Connected Fitting Room: Helping customers fill their baskets
Guest blog post by Steven Woodgate
With the Connected Fitting Room potentially transforming clothes shopping by delivering an exciting, creative and interactive process for the customer, the business can richly benefit from treasure trove of sales intelligence.
By leveraging tools from Microsoft and Accenture’s technology and analytics prowess, it can: provide a compelling, engaging shopping experience that appeals to customers; help increase sales; provide valuable intelligence that drives better merchandising decisions; and, help boost sales associate productivity.
Simon Francis, Windows Embedded Enterprise said: “You have all these devices that can collect valuable information for the enterprise and if we can get that back up into their central databases and BI, and get that back to the store, they can make intelligent and well-informed decisions.
“We can track customer behaviour and see how intelligence works to upsell to you, the customer. A good example is my shopping experience; for example, I was trying to buy a belt, but was worrying how it looked on other clothes, but with this Connected Fitting Room it helped me decide what belt was best.”
He went further in suggesting that it can dramatically transform the shopping experience.
He said: “The fitting room is like a crime screen. Clothes generally everywhere with customers getting frustrated and upset, and when they leave the store the Sales advisors are generally left clueless as to why the customer didn’t buy. With this technology, we can connect the customer with the store in places where they couldn’t before and provide.
“Customer service is very important. It’s about widening customer choices and attempting to upsell and cross sell. Link selling is vital for retailers and the amount of information you can tell through the dashboard is brilliant. The Intelligence Systems can help staff to actively compete where you can see your best performing staff.”
Brendan Mislin, Windows Capability Lead for Accenture Mobility, echoed Simon’s words and believes it will enable retail shops to compete with their online rivals.
“The whole changing room experience needs to be more fun, instead of being a drag. By using Connecting Fitting Room, we can turn trying on clothes into something fun and something that generates a large amount of valuable, anonymous data for retailers.
“Online shopping is easy to track, and now we can finally use those same analytics to help retailers make better purchasing decisions.”
This Connected Fitting Room solution is an Intelligent System powered by Microsoft technology that combines digital, cloud and analytics capabilities, key pillars of an intelligent systems, this solution
not only creates a much more engaging experience that encourages customers to buy, but also delivers deep insights into customer preferences and staff responsiveness that store managers can use to make better merchandising and staffing decisions.
