Connect With Customers Digitally, The Insights Are Priceless

By Global Managing Director, TNS Payments Market, John Tait.

These digital strategies can help Malaysian merchants enhance the customer experience and stand out from competitors — now and in the future.

The outbreak has dramatically altered how consumers shop for, pay for, and receive purchases of all kinds, disrupting tried-and-trusted business models almost overnight and forcing retailers across the globe to quickly adapt to meet customers’ new and shifting needs.

In Malaysia, the retail industry recorded a -9.7 percent growth in the third quarter of 2020, falling below market expectations. Meanwhile, the annual retail growth forecast of -9.3 percent, estimated in September, was revised downwards to -15.8 percent, due to the prolonged nationwide movement restrictions.

Retailers that were well on their way to digital transformation have been better able to weather these swift changes to consumer buying habits. Even post-outbreak, retailers who have invested, or are investing, in digital capabilities will be positioned to create customer experiences that help them stand out, using technology-based strategies.

To support these future strategies, however, retailers must implement a connectivity foundation that is more secure, more scalable, and more reliable than the traditional Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) model. For any retailer with more than five locations and more than 100 employees, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) can provide the connectivity backbone that allow business workflows to remain agile and perform optimally.

Because SD-WAN can connect dispersed locations over multiple geographical locations and use the best network route available at any given time, it allows different types of network traffic to be prioritized as needed. This provides for redundancy and a seamless user experience, but it also allows retailers’ networks to be more dynamic. For example, using a combination of managed wireless and IP connectivity with SD-WAN instead of purely MPLS can lower or eliminate circuit costs for retailers operating in a mix of rural and urban markets.  

Diversity of managed communications, combined with the intelligence of SD-WAN, can improve cost and uptime, which reduces the risk that POS terminals will go down and business is not interrupted. It can be layered on top of any connectivity solution to securely connect users with applications, including those in the cloud.

SD-WAN offers retailers the connectivity capabilities they need for in-store and ecommerce digital transformation initiatives. Here are five strategies it can support.

1: Offer customers free Wi-Fi — and use it to gain insights.

While not all consumers will return to shopping in physical stores, it is likely that most of them will. After all, plenty of people like to see options in person, browse, find deals they might not see on a website, or just get out of the house. And wherever they go, consumers will expect to have connectivity, which means free Wi-Fi is becoming a must-have for retail sites.

SD-WAN allows retailers to securely add on a free Wi-Fi solution for customers without affecting the connectivity layer that supports payments terminals or other digital initiatives in a store. And this free Wi-Fi is not just a perk for customers, retailers can harness analytics from the Wi-Fi to obtain valuable insights about shoppers’ patterns, behaviors and preferences.

For example, Wi-Fi analytics can tell retailers whether the customer is a first-time or frequent visitor. Wi-Fi analytics can show how much time a shopper has spent in the store and where in a store they spent it, as well as aggregate data about overall shopper behavior. This aggregate data allows retailers to revamp their store layouts to increase sales by highlighting popular items (or placing less popular items near better-selling ones) or placing promotional or add-on purchases near frequently traveled areas.

2: Connect with customers digitally.

Even if some consumers are not physically coming to a store, they still want expert opinions, which has led some retailers to implementdigital concierge services. Consumers can ask questions and view options via video conferencing, giving them the same white-glove experience they’d get in a physical store.

This is a trend that may continue after the outbreak, especially for products that require highly specialized knowledge like diamonds or audiovisual equipment. Retailers can use their best experts to virtually help customers all over a region rather than staffing people at every location. SD-WAN can help manage high-bandwidth applications like live video and clear audio and video by optimizing network traffic.

Other retailers have moved away from “try-before-you-buy” tactics for safety and hygiene reasons and toward augmented reality (AR) solutions. For example, some beauty stores no longer allow customers to try out a new lipstick shade by applying a sample to their lips, for hygiene reasons. Instead, stores can use AR mirrors that show the customer what the lipstick looks like on them — touch-free. Delivering responsive, smooth AR requires both sufficient capacity on the network and the ability to manage traffic, to protect the AR traffic from jitter and packet loss.

3: Accept and securely support omnichannel payments.

Consumers have not stopped buying, but they have changed the ways they shop and pay for goods, with many turning to ecommerce, mobile apps, or curbside pickup. This new desire for a variety of payment and buying options is not going away, and retailers must deliver on it. SD-WAN’s ability to expand connectivity over a wider area allows retailers to take payments in more places — outdoor terminals, pay-at-the-pump options, self-service kiosks and even via mobile POS terminals, like tablets.

While flexibility in where and how payments can be processed is ideal for the consumer, it can create cybersecurity risks. This is because more payments devices mean more points of interaction to and from apps or internet breakout. Proper security controls, especially for payments, are critical.

SD-WAN enables retailers to securely connect all types of payments options, as well as any other devices and networks within a retail environment. Depending on the equipment and/or vendor, SD-WAN can also protect sensitive personal and financial data and traffic — key for the retail industry. Regulatory compliance with PCI DSS security credentials is, of course, also critical within a retail environment, and some SD-WAN solutions available today have been designed to incorporate PCI DSS requirements. 

4: Use smart cameras to rethink store layouts.

Today’s security cameras are not just useful for catching break-ins and providing surveillance. New always-streaming smart devices can capture shopper patterns that can drive strategy and improve decision-making. Retailers can see what is happening at their physical locations, observing foot traffic patterns and gauging customer reactions to learn more about shoppers’ preferences and their intent to purchase.

Cameras can yield actionable insights to improve in-store offerings, maximize the placement of sales associates and in-store displays and even develop individual promotions. While tying these into a store’s analytics and network means there are even more devices on a retailer’s network, SD-WAN allows retailers to manage traffic to avoid a network from overloading.

5: Optimize the supply chain and inventory systems.

The supply chain issues some retailers experienced earlier in the Covid-19 crisis demonstrated the importance of being able to efficiently manage supply chains. Especially as shoppers demand more e-commerce options and faster delivery, retailers must be able to quickly perform inventory checks, automate orders for high-demand stock, and track orders in real time. SD-WAN can help retailers streamline operations and eliminate any network downtime, so all systems stay up and running.

What is more, many retail giants have started blending their stores and their inventory centers, indicating the lines between brick-and-mortar and ecommerce will become even more blurred. For example, big EU-5 retailers like Tesco and Carrefour have expanded online with in-store inventory, while Amazon — the original ecommerce company — has been rolling out physical stores in select cities.

The good news is that you do not have to be a global brand to exploit the advantages of connecting your business over SD-WAN. SD-WAN helps mid-sized merchants who want to set up a mobile order/ecommerce fulfillment center, a ghost kitchen to expand service areas or a seasonal kiosk location to test demand before committing to real estate. SD-WAN allows retailers to interconnect these new channels and locations in days rather than months through fast deployment of equipment and connectivity.

This means retailers can gain a larger yet flexible footprint without committing to another fully outfitted customer-facing storefront. And by prioritizing bandwidth-intensive retail workloads, such as retail analytics and inventory systems, SD-WAN can improve bandwidth efficiency and optimize inventory operations and productivity.

Get Ready for a New Future

Malaysia’s digital economy is at the core of the country’s economic future, growing at around 21 percent annually. In 2018, the digital economy contributed RM267.7 billion or 18.5 percent in the gross domestic product (GDP) which is among the highest in the ASEAN region.

In Budget 2021, the Malaysian government announced an allocation of RM9.4 billion to further drive the nationwide digitalisation initiatives across industry sectors and the people, in line with the Shared Prosperity Vision 2030. SD-WAN can deliver the agility and flexibility needed to accelerate digital transformation in Malaysia’s retail industry.

Retailers need to simplify, secure, and improve their network across all branches and locations to support continued digital transformation; remain agile in the face of change; and improve in-store and ecommerce customer experiences. SD-WAN can consolidate point solutions, simplify network management, provide visibility into data applications, and support new bandwidth-intensive digital strategies — all while supporting business-critical applications so that payments stay up and running.

However, some retailers may be challenged to implement this technology, either because their in-house IT staff does not have the time, or because they do not have in-house IT. Fully managed solutions can help in this instance. They remove the hands-on work of deployment while giving a business all the capabilities of SD-WAN — allowing retailers to focus on transforming the customer experience, not their network.

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