Why the old ways of retailing could lead to bias, inefficiency and profit loss at your retailer store, and why it is imperative that your business is keeping up the modern standard.
In the store many actions are taken just because management likes to do them a certain way. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” it’s often said. And particularly in well-established stores with a reputation to uphold, keeping standards high might entail squashing innovation in order to protect a static view of perfection.
However, all things change: The goods sold, the staff selling, the customers buying, and the customs and technology around the sale process. There’s a risk that online retailers simply hoover up so much data on their customers, and know so much about them, that they can seemingly intuitively outcompete physical stores through their advanced insight and analytics machine.
Some tech pioneers have made moves to fight back. Amazon Go for example aims to sew up both sides of the market, and clearly shows the careful intelligence that an online retailer can bring to the physical realm.
Their 14 stores really illustrate that physical retail Is simply not using the right technologies to offer business insight, centreing around visual solutions like smart video. The online culture of monitoring, tracking, and analysing means that those retailers have never had to struggle to understand their shoppers – and the facility with which offers can be made and online displays changed allows them to quickly test, measure, and adapt to changing conditions.
So retailers must not fall into the trap of muddling along without considering the new rules of the market. Getting over the rosy retrospection cognitive bias and recognising that the ways of the past are not necessarily the best is an essential first step to looking at the whole sales process with fresh and open eyes.
[…]
Copyright: Retail Sector. Read the full article here.
