Empower Store Associates With 360’ Customer Data to Improve In-Store Sales

This is a guest blog from Reflexis Partner – Arm

How much more could retailers sell in-store if they really knew each individual customer before their associates engage with a customer? What if associates knew what the customer had recently browsed online, what they’d bought before, which ads and social media they’d seen, what they wanted, and what to do to engage them—before they ever met the customer face-to-face? And what if retailers could see what each customer actually did while they were in the store, including all the aisles they visited and the shelves where they stayed longer?

The good news? New technologies—including the Internet of Things (IoT) and customer data platforms—are providing new ways to use customer data for high-end retail clienteling, hyper-localization, and targeted personalization of offers.

Retail’s Last-Meter Sales Problem

Telecommunications and shipping have long struggled with the “last-mile problem”—how to get service from the closest distribution center to each individual user. Similarly, many retail and major brands still grapple with the “last-yard” or “last-meter” customer data problem: Most retail associates have no idea who a customer is, what they want, or which loyal customers to focus on in the store. That customer data sits in many other platforms that don’t talk to each other, invisible or unusable on the handhelds the associates use. So even if they’re standing less than three feet away, associates are blind to all of this data that probably already lives somewhere in the organization.

Plus, data about how people actually shop—including the paths they take through the store, what they picked up and put down, how they used their phones or other personal devices—is almost always lost or unused, despite all the sensors, beacons, and cameras now used in retail.

New Collaboration Provides Personalized Answers Directly to Associates’ Reflexis Handhelds

That’s changing now that the Arm Retail Solution offers an In-Store Mode software development kit (SDK) that connects the Arm Treasure Data CDP, a customer data management platform, with the Reflexis ONE platform. The In-Store Mode SDK incorporates sensor fusion, in-store beacons, and indoor maps to capture in-store shopper behavior from the retailer’s mobile app.

The Arm Retail Solution uses the customer data already collected—from email platforms, loyalty programs, CRM, previous purchases, social media, web browsing, data from mobile apps, and increasingly, from sensor fusion, beacons, and indoor maps—to “know” each individual customer.

Using the Arm Retail Solution SDK, Reflexis customers can now show associates tasks based on each individual customer’s data from all customer data sources, such as average spend by each customer and loyalty info—all presented on easy-to-read dashboards tailored for each retailer’s handhelds.

Change the Game with Clienteling and Hyper-localization

For retail, the customer data personalization trend is a game changer. Just think of the implications for clienteling, when you know that a customer headed toward the designer coats right now regularly drops tens of thousands on apparel and footwear. Retailers can also hyper-localize planning and merchandising for local-community preferences and for its most engaged, profitable shoppers.

Why They Looked But Didn’t Buy

And when a shopper browses in-store, but doesn’t make a purchase, the Arm Retail Solution captures shopper dwell-time and engagement-at-shelf. The data is enriched with the customer’s opted-in digital and social data, and used to deliver personalized offers to the shopper—either via the retailer app when in-store or for the next store visit.

The moral: Going that last mile to know the customer solves your last-meter sales problem.

To learn more about Arm, join them at Reflexions 2019, Booth 5.

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Thomas Kurian

Director, Strategic Market Development – Retail and Logistics Market

Arm Inc., San Jose, California

Thomas Kurian (TK) serves as the Director of Strategic Market Development, Retail and Logistics Market at Arm, which he defines as the emerging market, that is a blend of retail, transportation and logistics created by increased adoption of e-commerce. In this role, TK is responsible for primarily advancing Arm’s data and Internet of Things offerings to global customers and partners in the vertical market. As part of the Strategy team, TK is responsible for leading vertical market solutions, creating the right to play for Arm in the retail and logistics industry, and collaborating with product, technology and marketing teams at Arm.

Prior to joining Arm in 2017, TK worked in the industry for Zebra Technologies. He was in the Chief Technology Office at Zebra and was responsible for portfolio and inorganic strategy in Internet of Things software and data-enabled services. He joined Zebra Technologies in 2011 in the Corporate Strategy team and led the Horizon 3 growth strategy which included the creation of the Internet of Things business unit, venture investments and acquisitions.

TK also worked for OMRON Corporation in Silicon Valley office from 1997 to 2008 and held positions of increased responsibility in the corporate innovation and corporate strategy groups. At OMRON he led and were part of teams that built new businesses based on emerging technologies like face recognition, speech recognition, robotics, machine vision and Internet of Things.

TK holds a Master’s in Business Administration from University of Massachusetts.