Recently I took a weekend trip to Sea Ranch, California, a coastal town 2.5 hours drive north of San Francisco. What was interesting (besides the great view and interesting architecture) was for three days there I had no cellular coverage on my mobile phone, but I was able to get access to the internet using Wi Fi in various locations. Being the classic connected and mobile consumer, my trip would have been much less enjoyable without some form of wireless connectivity
Cisco IBSG Retail Director Edward Westenberg recently published a paper on the impact of consumer mobility and what retailers should do to respond to the trend.
Peggy Casey, Cisco retail industry manager sat down with Edward to discuss his latest research and four areas of mobility that retailers should address:
The consumerization of information technology has been a boon to innovations in the workspace. With mobile phones and tablets, today’s employees and consumers carry a significant amount of technologies on them. Retailers can leverage these technologies to enable employee productivity and improve customer experience if it can be managed effectively an securely.
Today’s consumers are technology enabled, capable of shopping any time, any location and geographically mobile. Catching and keeping these shoppers are not easy tasks for brick and mortar or e-Commerce retailers today.
What are some innovative ways the retail industry is adjusting to the needs of shoppers today?
Online Commerce with Pop-Up Stores and Personalized Products
This was the scene in San Francisco this week where IndoChino, a menswear provider and tailor company, set up a one week temporary location on the busy Market Street. Integrating made to measure tailoring, traveling locations and online storefront, this allows customers to get measured for custom suits on site and products delivered to home.
Future orders for personalized products can be placed online including shirts and accessories. The result combines the scaling of mass production with personalized products, online customer service and only one on site visit in pop up store locations.
Retailing on Wheels -- Going to where the shoppers are
In June 2012, National Retail Federation released its National Retail Security Survey. In that report it suggests retailers in 2011 lost $34.5 billion to retail theft, or shrink – the loss of inventory due to employee theft, shoplifting, paperwork errors, or supplier fraud. Overall that accounts for approximately 1.41 percent of retailers sales last year.
One of the areas which retailers have invested in to address the shrink and security issue in gereral is video survieillance. This can cover areas including loading docks and the parking lot at distribution centers, or along the aisles and checkout in the stores for theft or criminal activities.
Cisco recently announced a new Video Surveillance Manager 7 with Suite of Hyper-Scalable Connected Physical Security Solutions that can help retailers address their video surveillance needs in a scalable and flexible manner. Read More »
When John Lewis (JL), a leading U.K. retailer, faced challenges with running its new, geographically distributed at home shops, Cisco IBSG knew that the problems could be solved through the innovative use of video technology.
Working with John Lewis CIO Paul Coby, Cisco IBSG and JL picked two critical concepts to pilot for the core retail use cases:
High-definition, real-time video conferencing based in each store for communicating among the at home shops, and between the shops and head office
A video portal for sharing and viewing videos on demand (via each shop’s PCs)
The pilot’s results proved the value and the business case for video in shops, including estimated annual savings of 28,000 man-hours across the eight shops, and estimated annual travel savings of 20 percent to date.
