To Build The Dream Store, Keep Your Head In The Cloud

Generate customer delight by reinforcing your bricks with cloud

The store is a retailer’s sandbox. But the effort to improve store operations doesn’t always play out as expected. The stakes are higher than ever, because the goal is no longer just a well-oiled machine—it’s customer Shangri-La.

Supported by cloud, brands can fully reinvent their footprint, build transformational efficiency, and turn their stores into an experience where the customer feels fully in charge.

How can cloud help you convert store operations into store delight?

01

01 Embrace next-gen
merchandising

Embrace next-gen
merchandising

With data housed in the cloud, size can also mean speed. Larger retailers can move much more quickly, merchandising more intuitively at the national level, the regional level, and the individual store level, all the way down to each shelf.

Retailers are stocking their shelves for the next generation consumer, rolling out private label brands and going hyperlocal with their assortments. Stocking shelves for local audiences comes down to weather, traffic, and cultural events, but can also revolve around time of day, social media trends, or even local phenomena like an upcoming visit from a well-loved musician or athlete.

Walmart’s 50,000 square-foot grocery store in Levittown, New York serves as both a data-gathering facility and a test lab for consumer experiences, which can then be applied elsewhere across their huge U.S. footprint. Called the Intelligent Retail Lab, this super-powered Walmart is capable of knowing immediately when items leave the shelf and need to be restocked, as well as when products are past their consumption date.

Alibaba’s Hema supermarket allows customers to entirely skip checkout by scanning and purchasing items in the moment, and they can even choose to have groceries delivered to their home. This way, each customer becomes their own walking POS, a mobile data stream of actions and transactions.

Without the need to constantly monitor inventory or operate POS at checkout, store associates are free to focus on strengthening customer interactions throughout the store.

For a step-by-step guide to creating delight in your retail or consumer product operations using the cloud, download the playbook here.

02

02 Elevate the
store associate

Elevate the
store associate

Store employees have always been an extension of the brand. But with the knowledge that stems from customer data and the technology to apply it while they’re on the floor, they become an extension of the customer.

Bernhardt Furniture drove sales up 20% in ten weeks with a mobile sales app and analytics platform that leverages IBM Cloud. In a similar partnership with IBM, City Furniture increased average order size 13% by giving sales associates real-time access to customer data within an iPad app.

Deciding how deeply to engage a customer ultimately falls to each associate—whether to cross-sell, upsell, or simply make the visit as rapid as possible. But customer data offers healthy indications of what they might expect from a store visit. And store associates are increasingly learning how to use the customer as their North Star.

Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab is also equipped to monitor staff and help optimize their efforts to best serve store needs in the moment, whether that means engaging customer inquiries or restocking product. It’s a strategy that delivers customer satisfaction and delight as much as efficiency in labor costs.

There’s a great deal of value in personalizing customer engagement to the point that they know who they’re dealing with before, during, and after the in-store engagement. Taking inspiration from Uber, Lyft, or even AirBnB, brands can choose to begin the conversation between associate and customer well before their store visit.

Jetblack, for example, is an invitation-only service that links consumers with a personal assistant to whom they can text personal shopping lists, fulfilled by a variety of merchants including Walmart or Jet. That’s exclusivity, personalization, and incredible ease of use, all in one.

03

03 Replatform
your stores

Replatform
your stores

The agility provided by cloud enables retailers to not only redesign store architecture but rethink store functions.

Underused space is a huge area of opportunity to revitalize square footage that might otherwise die off. Empty Radio Shacks, for example, are finding a Lazarus-type existence in new industries, including boutique fitness offerings like Pure Barre, Soul Cycle, and pilates. It’s part of a suburban trend that sees fitness companies “clustering” in older shopping developments, where the infrastructure is already in place to serve a communal, multi-purpose environment.

The cloud plays a key role in identifying which inventive new store offerings to create and where, gathering data across social media listening and customer passion points.

For Canada Goose, the next-gen store serves as the proof in the pudding, letting customers audition clothing in different real world environments that are simulated within the confines of the store itself.

Some retailers are choosing to reduce in-store inventory and pivot the store experience to window shopping, as it were, with display-only retail environments. Others, like the Pacific Retail mall in San Jose, are using space as a canvas for local artists.

As brands pursue a more hybrid existence in retail—inventory AND experience, transaction AND recreation—their approach to cloud needs to be hybrid, too:

“The reality is not everything’s going to be on the cloud. Retailers will want to have certain things on premise—maybe customer data for safety reasons or point of sale for stability reasons. More often than not they’ll want architecture that allows them to do all three: off-prem, on-prem, and multiple clouds. It’s about finding the balance of where their applications run within that. The agility to do all of those things is what’s key.” — Colm O’Brien, Director, Offerings & Solutions, Global Consumer Industry, IBM

For a step-by-step guide to creating delight in your retail or consumer product operations using the cloud, download the playbook here.

04

04 Conclusion: Store operations
can be delightful
store optics.

Conclusion: Store operations
can be delightful
store optics.

Even as processes like inventory monitoring become less visible to customers with the rise of AI sensors and other automation, the end result is highly visible to them: a rewarding in-store experience. Customers are savvy enough to not only pick up on brand innovations but expect them.

The cloud is the invisible thread holding together brand impressions at every point in the store.

05

05 What needs to happen to make these store transformations a reality? It starts with cloud technology, which begs some key upfront questions:

What needs to happen to make these store transformations a reality? It starts with cloud technology, which begs some key upfront questions:

What needs to happen to make these supply chain innovations a reality? It starts with cloud technology, which begs some key upfront questions:

What do you want your business to look like next year? In five years?
Which applications and capabilities will help you get there? Where are those apps best run (on-premise, in-cloud, etc.)?
Where are you wasting resources (money and manpower) on applications that are not driving business results?
What savings will you realize from this shift and how can you redeploy those resources into innovation and modernization?
What common business functions within your applications could be converted to microservices, so they can be updated consistently and easily without interrupting other processes?

For a step-by-step guide to creating delight in your retail or consumer product operations using the cloud, download the playbook here.