Today’s retail is all about in-store customer engagement with the help of technology. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores are competing with e-commerce which allows consumers to shop any time, 365 days a year and 24 hours per day.
Many retailers have lost out to the e-Commerce trend, However, those retailers will survive and prosper in the future who will adapt and leverage technology to provide value to customers. Retailers need to leverage technology to allow consumers to do all those things which they do online, and even more, inside the retail store.
Learn More: How to lock your iPad to One App for your retail store
Since the introduction of iPhones and iPads in retail, businesses have found remarkable ways to use the devices and with every release of a new iPhone device, the possibilities are only increasing. iPad Pro is the major and very powerful tablet till date and it has initiated the wave of the use of tablets for business demonstration, entertainment, playing games, and various other purposes. It is now used to generate billions of revenues in businesses every year.
Again, since retail, today has to focus about increasing in-store customer engagement by leveraging state of the art technology, iPads are the perfect devices for the forward-thinking retail businesses who want to transform the shopping experience for their existing as well as their prospective customers.
For quite a long time, mobile devices were not exploited for increasing customer experience enhancement. But, now we are witnessing a new trend of using mobile devices and moreover iPads in retail as the best in-store marketing tool.
This is due to ease of use, light in weight, and affordability for businesses, and most importantly internet connectivity has made it possible for iPads to attract businesses and consumers are naturally drawn to them. Hence, it is proving to be the best tool for retailers to use in their store for marketing to customers.
It has the potential to play the level playing field between traditional brick-and-mortar and online stores. But it also depends on finding innovative ways to use iPads in retail to enhance customer experience and improve business processes.
How can retailers use iPads in their stores?
1) Point of Sale
Tablets are used as Point Of Sale in most of the retail stores today and have replaced the desktops or the old cash registers. And, iPads in retail, provide a better deal as POS (Point of Sale), in fact, they are cheaper than the traditional systems. You can weigh products, print receipts, update inventory, and track sales. The check-out becomes streamlined & faster.
2) Inventory tracking
For inventory management, there is a huge transformation in the way inventories are managed and controlled in the stores, malls, and warehouses. Technology has made it very easy with the use of mobile devices, POS, RFID, barcodes etc. that no one needs a legacy system, every function can be managed through an iPad Kiosk App.
3) Customer Service
Businesses can use iPads for better customer service. You can deploy a good CRM app across the organization by which the customer service executive can have all the customer info right in front of him at the same time while attending them.
The customer service representative at the front desk, can access the different customer profile and answer the queries or solve the issue promptly.
If there is any new prospect, their details can be entered on the iPads, while showing them around in your retail store.
4) Educating customers about various products & services
Businesses can give various product demos by the iPads in the store, which can make it interactive. Malls or in a single store, they can keep a kiosk running the demo and even the video of the whole store in or the mall showing where are the different things available, which help the customers to navigate according to their needs.
If not video, then just keep a slideshow of the photos of the different products available. By this, the customer can have an idea of what all things are available in the store.
And it is very easy to turn the iPads into kiosks with Scalefusion
5) Survey
Businesses can set up a customer survey using a survey app. They can deploy the app on the iPad keep it customer-facing. Generally, it can be kept at the entrance or at the POS, where customer immediately takes a note. They can be simple surveys with the smileys asking the customers to tap on the answers how much they are satisfied with the storage service.
Conclusion
So, as we saw there are numerous ways in which iPads can be used in retail, and with Scalefusion iPad MDM solution, iPads can be leveraged up to unprecedented extents as POS, Kiosk, Digital Signage and many other utilities.
