The Ultimate Customer Experience

While broadband technology is now well established in the retail sector, primarily to cut the cost of telephone calls, during the last twelve months we have seen a shift in focus by retailers to find new ways to “sweat” this powerful technology by viewing it as the backbone for managing stores in a more dynamic way.

Retailers are looking at all aspects of using networked data to manage their stores for better merchandising, customer service, more productive deployment of staff resources and better overall control of the store estate.

For instance, discount retailers such as T J Hughes now have an efficient way of generating and distributing their promotional material to stores, a process that saves money and raises sales by getting promotional leaflets out on time. While Instore/Poundstretcher is making more effective use of their network to run e-learning programmes for staff.

Meanwhile, fashion retailers such as Mosaic and Jaeger have not only made hard savings through the adoption of voice over IP, they are using sales, merchandising and management data from their stores to analyse performance more dynamically.

So my take on 2008 would be that whilst the technology has been delivered, the opportunity for 2009 is to develop and deliver the solutions. The future incorporates more of e-learning, IPVideo, Waste Management recording and dynamic loyalty schemes and very importantly the securitising of payment information.

I see one of the most exciting prospects being the innovative use of IP Telephony to make the retail enterprise a Virtual Call Centre, connecting staff and customers directly according to their needs and by whatever media from and to any location -making it the ultimate customer experience.

Mike Bielinski, Chief Executive - Vodat International

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