Instead, today’s customers and their expectations are defining what retailers need to do to stay competitive in a rapidly-changing consumer landscape. From faster checkouts and returns to personalized shopping experiences, multi-channel ordering and fulfillment, and beyond, organizations need to work faster and harder than ever to do business with customers in more ways than ever before. Delivering all this on an enterprise scale, however, requires more than desire. Often it also requires both business transformation and a complex, but dynamic, enterprise mobility infrastructure that can support and enable the core business processes needed to delight customers, capture customer dollars, and foster increased customer engagement. Whether it’s faster and increasingly dynamic warehouse processes or new point-of-sale (POS) capabilities, organizations need to integrate and take advantage of the progressively more complex range of opportunities that mobile devices can enable. If anything, today’s enterprise mobile technologies present even greater opportunities than just a year or two ago.
For example:
Associates on the sales floor can use mobile devices to access and reserve in-demand items for in-store shoppers in real-time, offering home delivery or in-store pickup at the location of their choice to preempt a lost sale.
In the warehouse, handheld devices can speed products into inventory.
In distribution centers, scanners can quickly locate in-demand goods before re-routing them to stores with high demand.
In addition, a good mobility strategy can have a positive impact on revenue. Having mobile functionality available can help retailers’ bottom lines — often significantly.
Deployment of mobile POS functionality is expected to ratchet up as customers clamor for convenience — buying online/picking up in-store options, office/home delivery of out-of-stock items, and self-checkout.
Convenience is especially important to shoppers who are beginning to view stores not as transactional venues but settings for personalized retail experiences.
Another dimension of convenience comes into play when you consider how retail shoppers want to pay. More than 33% of smartphone users worldwide expect to use their mobile phone to pay for purchases. In all, 81% of retailers plan to deploy unified commerce platforms to support sales across stores, mobile users, and the web by the end of 2020.
No matter where retailers are in the enterprise mobility journey, a gap analysis is likely to reveal new opportunities to boost operational efficiency, increase revenue, and forge a stronger bond with customers with enterprise mobility.
