Articles

Shoppers Stop Tries Digital Transformation For Personalized Customer Experience

The traditionally offline retailers, especially those selling lifestyle and fashion products, are facing major competition from the online players. Over the last few years many of them have been trying to transform their business processes to ensure better customer engagement and turnaround. The retail companies are now looking at ways to improve the in store customer buying experience, make it more personalized, and innovative.

Giving an insight into the retail market scenario, Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC said “Retail is one of the top three industries most vulnerable to digital disruption. In retail, insight is currency and these insights help retailers provide a hyper-relevant customer experience and remain competitive in the digital age.” In fact, a recent report by Cisco on digital transformation of the retailers shows that they can gain $506 billion in value by adopting technologies that enable this transformation.

With this idea in mind, Shoppers Stop, one of India’s leading lifestyle and fashion retailers, is implementing latest mobile technology to offer highly personalized customer experience through location-based services. This part of the retailer’s omni-channel strategy to use mobile technology to engage and retain the customers who walk into the Shopper Stop stores across the country. The aim is to give them an interactive shopping experience across the retailers many stores and online presence. Talking about the company’s digital transformation strategy, Anil Shankar, Customer Care Associate & Vice President – IT, Shoppers Stop Ltd. said “A pivotal element of our omni-channel strategy is to digitally transform our physical stores to provide a seamless and convenient shopping experience. We believe that digitization is not about just using the latest technology but about enhancing the customer’s journey.”

Omni-channel experience

To enable that the company has collaborated with networking major Cisco to implement Cisco Wireless Solution across 80 Shoppers Stop stores across the country. The retail major has already started piloting the solution to test the kind of change in buying experience it brought to the customers. It is trying out the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) capabilities integrated with Cisco Wireless Solution for enhanced, personalized experiences for shoppers. Explaining the perceived benefit of this solution, Shankar added, “Cisco Mobility Solution will help us enhance customer experience, gather insights into our customer preferences and optimize our resources to offer enhanced personalized experiences to customers who shop at our stores. We are excited to partner with Cisco to digitally transform our stores, improve our employee productivity and device strategies that put our customers at the heart of our business.”

If this pilot project gives the expected results then the retailer will be well on the path to accelerate the digitization of its stores. As part of our omni-channel strategy we aim to achieve 20 percent digitally-influenced sales by 2020. We will be able to offer enhanced, personalized and engaging in-store experience for customers to boost sales and deepen customer loyalty,” informed Shankar.

Features of digital transformation

“We are excited to collaborate with Shoppers Stop as they digitally transform their business, deliver hyper-relevant customer experiences and enhance workforce efficiency to emerge as the retailers of the future by driving both revenue growth and operational efficiencies. Cisco’s CMX solution is designed to help Shoppers Stop better serve its customers by analysing individual customer experience, behaviour and engagement,” said Malkani.

Using Cisco’s expertise, Shoppers Stop has already deployed guest Wi-Fi for more personalization and digital services to help its customers discover the best shopping possibilities within its stores. Cisco CMX integrated with Cisco Wireless Solution is being delivered via cloud as well as on premise. The solution working together will enable Shoppers Stop to boost sales through location-based services, and targeted advertisements through advanced analytics and insights. This will also help Shoppers Stop better serve its customers by analysing individual customer experience, behaviour and engagement.

According to Shankar, with Cisco Wireless Solution, Shoppers Stop will gain a single view dashboard of connected customers in the store. He expects to manage customer behaviour analytics, traffic flow and dwell time analytics, location based services and analytics for effective in-store marketing and in-store tracking.

Cisco is also deploying its Enterprise Class Secured Wireless platform to bring intelligent network capabilities to the retailer’s existing set up. This is expected to drive insights and actionable analytics to enhance the customer shopping experience and improve business operations with better operational control and seamless, secure Wi-Fi on boarding. “ With over 4.6 million First Citizen loyalty program members and one million Shoppers Stop Mobile app downloads, we will be able to use aggregate data to map and offer personalized in-store promotions to customers,” added Shankar.
And it is not just the customers, Shoppers Stop is also looking to enhance the working experience of its sales staff and other employees. It is also implementing Cisco Video Collaboration solutions to make it easier for Shopper Stop employees to connect, collaborate and make faster decisions and quicker resolutions with colleagues and partners from any location.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top