One of the best things about attending NRF Protect is the opportunity to participate in conversations, engage in lively debate and hear stories from the field. If you missed NRF Protect, or in case you weren’t able to attend all the sessions you wanted to, these are three recurring themes that we found extremely insightful and worthy of reflection.
1) Big data is a big thing (and it’s now available in physical stores!)
Big data is capable of providing competitive-edge-gaining insights to retailers for those that understand how to harvest and analyze the data. Perhaps most interesting are the new technologies that are bringing brick-and-mortar stores back to the playing field. For many years, online retailers had the advantage: seeing every bit of the customer shopping experience, from what items they viewed, how long they looked at them, to what they put in the cart and purchased versus what they abandoned. Physical stores were left behind for years, unable to extract that same richness of data from their customers’ interactions.
However, with new in-store technologies, this is quickly changing. Thanks to queuing software, analytics, heat mapping, video analytics and more, physical stores now have access to invaluable information about their customers’ shopping experience. Retailers are also taking advantage of convergence of technologies, leveraging different data sources across platforms rather than working in technology silos. This is helping them better compete with their e-commerce counterparts.
2) Loss Prevention teams are at maximum capacity
LP professionals have always been stretched. This team is expected to deliver year-over-year reductions in shrink, anticipate and thwart emerging theft behaviors, protect in an unsafe world, and partner with others in the retail organization. Crushed by rising expectations and the demand to leverage completely new technologies for LP purposes, these teams are at maximum capacity. Any partner, technology or internal alliance that helps them to streamline operational expense and do their jobs more efficiently is a win and increasingly essential.
3) Retailers are seeking strong ROI
Retailer margins in many categories are razor-thin and maintaining profitability has long been a priority. Retailers are digging deep to extract the maximum value from new technologies. Increasingly, marketing is footing the bill for investments in emerging technologies that are now purpose built for security and business data. These solutions are becoming invaluable as they drive more intelligence toward understanding customers interactions with retail initiatives.
Alongside investments in new technologies, retailers are also seeking to maximize ROI on existing technologies. It’s essential that vendors provide the flexibility to leverage new with old.
With these challenges and trends in mind, Telaid continues to evolve to meet our retail clients’ ever-changing needs. With outsourced Help Desk support to ensure maximum ROI on your technology and minimize burden on your already-strapped internal resources, to deploying the latest, greatest technologies that allow physical stores to compete, Telaid is a dependable, proven technology partner. Find out how Telaid can help you reduce time, task, cost and risk associated with your cradle-to-grave technology needs.
