Digital content to optimize the in-store customer experience

Customer experience is the nerve of the war for brands and retailers. Consumer volatility, brand image, increase in sympathy capital and loyalty are all issues that customer experience addresses positively. At a time when brands and retailers are massively deploying an omnichannel strategy, theuniformity of the customer experience across all sales channels is of paramount importance.

To ensure that the customer experience at the point of sale is consistent with the digital one, many platforms and tools play a crucial role, as much for your end consumers, as for your B2B customers and even your sales force. 

Which platforms to maximize the in-store customer experience? What tools are appropriate for your point-of-sale teams to best advise customers?

Create an in-store experience with content from PIM/DAM and Shopify

Digital and physical are extremely linked for brands. Combined together and working in synergy, your digital channels reinforce the attractiveness of your points of sale. Online information gathering, comparisons with other products, consultation of review sites, are all motivations that push your customer to browse your digital channels and then push them to go to the point of sale. The content in question, managed by platforms such as PIM/DAM and Shopify, is then THE major source of value for your brand.

Digital to enhance the point of sale experience

Your digital content has never been so valuable for enhancing your in-store customer experience. Information about your products (descriptions, materials, compositions, photos, videos, packshots...) enrich the data your future customers assiduously seek. Consumers are always on the lookout for greater transparency and completeness in product content, so they can trust your brand. Whether your teams are in marketing, e-commerce, R&D or product development, they all play an active role in updating and enriching your product data, through platforms such as the PIM/DAM Quable.

All of this product content, delivered in a uniform manner across your sales and distribution channels, directly homogenizes and enhances the in-store customer experience. Easy-to-use and easy-to-integrate platforms like PIM allow you to quickly optimize your customer journey and the customer experience at the point of sale. For example, the PIM Quable platform allows you to easily create catalogs and brochures, to quickly feed content to your sales force's tablets and other digital media, or to create QR codes or coupons for sales operations, contests, etc. In short, the PIM & DAM platforms are the guarantors of reliable and systematically up-to-date information that plays a vital role in your product and customer experience at the point of sale.

Range extension at the point of sale: upsell, cross sell and better margins

Quality digital content allows brands and retailers to improve the experience at the point of sale and in particular at the Endless Aisle. 

Indeed, there are very often more products available on their e-commerce site than there are physically in their stores, showrooms or pop-ups. It is an opportunity for them to show and sell, via digital screens, products that they do not have the space (or the desire) to display. These are therefore additional sales with high margins, as they do not require a display or storage area. 

In this context, a customer-oriented digital solution, which takes over the content of the e-commerce site (which is usually of high quality), allows to show, present and sell all the products. 

The temptation is sometimes to just put your site on a screen, but the experience doesn't work because : 

• The content is not adapted to the customer's path in the store (I am looking for a particular product category),
• The website experience is not adapted to an interactive use in store (cookies, etc),
• Customers do not want to enter personal data on a split screen.

Big brands like IKEA, Decathlon or H&M have developed their own solution/application for range extension. This type of solution is generally called Phygital (physical + digital). Cloudshelf teams call it InStore e-commerce.

Make your salespeople better

The wealth of product information and its completeness no longer leaves room for doubt and errors regarding your products. With a library of product information and data, the experience and know-how of your sales consultants is maximized and enhanced. All desired information is gathered in one place, reliable and synchronized in real time, thanks to the functional richness of the PIM /DAM platform. 

In-store sales teams become even more expert thanks to this digital content, your products are even better presented and enhanced, and the feeling of credibility towards your brand is maximized.

Automate the distribution of content on digital screens at the point of sale

Your time and that of your business teams are precious. In fact,automation is king. Being faster is a goal if you want to spend more time on higher value tasks. This is exactly where platforms like Quable and Shopify come into play in the automation process.

Centralized and reliable content

Quable's PIM/DAM allows the centralization of all your product information in a single, collaborative place, accessible by everyone and from anywhere. No more errors and duplicate information, scattered in Excel files, emails or other systems. Everyone has quick and easy access to the information they need and it is updated in real time, so it is as reliable as possible. It becomes much easier and faster to feed your Shopify website, for example.

Take back control of your content and distribute it widely

Your product content belongs to you and you are the master of it. Once validated on your side, it is much easier to distribute it on all your sales and distribution channels. Numerous tools on the PIM Quable side, such as workflows and completions, make it easy to manage these processes. With workflows, each business team knows what it has to do, when it has to do it, and what its contribution to the product data is. Teams are interdependent, and can work independently and smoothly without depending on the progress of other teams. Completeness also allows your teams to ensure the level of information of their products and their distribution or not on each channel (website, marketplaces, resellers...) etc. to be sure not to omit any important information for your customer. 

It is this kind of functionality of PIM that made the difference for our client Petit Bateau, for example, and which has since managed to increase the conversion rate of its website.

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Cloudshelf: automatic creation of the interface and content on your point-of-sale screens

It is important that the implementation of a content solution on interactive kiosks or digital signage in store is simple and quick to deploy. 

These phygital solutions can be expensive to deploy when you develop a specific technical solution and dedicated content. One solution is to use the content of the e-commerce site which is often of high quality. 

Cloudshelf, which is a Shopify application, allows to create an interface on interactive kiosks in store with the content of a Shopify website. The interface, which can be adapted to the customer's path in the store by displaying, for example, that a certain category of product (eg: accessories, products on promotion, ...) offer a payment by QR code to have nothing to enter on the interface. 

Thus, the simplicity and speed of creating a Cloudshelf for a point of sale is an important differentiator, because it is done in 3 minutes, as shown in this video.

The software of tomorrow: the choice of 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 meant to be a scalable solution, easy to use, including little maintenance efforts on the client and user side of the solution. This also reduces costs for brands and retailers, as well as the cost of upgrades and hosting.

In any case, at Quable, all offers and packages are adapted to your needs and your growth objectives and always include support, data security, hosting of your product information, new platform versions and maintenance.

Enable Shopify agencies to extend their business to their clients' retail teams

This simplicity allows Shopify agencies and integrators to offer these SaaS solutions without having expertise in physical retail.

The diffusion of digital to the retail activity can increase the activity of agencies and integrators.

Digital solutions that improve retail activity open up opportunities for agencies and integrators, who are familiar with content management solutions, to sell solutions and services to teams that they are not always used to dealing with: IT, retail, and even brands (for digital signage). 

These are teams with their own budget that are looking for solutions so that the physical retail experience and activity do not compete with the e-commerce site, but are complementary. 

This way, product sales that are made via Cloudshelf will be integrated into the store's revenue and salespeople's goals. 

So we end up with a digital content thatdirectly improves the activity of the physical retail.

The Shopify POS example

Shopify POS is a good example, as agencies and integrators of this solution have to interact with IT and retail teams (and much less with the digital teams that are usually their primary contact). 

Cloudshelf and the Shopify POS are thus complementary, as they enable an end-to-end experience for retailers to improve their in-store business with optimized digital content delivery via solutions like Quable and a Shopify site.

Conclusion

Your digital content is one of your best assets. Its reliability and quality are a guarantee of credibility and trust towards brands and retailers. Quality, exhaustive and updated information in real time, and this, on all your communication and sales channels, undeniably makes the product and customer experience, homogeneous, fluid and sublimated. 

Of course, ensuring this level of content for brands requires the right software and platforms such as Cloudshelf or PIM Quable. Combined together, these platforms reinforce the complementarity of your physical and digital channels, always with the aim of increasing your conversion rate and your sales in general, but also bringing a better visibility or a better development of the sympathy capital towards the brand, etc.

Interested in maximizing the value of your digital content? Request your free demo.