Last week, Olympia London was once again the focal point of the retail industry, as retailers and exhibitors gathered for RetailEXPO 2019. This year’s event was centred around ‘energising retail’, overcoming the current challenges and ultimately leveraging the opportunities presented by a digital future. This is clearly a topic that is gaining significant attention in 2019, with over 24,000 attendees and 76 countries represented at the event.

Below we have put together some of the key insights from RetailEXPO 2019.

Shifting KPIs

In a world where a customer might visit a store, potentially even several times, before deciding to make the purchase online instead, how can we make sure that this purchase is rightfully attributed to the salespeople in the store?

As retail evolves, KPIs should follow suit; retailers therefore need a robust strategy that is interconnected across channels. The Mercaux platform can track the purchase process from an in-store recommendation all the way through to an online purchase from a personalised email basket, bridging the gap that would otherwise leave salespeople feeling demotivated.

Quantifying Customer Experience

As expected, there is a continuing emphasis on customer experience. This is crucial, as “companies with the best customer experience increase revenue at two times those with the worst” (Forrester). Below are two other noteworthy statistics presented at the event:

Source: RightNow Technologies (left), ThinkJar (right)

But if the role of the physical retail store is in transformation, becoming a hub of customer experience and brand awareness, how can retailers measure success beyond revenue? New metrics are also needed that can quantify the experience of customers in-store. This could make use of emergent technologies, for example tracking customer dwell time using geolocation. Another metric that Mercaux clients are making use of right now is the amount of salesperson hours saved due to stock check, which are instead used to create a meaningful experience for the customer.

Convenience is Key

The message is clear – bricks and mortar retail is here to stay. The general consensus is that retail is not experiencing a total revolution, but instead an evolution of what we see today. Customer experience is at the heart of this, but there is also an increasing emphasis on convenience as the customer value proposition. Retailers need to better utilise retail spaces to seamlessly bring people access to the products they need, when they need them. Endless aisle solutions are the perfect answer to this, enabling a full catalogue of products to be sold across the store estate, even where floor space is limited. Customers benefit from convenience and retailers benefit from the resultant uplift in sales and marginal revenue.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss how we can help with in-store digital transformation to drive improvements to your KPIs. Our intuitive store apps provide sales people and customers with endless aisle, full product knowledge, styling suggestions, trending content, and instant checkout - proven to increase customer loyalty, conversion and basket size.