Retail will never be the same again.
As the industry emerges from the changes caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, retailers need to understand that they face new challenges amid an irrevocably altered landscape. Customers demand a more personalized, streamlined experience as they return to stores while maintaining many of the online shopping habits they established during the pandemic.
“There’s a race to win customers back into stores,” says Wali Azim, a sales manager for Pacific Northwest Majors at CDW. “Retailers need to find ways to deliver great customer experiences.”
The opportunity is there. Customers want to shop in stores. A 2021 report from Shopify found that 61 percent of shoppers said they would rather shop with brands that have physical locations, as opposed to brands that are available solely online .
As they return to stores, customers expect a shopping experience that makes it easier to get help from associates, buy products and get through checkout. In fact, according to Shopify, 70 percent of consumers identify the checkout experience as their most significant retail pain point. Technology tools that modernize the checkout process, such as mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) solutions and self-service kiosks, can help stores address this challenge. But to achieve this objective, retailers need to build out an infrastructure that supports these technologies, integrate them with other systems and make sure that users know how to handle them effectively.
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