Digital content to enhance the in-store customer experience
9 March 2023
The customer experience is the lifeblood of brands and retailers. Consumer volatility, brand image, building goodwill and customer loyalty are all challenges that the customer experience helps to address. At a time when brands and retailers are rolling out omnichannel strategies on a massive scale, ensuring a consistent customer experience across all sales channels is of paramount importance.
To ensure that the in-store customer experience is consistent with the digital experience, numerous platforms and tools play a crucial role, both for your end consumers and your B2B clients, as well as your sales force.
Which platforms should you use to maximise the in-store customer experience? What tools are best suited to ensuring your in-store teams can advise customers as effectively as possible?
Creating an in-store experience using PIM/DAM content and Shopify
Digital and physical channels are closely intertwined for brands. When combined and working in synergy, your digital channels enhance the appeal of your physical stores. Researching online, comparing products, and checking review sites are all factors that encourage your customers to browse your digital channels and subsequently prompt them to visit a physical shop. This content, managed by platforms such as PIM/DAM and Shopify, is therefore THE key source of value for your brand.
Digital technology enhancing the in-store experience
Your digital content has never been more valuable in enhancing your in-store customer experience. Information about your products (descriptions, materials, compositions, photos, videos, packshots, etc.) enriches the data that your prospective customers are actively seeking. Consumers are always looking for greater transparency and comprehensiveness in product content in order to trust your brand. Whether your teams are in marketing, e-commerce, R&D or product development, they play an active role in updating and enriching your product data through platforms such as Quable’s PIM/DAM.
All this product content, distributed consistently across your sales and distribution channels, directly standardises and enhances the in-store customer experience. Platforms that are easy to integrate and use, such as PIM, enable you to quickly optimise your customer journey and the in-store customer experience. For example, the Quable PIM platform allows you to easily create catalogues and brochures, quickly populate the content on tablets and other digital devices used by your sales team, or generate QR codes or discount vouchers for sales campaigns, competitions and so on. In short, PIM and DAM platforms ensure reliable and consistently up-to-date information, playing a vital role in your product and customer experience at the point of sale.
Extending the product range at the point of sale: upselling, cross-selling and higher margins
High-quality digital content enables brands and retailers to enhance the in-store experience, particularly through range extension (or the ‘Endless Aisle’).
Indeed, there are very often more products available on their e-commerce sites than there are physically in their shops, showrooms or pop-up stores. This provides them with an opportunity to showcase and sell, via digital screens, products that they do not have the space (or wish) to display. These therefore represent additional sales with high margins, as they do not require display or storage space.
In this context, a customer-focused digital solution that draws on content from the e-commerce site (which is generally of high quality) enables the entire range of products to be displayed, showcased and sold.
There is sometimes a temptation simply to display the website on a screen, but this approach does not work because:
- The content is not tailored to the customer’s in-store journey (I’m looking for a specific product category),
- The website experience isn’t suited to interactive in-store use (cookies, etc.),
- Customers do not wish to enter personal data on a shared screen.
Major brands such as IKEA, Decathlon and H&M have therefore developed their own solutions or apps to extend their product range. This type of solution is generally referred to as ‘phygital’ (physical + digital). The teams at Cloudshelf call it ‘InStore e-commerce’.
Empower your sales staff
The wealth and comprehensiveness of product information leave no room for doubt or errors regarding your products. With a library of information and data relating to your products, the experience and expertise of your sales advisers are maximised and showcased. All the information you need is brought together in a single, reliable location, synchronised in real time, thanks to the rich functionality of the PIM/DAM platform.
In-store sales teams become even more knowledgeable thanks to this digital content, your products are presented and showcased even more effectively, and the perception of your brand’s credibility is maximised.
Automate content distribution on digital screens at the point of sale
Your time and that of your operational teams is precious. Consequently, automation is key. Working faster is a goal to be achieved if you wish to devote more time to tasks with greater added value. This is precisely where platforms such as Quable and Shopify come into play in the automation process.
Centralised and reliable content
Quable’s PIM/DAM enables you to centralise all your product information in a single, collaborative location, accessible to everyone from anywhere. No more errors or duplicate information scattered across Excel files, emails or other systems. Everyone has quick and easy access to the information they need, and this is updated in real time, making it as reliable as possible. It then becomes much easier and quicker to populate your Shopify site, for example, securely and with peace of mind.
Take back control of your content and distribute it widely
Your product content belongs to you, and you’re in charge of it. Once you’ve approved it, it’s much easier to distribute it across all your sales and distribution channels. Many tools within Quable’s PIM, such as workflows and completeness checks, make it easy to manage these processes. With workflows, each business team knows exactly what they need to do, when, and what their contribution is to the product data. The teams are interdependent but can each operate independently and seamlessly, without being held back by the progress of other teams. Completeness checks also enable your teams to verify the level of information available for their products and whether they are distributed across each channel (website, marketplaces, retailers, etc.) to ensure that no information important to your customers is omitted.
It is this sort of PIM functionality that made all the difference for our client Petit Bateau, for example, and which has since enabled them to increase their website’s conversion rate.
Cloudshelf: automatic creation of the interface and content on your in-store screens
It is important that implementing a content solution on interactive kiosks or in-store digital signage is quick and easy to roll out.
These phygital solutions can be costly to roll out when you have to develop a bespoke technical solution and dedicated content. One solution is to use content from the e-commerce site, which is very often of high quality.
Cloudshelf, a Shopify app, allows you to create an interface on in-store interactive kiosks using content from a Shopify site. The interface can be tailored to the customer journey in-store by displaying, for example, that a certain product category (e.g. accessories, promotional items, etc.) offers payment via QR code, so that customers do not need to enter any details on the interface.
Thus, the simplicity and speed with which a Cloudshelf can be set up for a point of sale is a key differentiator, as it takes just three minutes, as shown in this video.
The software of tomorrow: choosing SaaS platforms
By its very nature, SaaS software – such as Quable’s PIM/DAM platform, Cloudshelf’s platform or Shopify’s e-commerce platform – requires little maintenance. Such a platform is designed to be a scalable, user-friendly solution, requiring minimal maintenance effort on the part of the client and the solution’s users. This also means lower costs for brands and retailers, including reduced costs for version upgrades and hosting.
In any case, at Quable, all our offerings and packages are tailored to your needs and growth objectives and always include support, data security, hosting of your product information, new versions of the platform and maintenance.
Enabling Shopify agencies to extend their business to their clients’ retail teams
This simplicity enables Shopify agencies and integrators to offer these SaaS solutions without needing expertise in physical retail.
The adoption of digital solutions in the retail sector can boost business for agencies and integrators.
Digital solutions designed to improve retail operations open up opportunities for agencies and integrators – who are familiar with content management solutions – to sell solutions and services to teams they are not always used to dealing with: IT, retail, or even brand teams (for digital signage).
These are teams with their own budgets who are seeking solutions to ensure that the in-store retail experience and business do not compete with those of the e-commerce site, but rather complement them.
Consequently, product sales made via Cloudshelf will be included in the shop’s turnover and counted towards sales staff targets.
The result is digital content that directly enhances the physical retail business.
The example of Shopify POS
Shopify POS is a good example, as agencies and integrators working with this solution must liaise with IT and retail teams (rather than the digital teams, who are usually their primary point of contact).
Cloudshelf and Shopify POS are therefore complementary, as they enable retailers to be offered an end-to-end experience to improve their in-store business by optimising the delivery of digital content via solutions such as Quable and a Shopify site.
Conclusion
Your digital content is therefore one of your greatest assets. Its reliability and quality are key to building credibility and trust in brands and retailers. High-quality, comprehensive information, updated in real time across all your communication and sales channels, undeniably makes the product and customer experience consistent, seamless and enhanced.
Naturally, ensuring this level of content for brands requires equipping yourself with the right software and appropriate platforms such as Cloudshelf or the Quable PIM. When combined, these platforms reinforce the synergy between your physical and digital channels, always with the aim of increasing your conversion rate and overall sales, whilst also enhancing brand visibility and fostering greater brand affinity, amongst other benefits.