utilising it intelligently to engage with customers is crucial.
Branch networks are generally simpler and quicker to set up than campus networks. With no hardware to install onsite and nothing to plug in, your cloud-based network can be provisioned and ready to use in 15 minutes, and it’s much cheaper to install and run.
Campus networks great advantage is that they provide granular security, the level of assurance required by university researchers, government departments or corporate HQs to deal with confidential or sensitive information.
One of Britain’s most iconic high street retailers, the Co-op, is using its network to evolve from a local convenience offering to a ‘hub of the community’. By providing services to complement their convenience stores, the Co-op wants to respond to customers, improve margins and set themselves apart from new and existing competitors.
The Co-op's project involved installation of 7,500 devices and switching appliances to more than 2,680 stores across the UK within a 12-month window. This refresh programme needed to integrate into existing wireless technology. Cisco Networking Cloud was chosen to build an agile, scalable platform and with an architecture perfectly suited to multi-site retail modernisation.
With the APIs available through the Cisco Networking Cloud configuration, CAE suggested automating the deployment process to reduce the project time and cut costs as part of the value creation process.
The Co-op team had visibility of every Cisco Networking Cloud product across the whole estate of 2,680 stores and managed from anywhere, on any device, with the right security credentials. Existing wireless technology information could be pulled into a single dashboard along with the new security and switching devices. End-to-end visibility also exposed how users were experiencing the store platform, delivering valuable business intelligence.
The new store ‘platform’ enabled the Co-op to bring about change at speed and scale, giving it the foundations to unleash its vast potential for customers. The store ‘platform’ gives the Co-op a faster time to market with new business models, provides increased access to customer data and ability to action insights, and allows easier improvements to store productivity and efficiency.
The cost and speed of change was a revelation. Instead of multiple touch points and weeks of planning, the pioneering ‘store as code’ architecture allows changes and updates to be made across the whole store estate within 15 minutes from the ‘single pane of glass’.
Partnerships with major retail brands have increased the average basket size, and current projects include utilising customer preferences to leverage store formats and in-store customer experiences.
In this new retail era, providing a generic service will no longer be enough to satisfy consumers. Retailers need to deliver a customised, personalised experience to positively engage with their customers. To do that they need to engage their network technology to understand what customers want, develop a sustainable experience strategy, and track its effectiveness.