The Potential of Retail App Experiences: A Blueprint for Success
Explore all you need to know to create a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers through innovation in app technology.
The Evolution of Retail
Retail is evolving quickly due to changes in technology and consumer behavior. E-commerce is booming, with about 58.4% of working-age internet users shopping online every week. But even with its popularity, 56% of shoppers still prefer visiting a physical brick-and-mortar store before purchasing online. Contrary to what had been anticipated, the e-commerce space isn’t taking over physical retail storefronts – the two are merging, and businesses moving with this new trend are rising to the top.
Today’s digitally savvy consumers expect the shopping experience to flow easily from one location to another and from one device to another. The customer journey is continuous, dynamic, and accessible, and omnichannel excellence is key to unlocking growth.
A unified, seamless omnichannel approach provides consumers with a more holistic experience, allowing them to shop across multiple sales channels, including wholesale stores, physical stores, and online, using their mobile phones or laptop.
Companies transitioning to modern technology with API-driven and cloud-native systems, like Best Buy and Tire Discounters, are already reaping the benefits of the omnichannel model via BOPIS and modern POS systems – serving the needs of customers better and driving growth and revenue.
Attempts to integrate updates or add new features to antiquated traditional, monolithic, legacy platforms often result in glitches and downtime. Many users are quickly realizing the importance of a platform that allows for agile development and that innovation is critical to survival.
Using the latest tech solutions is a strategy that has helped many companies evaluate customer satisfaction. For example, Shockoe has helped improve the grocery experience with an in-store kiosk app that promotes surveys.
If you want to take full advantage of technology in retail, schedule a call.
Continue reading for more information on how to innovate your shopping experience and scale your company.
Innovation in the Shopping Experience
Over the last few years, technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and chatbots have reinvented the customer experience by making it more immersive. These technologies sink customers into the shopping experience, encouraging them to spend more time in your app or store and learn more about your brand. They also allow for deeper levels of personalization, resulting in better engagement and conversion rates, higher sales volume, lower return rates, and higher customer retention.
With competition in the retail sector fiercer than ever, businesses must look toward innovative in-app experiences to get an edge. MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) technology can lead the way in helping retailers create flexible, agile, efficient, highly scalable, and future-proof apps.
One of the most important lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic is that businesses must adjust rapidly to new requirements to remain competitive. A MACH architecture enables you to iterate quickly and respond effectively to new opportunities and changing business and market needs to ensure business survival.
Innovation is also crucial to the success of app growth strategies. Whether your goal is app development, market development, penetration, or diversification, innovation can help you discover previously unknown insights, deliver an outstanding value proposition, find the best avenues to promote your app, and increase customer lifetime value.
New strategies and techniques can drive business growth. Schedule a call for more information.
Benefits for Customer Experience
Searchability
One of the biggest pain points when shopping is finding the products you seek – approximately 2 in 3 people who walk out of a store without buying a product do so because they can’t find a specific item.
App technology can streamline shopping, helping customers find their favorite products faster. For example, online shoppers can type the name of the product they seek using the search feature to find it in a matter of seconds. In-store shoppers can create a list of the items they want to buy on the app, grab a smart cart when they arrive at the store, attach their phones to the cart, and let the app guide them to each product’s location.
Speed and Agility
App automation and smart features can ensure your platform is always running and scaling and remains secure. Launching promotions and campaigns and getting new products to customers without delay makes it easier.
Additionally, app technology allows you to provide information, process transactions, deliver products, and integrate new technology quickly and seamlessly, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Scalability
Another reason investing in app technology is an excellent idea is that it enables you to seamlessly grow your business and adapt to new requirements while keeping your customers at the forefront.
As an example, cloud-based apps can be scaled at a moment’s notice to accommodate planned or unexpected spikes in traffic and sales volume, ensuring customers always experience fast performance and no site downtime.
Moreover, app technology helps you collect actionable feedback, adding more power to the mix as your business expands. With the data collected – either directly from customer responses or indirectly from tracking their online behavior – you can determine which app improvements are necessary to optimize functionality and user experience. As a result, you’ll better serve the needs of existing customers, increase their lifetime value, and attract new users to your app.
Checkout
Roughly 77% of U.S. shoppers aren’t returning to stores due to the lengthy checkouts that can happen during in-store shopping. With app technology, shoppers can self-checkout from the comfort of their mobile phones and avoid long checkout queues, and when returning a product, navigate to their purchase in the app, select the return option, scan the item and its QR code, return the item, and go about their day.
Flexibility
Take advantage of all the opportunities for delivering personalized customer experiences in retail through app technology. Reach out if you’re looking to grow your business.
Many companies have built innovative apps to solve their customer pain points and drive growth and revenue. Winn-Dixie created a personalized couponing and rewards system for their customers and Pet Paradise streamlined its online booking process. It now uses an intuitive app that allows for faster bookings and direct reservations without phone calls. This innovative solution resulted in an increase in user spend during bookings and a 12% increase in add-on services.
Over the last decade, Shockoe has helped many companies build innovative apps to solve their customer pain points and drive growth and revenue. In addition to helping Winn-Dixie create a personalized couponing and rewards system for their customers, we also streamlined Pet Paradise’s online booking process through an intuitive app, allowing for faster bookings and direct reservations without making calls. This innovative solution resulted in an increase in user spend during bookings and a 12% increase in add-on services.
Transport company Globalvia is now able to better manage its toll facilities in Virginia through Slora, a user-centric app. With Shockoe’s assistance, Slora now offers a seamless onboarding experience, personalization, and transparent pricing. It also allows drivers to pay on the go on most expressways in Virginia, helping them get to their destination with less hassle.
Want to learn more about attracting customers and driving revenue? Continue reading.
Personalized Experiences
As per Mckinsey & Company’s 2021 report, 71% of customers expect personalized interactions when shopping, and over three-quarters get frustrated when retailers don’t deliver customer intimacy. The research also found that leaders in personalization generate 40% more revenue than their peers. These findings demonstrate that personalization is more important than ever in attracting, engaging, and retaining customers, and driving revenue.
Retailers can deliver more personalized experiences by augmenting their space with interactive product displays, virtual try-ons, self-service kiosks, loyalty programs, and immersive pop-up stores as a few examples.
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Interactive Product Displays
Interactive product displays do more than just deliver a message to customers – they invite them to interact with a product and have a meaningful experience. As an example, Perch’s interactive shoe display provides 360-degree views of each shoe’s critical elements and a video of the shoe in action. This enables customers to gain first-hand experience with the performance features and construction details of each shoe. Immersive experiences like these not only facilitate product discovery but can also drive customer engagement and sales.
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Virtual Try-Ons
Virtual try-ons can be used for a variety of products, including clothing, accessories, and cosmetics, to enable customers to see how a product looks on them and experiment with different styles without touching the actual goods.
Brands like Nike and Gucci are using the technology for shoe try-ons; Michael Kors is using it for virtual try-ons of sunglasses; and M·A·C, L’Oréal, and Sephora are using it for makeup try-ons. Virtual try-ons help customers select the right product for their needs, reducing potential product returns and increasing customer satisfaction.
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Loyalty Programs
Consumers are highly in favor of personalized product recommendations, coupons, rewards, and promotions based on previous purchases. Surprisingly, only 48% of retailers who currently offer personalized experiences offer promotions based on previous purchases. Similarly, only 39% offer product recommendations based on past purchases. The overall implication is that about 20% of customers are not receiving personalized experiences based on their previous interactions with brands.
Bridging this gap can help retailers boost sales, profit, online traffic, and customer loyalty. For example, when Shockoe helped Winn-Dixie create a personalized couponing and rewards system based on customer data – like online behavior, purchase history, and how they wish to interact with the brand – the supermarket chain’s engagement soared to an all-time high. The user count tripled in a matter of weeks and Winn-Dixie now meets customer expectations better than before, driving revenue and growth.
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Immersive Pop-Up Stores
Immersive pop-up stores are a great avenue for brand activation and driving traffic to your physical stores. They also provide an excellent opportunity to deliver special promotions, generate buzz around exclusive merchandise and limited-edition products, and provide first-hand experience with your product. Case in point: Internet behemoth Google.
In 2017, Google set up futuristic pop-up stores in Los Angeles and New York to allow customers and tech enthusiasts to test cutting-edge tech like the Daydream VR Headset, Google Home Mini, and the Pixel 2 smartphone, to get their latest hardware in consumers’ hands and create a lasting impression.
Undoubtedly, app technology can provide significant benefits to both retailers and their customers.
At Shockoe, our team is on the frontline of data privacy and security and can help you prepare to lead the way. Reach out if you want to learn more about scaling your business with the latest and greatest technologies.
But how do you measure impact and success? Below, we take a deep dive into the most important frameworks and metrics.
Measuring Success
Understanding your product strategy and tracking meaningful metrics can help you discover opportunities to drive demand and growth for your organization. It can help identify features to optimize user experience, boost engagement, keep customers using your app, and create a meaningful impact.
Your first step should be deciding the framework you’ll use to measure your app’s success. Grounding your app’s impact in a framework clarifies the bigger picture and focuses on what truly matters.
Some useful frameworks include:
North Star Metric
A North Star Metric is an all-encompassing tool that measures your ability to solve customer pain points and generate business. It focuses on your product strategy and value, as well as business outcomes important to your organization.
A good example would be a metric that tracks order fulfillment – rather than just keeping tabs on the number of orders placed through your app, a North Star Metric can measure value in the form of customer experience, such as whether you delivered the order on time and without returns.
The impact of using a North Star Metric hinges on your ability to align your team, activities, and decisions with your overarching goals. The metric should also focus on the points where you’re most likely to convert potential customers.
HEART Framework
Designed by Google researchers Xin Fu, Hilary Hutchinson, and Kerry Rodden, the HEART framework enables you to measure user experience across five metrics – happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success – and to make the best decisions during product development.
- Happiness – Often tracked through surveys, this metric measures customers’ attitudes and satisfaction with your app.
- Engagement – tracks how users interact with your app, of their own volition, including the overall level of interaction, regularity, and intensity of use during a given period.
- Adoption – measures your ability to attract new users over a certain period. While sales and marketing efforts play a crucial role in bringing more users on board in the short run, a good user experience is key to more adoption in the long run.
- Retention – measures the number of customers you keep over a given time frame, helping you identify where your app’s dropout is most pronounced, and tackle user experience issues leading to it.
- Task success – tracks the percentage of task completion (e.g., registration and checkout) and the time spent on tasks, providing valuable insights for improving the process.
This framework is easy to understand and implement. It’s also practical for small and large projects – although data collection methods can vary. Moreover, metrics like happiness can provide retailers with a subjective assessment of the QoE of immersive experiences, while engagement and task success can provide an objective view, helping them better understand customer needs and improve upon the overall impact of their apps.
The Goals-Signals-Metrics Process
Your goals-signals-metrics process can help your team focus on a specific outcome (or output), discover useful insights, and predict ROIs more accurately – enhancing your organization’s overall efficiency. It includes the following steps:
- Identifying your organization’s long-term objectives (in terms of a feature or a product)
- Determining which signs indicate you’re moving toward those goals
- Choosing the right metrics to measure your progress
Combining the goals – signals – metrics process with the HEART framework can help develop robust, user-centered metrics, resulting in a more comprehensive picture of your app’s impact.
After determining the suitable framework for your project, the next step should be assessing how your app stacks up. This includes closely examining your app’s ROI, the user behavior it encourages, and how it compares to similar apps and industry standards. Once you have this essential data, it’s time to map out your app changes for success. Remember, measuring mobile app success is a continuous process, and you should regularly revisit the exercise to ensure your metrics and goals stay aligned.
How Shockoe Can Help
Shockoe is a leading digital service provider with extensive expertise in immersive experiences and retail. Our product design and development process is grounded on industry best practices, creativity, and sustainability to deliver a unique and lasting impression for your users.
For more information on Shockoe’s innovative app solutions, check out our portfolio to see how we’ve helped businesses excel.
Remember, shoppers are now looking for an omnichannel experience and expect product delivery how, where, and when they want.
Learn more about Shockoe’s approach to app development from our engagement manager, or contact our experts to learn about some of the innovative app experiences that would be a good fit for your brand.