With Christmas fast approaching, many retailers are focusing their efforts on attracting customers in-store. However, the difference between success and failure during the festive season is a result of strict planning and preparation. In addition, coping with the Christmas shopping rush is made even more complex with the connected shopper having increasingly high expectations for fast and reliable in-store WiFi.
From interactive changing rooms, to the integration of in-store augmented reality, retailers have considered their customers’ needs and embraced the technological revolution. However, many forget to consider how their networks will cope with the increased pressures of the rapid influx of customers, particularly during this festive season. It is this demand that retailers may struggle to satisfy, not just at Christmas but all year round.
Whether it’s tweeting a picture of the latest find, browsing online for price comparison or interacting with retailers’ touch points through their smart phone – connected customers demand for seamless WiFi has become a growing issue that retailers need to tackle. A recent study by digital marketing consultants Acuity Group indicated that 50 per cent of smartphone owners would feel more confident making a major purchase in a store with WiFi access. An additional 30 per cent would be more likely to browse additional items not on their list and 20 per cent would be more likely to spend longer in the store. This goes to show that reliable and efficient WiFi, which can cope with increasing pressures during the Christmas rush, is rapidly becoming a vital tool that retailers should be adopting to enhance the overall customer experience.
The cost of failing to implement the correct networking solution can be detrimental to brand reputation and can even lead to losing out to competition. Recently, coffee shop poster boy, Starbucks, experienced a point-of-sale outage, which lasted some five hours across stores in North America. Just five years ago this would have been a relatively small inconvenience, but now with disgruntled consumers able to expel their wrath on social media sites, the stores were forced to offer free drinks as compensation. This one ‘minor’ networking failure was thought to have cost the company several millions of dollars – avoidable with fore thinking and planning
However, the sheer volume of users, devices and Christmas traffic, will only continue to place a heavier burden on a network. Limited resources, constrained capital budgets and geographically dispersed locations are making it increasingly difficult for retailers to efficiently manage, monitor and support such distributed WiFi networks across stores.
Knowing what devices are connected to the network, when and where the traffic congestion is, can help to identify bandwidth utilisation – a factor that shouldn’t be a guessing game. Retailers need to ensure their wireless networks are continuously monitored for usage in order to implement the correct measures. Access points should be placed strategically around customer hot spots to cope with the fluctuating demand of in-store WiFi. This will be imperative to a retailer’s success at Christmas and beyond, with the number of network-connected devices expected to increase by 20 per cent over the next year (Matthias Machowinski, research director for enterprise networking at IHS Infonetics.
With this in mind, finding the most cost-efficient way to deliver sustainable and flexible WiFi, at such a high-pressured time in the shopping calendar, is an obstacle many are looking to overcome. As a long term solution some are turning to the cloud, with less costly infrastructure and no need to hire expertise to manage it. The pay-as-you-go option of some cloud-based solutions makes it a more accessible, affordable and efficient solution for retailers only wanting to pay for the capacity they use.
With the dispersed locations of retailers, such a cloud-based approach to networking allows the additional costs associated with hardware installation and maintenance to be cut. When given the ability to be controlled centrally, organisations’ entire WiFi infrastructure can be managed from any location, with the need for truck rolls reduced virtually to zero. This centrally managed approach means time, cost and responsibility for maintenance is significantly reduced, leaving more time and budget to be spent on improving the customer’s in-store experience.
As customer expectations rise in their need for high quality WiFi, and especially with the upcoming Christmas rush; retailers need to think ahead to an all encompassing network solution for coping with heavy customer traffic across multiple locations. This can be done by providing a reliable and resilient connection, with multiple access options. Prime focus must be on maintaining long term customer loyalty. A cost efficient and reliable IT infrastructure can be the facilitating solution. Retailers need to act now to implement flexible and adaptable network solution tailored to the store and most importantly, the customer’s needs to make for a hassle-free Christmas.
