Your Guide to Experiential Retail: Customer Engagement

| Retail

Clienteling Augmented Product Information

Online shopping has fundamentally changed the retail industry and how customers interact with their favorite brands. Today, we can buy anything we’d like, no matter the time or place, with just a few taps on our smart devices. E-commerce offers remarkable convenience and flexibility for shoppers. But despite these strengths, there are still crucial areas where online stores can’t compete with physical shops, notably in offering compelling, tactile, personalized experiences to build more emotional connections with a brand.

That’s the fundamental idea behind experiential retail: providing exciting, non-traditional experiences within your physical retail space to help build customer loyalty—and turn footfall into sales. In this post we’ll be exploring how your retail enterprise can create more compelling, interactive in-store experiences with smartphone scanning in your associates hands.

Mobile Clienteling Apps

Retail clienteling is constantly evolving as we discover new, more effective ways to leverage existing data to create better in store experiences for customers. For example, by integrating scanning capabilities into today’s mobile clienteling apps associates are empowered to access helpful stock data – like sustainability info, available sizes, and colors – on the spot with a quick single scan of a product barcode, without making a lengthy trip to a backroom and potentially losing the sale.

With mobile clienteling apps, customers are attended to and supported throughout the entire shopping experience. Shoppers can find what they need quickly and have any questions answered by a seasoned staff member equipped with the digital tools to put real-time information in their hands.

Scandit-powered clienteling apps can leverage augmented reality (AR) and MatrixScan to locate specific stock by capturing an entire set of barcodes in a single scan. For example, an employee could scan a large selection of shoe boxes to find the exact size a customer needs in moments—simply by hovering their smart device over the barcodes!

Best of all, Scandit software can easily integrate with your existing clienteling solutions and inventory system for seamless deployment.

AR Overlays for Reviews & Recommendations

Augmented reality is an increasingly popular technology with huge potential to support more experiential shopping journeys. In the context of retail clienteling, AR is used to display real-time data on screen, whether that be specific product info or a related item the customer might want.

Your stores can leverage AR overlays to show relevant product details at a glance on the screen, bringing a whole new dimension of interactivity and personalization to the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Associates can confidently answer and seamlessly offer suggestions during the interaction and shoppers gain added value from their trip to the store.

These overlays can also display relevant and up-to-date reviews, promotions, and discounts within your clienteling app. Not only does this feature support increased sales, but it also helps customers make more confident, informed purchasing decisions while improving brand loyalty.

Ordering In-Store for Home Delivery

Shoppers expect fast, intuitive, and flexible shopping experiences that adapt to their preferences. For many, that means having the freedom to order in-store and have any selected items delivered conveniently to their home (a.k.a. mobile shopping). This feature is especially useful for customers ordering bulky, unwieldy items like furniture or large appliances.

Retail associates can help consumers by placing orders for them on the shop floor, taking payment, arranging delivery and even scanning their loyalty card to ensure they get their points – all on the same scanning-enabled smart device. Alternatively for ultimate ease, shoppers can just enter the store, scan any items they want on their personal smartphone via a shopping app, and head home—with delivery details being sent via text or email.

The key to supporting mobile shopping for experiential retail is investing in barcode scanning software with exceptional accuracy and speed. If the scanning process takes too long or is incorrect, a consumer will walk away and you lose a valuable sale. Worse still, they may even stop using your app. That’s why retailers worldwide count on Scandit software for enterprise-grade scanning performance.

The Scandit solution brings unmatched speed and reliability to mobile scanning customer and employee apps. Scandit-powered retail apps include omnidirectional scanning technology, allowing shoppers to scan item barcodes from any angle with ease. Even codes that are damaged, obscured, tiny, or poorly lit are no match for our advanced decoding algorithms, empowering your shoppers with a seamless experience.

Taking Payment Without Queuing

Waiting in long lines is one of the biggest pain points for shoppers. That’s why today’s retailers are investing in more seamless checkout solutions to suit different consumer preferences.

One option is self-scanning apps to help customers avoid this tedious in-store experience. Mobile self-scanning and Self-Scanning shopping give customers added convenience and choice by enabling self-checkout through a mobile shopping app. This removes the need for customers to use the traditional checkout, allowing them to scan items as they shop, and pay in seconds to close out their experience.

Alternatively, empowering your employees to take mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) payments anywhere in the store is another way to bust queues and make shopping in store a more seamless experience. Customers simply approach any staff member for help and can complete a purchase in-aisle during the same interaction. Free up floor space, cut down queues and limit lost sales from walkouts caused by long waits.

The key is to make checkout fast, simple, and differentiate your retail stores from competitors, driving more consistent footfall and revenue.

Elevate Your Retail Experience with Scandit

With the Scandit solution, your team can access all of these features on one inexpensive device, which is inexpensive yet sleek and modern, that customers or store associates can fit right in their pocket, creating a powerful, intuitive tool for experiential retail. We offer the best-performing mobile barcode scanning software in the business, so you can start putting this innovative technology to work for your in-store staff and shoppers!

Contact us today to learn more about Scandit—and how we can help you achieve your retail goals through thoughtful, elevated shopping experiences. We’re here to help.