I was in a London retail store last week and just had to ask the blue-shirted Apple employee: “how many retail associates do you normally have working here?“ He went on to say that this was light traffic for midday, but on average, roughly 100 trained staff were on site engaging customers.
That’s 100 people; 125 when the store was really humming with people in search of their next cool digital life gadget. That is over 100 different access points to connect human curiosity with meaningful customer experience. Content – in the form well designed hardware – and context – in the form of easy to use software that interacts with one’s digital life and data – currently rule the day as they allow us to connect in real time.
Not a Single Check-out Lane in Sight
Next to me was a younger professional looking to buy 7 iPad Minis. One table over, a woman was asking how the iPad could help her be more productive at home and on the go. The time it took to make their purchases and be on their way was 1/10th the amount of time they spent exploring products and having their questions answered by eager Mac Specialists. Retail is being transformed by what brings people into a store: focus on the experience versus the check-out process. Understanding online casino where your customer’s ’point of emotion’ is and intuitively putting value in front of them increases their willingness to pay. This combination–of digital integration of product and immediate gratification–has never been as powerful as it is today and software enables it all.
For software, these points of emotion are connected by properly placing in-application triggers across software, when and where people are most likely to be. In today’s largest countries, these “locations“ you can see are in email and social computing. At Open-Xchange, we develop software that has this principal at the heart of the products and services we deliver. Just like surfing the web, easily clicking on links in context of someone’s unmet need fufills the curiosity and immediate need users are demanding. And SaaS-based models are leading the way as they fulfill the long tail of retail for many industries and business.
With Open-Xchange, the foundation for service providers to utilize and leverage the value of their customer base and brand is found in our flagship product OX App Suite. Have a customized VOIP App to upsell your users? Want to offer more storage to users exactly when they are looking for it? Imagine having 100 different check-out lanes across context and branded sales opportunities.
If leading software envagelist Mark Andreessen’s comment on the “pre-death of retail“ pans out, it will be a disruptive next few years that should crank out more than 5% of ecommercing that is currently “eating“ into retail sales. And it is velocity, not only speed, that will be the guiding factor of the winning business modelsCrayon Playland 4 en 1 Combo.