The evolution of technology and the accelerated speed of automation often have two sides. On the one hand, technological innovations are often exciting to see and implement. On the other, there is always that thought of how much it could all change from today to tomorrow. With that being said, it’s important to embrace the upgrades and updates, as oftentimes new technological tools tend to simplify things.
One of the main purposes of Digital Smart Labels™ is to eliminate mundane tasks and manual labour, and instead, help businesses better allocate their time and resources. By incorporating digital transformation and choosing the path of automation via Digital Smart Labels™, retailers can not only sustain and improve their productivity and efficiency, but also improve the customer experience. This is especially important in today’s retail environment, as now more than ever, the secret to success is providing personalized and memorable customer experiences.
Let’s discover how Digital Smart Labels™ could improve customer engagement and retention ,all the while opening up new opportunities for new retail positions.
The customer experience
Un artículo de Retail Insider titulado Why Canadian Retailers Must Own the Customer Experience in the Last Mile: George Minakakis mentions, “Every day a new generation of ideas emerge meant to provide consumers with more shopping options under the guise of convenience and a better customer experience.” As a retailer and a place of business, it’s essential to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and gadgets.
What’s the ultimate goal of any and all retailers? Longevity, brand loyalty, and customer retention. At the end of the day, a business is only as successful as its customer relations. A consumer who appreciates the retail experience, stays loyal to the brand, and keeps coming back, is someone who will help your business stay afloat.
Digital Smart Labels™ and customer engagement
Whether you’re a retailer or not, everyone is a customer on a daily basis. From a customer perspective, it’s safe to say that the shopping experience contributes a lot to the decision on whether one shops at a particular store or not. And while there’s been many debates around technology and the impact it has on the retail industry, there’s no denying that its positives outweigh the negatives—especially when it comes to enhancing customer loyalty. Take Digital Smart Labels™ for example: since they are reliable and function in a flexible and quick manner, customers can trust that the information displayed is accurate. Meanwhile, retailers can rely on them to foster a more successful customer journey and beat the competition.
Another article from Retail Insider titled "El comercio minorista y la tecnología en Canadá: ¿una pareja perfecta o condenados al fracaso?"... that speaks on technology in the retail space mentions, “It has traditionally been a tool to improve data collection and productivity. However, in the last decade it has both increased competition and become an internal transformational juggernaut to stay competitive.”
What’s next?
You might be wondering about how technology might affect job opportunities or lack thereof. Although that is a normal, everyday concern, it’s important to also take note that digitization also has the power to create next generation career paths.
For example, as we help eliminate the mundane task of changing labels manually, the grocery store employee who used to spend hours updating prices could focus their knowledge and efforts on more high impact tasks or roles. Perhaps they would want to get into being a retail food expert where they could share their knowledge with potential and returning customers. This opens the window to expand on the role of being a grocery store employee, and enables those same employees to be more proactive while keeping their skills relevant. Instead of being hired for a simple and repetitive task of changing prices, a retailer could provide training in product knowledge and enable their employees to foster more meaningful relationships with their customers.
An insightful article from McKinsey & Company titled The path forward for European grocery retailers reports, “COVID-19 changed the market in unprecedented ways in the past months. Now evolving consumer demands also require grocery retailers to adopt new strategies to increase performance and pursue growth…Grocery retailers thus will need to strive for further efficiency and find new margin pools to grow profitably.”
Moreover, grocery stores could potentially begin hiring employees who might have food and/or nutrition expertise and past experiences. This could open up a pool of new grocery store positions as a result! Whether the employee might already be capable of providing recommendations and their knowledge on things such as dietary restrictions, allergies, or simply more information on a specific product, or they require more training, automation could open up new opportunities to look forward to.
Embrace the shift
A McKinsey & Company article titled The future of shopping: Technology everywhere says: “The most successful retailers will be those that connect with consumers in new ways by leaning in on their digital, omnichannel, and in-store technology ambitions.”
You might be thinking that innovative, digital tools will take away current positions or eliminate the need to hire more people at grocery stores, but that’s far from the truth. By implementing new technologies, as a retailer, you could expand and elaborate on basic grocery store positions and/or roles and give employees more insightful and innovative tasks. With such updates, a simple task of manually changing a price and repeating the same action over and over, could quickly become a role that positively impacts both the employee and the area of business.
In addition, with Digital Smart Labels™ implemented within your store, employees would go from spending hours dealing with manual price changes to utilizing their time in a much more valuable way while engaging customers. With more consumer related tasks and roles, growing brand awareness and encouraging brand advocacy becomes that much simpler and more natural.
Providing a positive and memorable shopping experience for your customers is the main goal, and it all starts with how you do business. Embrace the tech-savvy wave we are all on right now, and continue this innovative, digital ride by giving us a call to see out how Digital Smart Labels™ could help you elevate your business, while providing greater employee engagement as well.
