Technology
Tech transformation of retail in the time of COVID-19
Retail continues to move online and COVID-19 is limiting physical space. Michele Dupre, group vice president at Verizon Business, answers the question “Why should retailers invest in technology and outfit a brick and mortar space now?”
October 15, 2020 by Michele Dupre
The global pandemic has changed nearly every aspect of daily life, including how we shop. When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March, essential retailers needed to quickly put in place measures to ensure the health and safety of their customers and employees, while non-essential retailers needed to quickly pivot from a physical to digital environment.
By June, non-store retailers outpaced in-store retail more than 4x over in sales. While COVID-19 has posed myriad challenges to in-person retail, from safety to delivery, it has also accelerated the technological evolution of retail. Technologies that enabled the enhancement of in-store or curbside pick-up, customer personalization, and contactless service and delivery have helped retailers solve for some of today's challenges.
These experiences are not just limited to deep pocketed retailers; small and midsize retailers also need to look at how next generation technology and digital transformation can better service customers in this new normal.
Here are a few things all retailers, regardless of size need to consider:
Digital retailing is accelerating
Typically, it takes retailers months to launch an online storefront and add another prong to the sales or fulfillment channel, but during COVID-19, we've seen retailers dramatically compress that timeline to weeks and even days to mitigate lost sales from the halt of in-store operations. Retailers are also capitalizing on digital storefronts and fulfillment from their local stores. For instance, some retailers quickly pivoted to enhance and expand their offerings for same-day services like order pickup and drive-up. We're now seeing the results of the growth in digital comparable sales as retailers announce their second quarter earnings. But many businesses have not been able to execute digital sales and customer services strategies as quickly and they're still modifying their strategies to find what works best. The companies increasingly embracing digital are ultimately better prepared for next generation technologies like 5G, the fifth generation of wireless technology, that are expected to redefine the customer experience.
At this point in time, it's highly unlikely we can know what all of the use cases for 5G will be with any level of certainty. But what we do know is that 5G should power next-level customer experiences and help customers stay better informed about their purchases and receive that information faster. While 4G enabled in-store pick up of online orders, 5G has the potential to bring to the best of brick-and-mortar and digital retail experiences together. 5G's high speeds, massive bandwidth and low latency should enable incredibly fast augmented reality (AR) object recognition on several products at once so you can do real-time product comparison and get product reviews based on a star rating across multiple items in a single screen shot. Imagine holding up a smartphone or tablet to grocery shelves and easily seeing which products have allergens like nuts by displaying the words "Nuts", "No Nuts" or "Traces of Nuts" over all of the products on the shelves in real time on your screen.
5G will ultimately enable numerous new use cases that enhance the customer experience and help online and in-person retail operate more in tandem.
Data for forecasting makes decision-making smarter, faster
Another big transformation we're seeing is that the front of the house and back of the house are blending together from an analytics perspective. With 5G, customer data and inventory patterns can go from something stored, and checked in on occasionally, to something that brings real-time insight into inventory and supply management to improve operations and forecasting. 5G can empower staff with customer and business insights at their fingertips.
One 5G application we're testing at one of our retail stores in Sacramento involves AWM Smartshelf, which uses 5G-powered computer vision for inventory tracking and other analytics. For store associates on the sales floor, the application can trigger an alert if an item is out of stock or misplaced on a shelf so the staff can re-merchandise in real-time to minimize lost sales. On the back-end, it can produce granular insights on shopper behavior and SKU-level product engagement to inform merchandising, marketing, promotions, and operational decisions. With 5G, we're delivering this real-time intelligence without extensive on-premise server infrastructure and without any impact to the store's existing connectivity.
A new customer experience that is pandemic-proof
Customers are seeking richer experiences when they shop, and tools like an immersive mock living room showcasing 5G-enabled smart home technology or a product trial built in AR enhances the customer's understanding of a product and its benefits. 5G-enabled AI allows for real time immersive advertising practices like tailored out of home digital ads showing up in the entrance of a store, where a rolling screen changes what ad it displays based on the demographic or shopping habits of a customer that walks through.
In a post-COVID world, safety is of course paramount, and 5G has the power to help there as well. Wirelessly connected products could perform activities ranging from monitoring temperature of shoppers to helping shoppers share the same shopping experience but digitally. Imagine a virtual fitting room where you can try on an outfit and send your friends your 3D hologram and solicit feedback in near real-time. 5G can help scale volumetric imaging needed to create that 3D hologram by enabling the processing and streaming of huge amounts of data required to make this a real-time experience.
A pandemic might not seem like the time to change things up, but the savviest of retailers are already exploring the new customer experiences that could be possible on 5G. So for any business regardless of its size or point on the digital transformation journey, right now, innovation is a necessity and all retailers can take advantage of the capabilities and benefits of 5G.
Michele M. Dupré is group vice president, Verizon Business.
About Michele Dupre
Related Media
Subscribe
Get the latest news and resources from Retail Customer Experience.
