Let’s take Mobility, Customer Loyalty, Social Media, and Business Intelligence and show you how connectivity considerations will lead to success.
In May 2013, CSP Magazine published an article entitled "What’s Trending," which details the common technology concerns from more than a dozen retailers and suppliers. Most of these concerns centered around four big buzzwords:
All of these technology themes offer great opportunities for those retailers that utilize them correctly.
Even though retailers should dream big, ultimately, the main focus should be on a structure that enables all technologies to efficiently work together.
Efficiency can be accomplished through implementation of the final theme detailed in the article:
Mobility opens up the professional floor and allows businesses to function more efficiently. The act of picking up a smartphone brings malleable control to a retailer’s doorstep. Retailers are quickly picking up on how mobility can strengthen their business, with offerings like customer-centered Apps, coupons, and mobile payment options.
Mobility for customers is a central pull strategy to implement this technology, but both retail owners and employees want more access to data in an immediate fashion, from wherever they are.
Loyalty is a key consideration of a business transaction. Mobility is making loyalty programs better, more on-target, and less cumbersome. Point accumulation and discounts can be customized to be more relevant to the recipient.
Social media platforms have become the lifeblood of commercial retail promotions. All eyes are on the evolution of this en-masse communication tool and its potential for direct marketing and data development.
Business intelligence offers a multi-faceted view from inside the mind of the consumer. Tracking and analyzing data can help retailers determine buyer motivation, market problems, and create effective promotional strategies.
As retailers launch campaigns through different technologies, they must put heavy consideration into the logistical connections needed to transmit the valuable data.
Some retailers may need to evaluate the readiness of their communications network to support trending retail technologies. This is even more important as a company transitions to hosted communication systems, putting their business processes into cloud servers. A secure, PCI-compliant network is needed to accommodate the bandwidth required to transmit data efficiently and securely, but also should prepare retailers for future data and application demands.
A business must ask itself what applications and processes it will need to implement over time, and select the right technology today in preparation to support its future needs. The depth of coverage and connectivity options provided by Fusion’s network footprint and our core offerings of data, voice, security, and hosted IT services allow clients to do that and more.
These business services will help retailers integrate trending technologies into their business processes, giving retailers exactly what they need: the ability to be more available, more secure, and more successful.