The retail Industry in today’s world is expanding beyond brick-and-mortar store operations. In an attempt to acquire customers both online and offline, retail stores are indeed decking up their online presence as well. The evolution journey of retail started from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce. facial recognition in retail enbles the retail stores to create an unified commerce and omnichannel presence.
The landscape of commerce is undergoing a transformation, though perhaps not in the manner anticipated by some. The forthcoming shopping experience won’t be solely retail or online-centric; instead, it’s evolving into a hybrid model. Omnichannel retail and unified commerce converge to create a customer-focused, all-encompassing solution.
This method enhances the customer experience, regardless of their preferred shopping mode, and amplifies your impact across all channels. With the appropriate tools, your customers can relish a smooth, personalized, and interactive purchasing journey, irrespective of whether they physically visit your store.
The Digital Transformation in Retail
The next phase led to shopping via mobile phones and now to even social media. This evolution could be seen as starting from single retail stores to virtual stores, finally omnichannel. Every organised retailer is equally expanding towards online and social media market space as well- leading to a Unified Retail Space.
An integrated commerce platform enables you to enhance your in-store sales strategy by leveraging cross-channel customer insights. By having a consolidated perspective on customer interactions across digital, social, and other channels, sales associates can provide personalized services based on data, catering to the unique preferences of each shopper.
Facial Recognition in Retail: Shaping the Shopping Future
Facial recognition in retail too has evolved keeping at pace with new technological developments. With the advent of computer vision, artificial recognition and machine learning, facial recognition technology has moved beyond the identity of security management tools. Rather, it is being made to use an important medium for customer service and engagement.
As omnichannel retail gained prominence among customers it was widely accepted among the consumer base. The availability of multiple interfaces helped customers shop effortlessly, and to gain an overall understanding of customer behavior. But, instead of complementing the shopping experience, the omnichannel retail space ended up competing against each other. The competition affected both online as well as offline retail, as both failed to cater for the customers in their way.
Personalization and Customer Preferences
Regular store-visiting customers lost attraction over online shopping due to a lack of personalisation in services. Online customers are too detached from brick-and-mortar stores for price disparities. The overall retail failed on two base pillars of customer satisfaction-pricing and personalised service.
The development of Unified Commerce has brought in new opportunities as well as challenges for the retail industry. The primary idea behind developing Unified Commerce is to create a seamless and frictionless shopping experience for customers. Facial Recognition in retail, or rather Unified Commerce can be a solution to create this frictionless experience.
The Unified Commerce space can be broadly classified into 3 categories:
- – The Brick-and-mortar-Stores
- – The E-Commerce Platform
- – The Social Media
Among these categories, the first two have a common playing field. The different channels interact and interoperate with each other in real-time through a centralized, single platform made up of unified commerce solutions (single technology), that handles every function across channels. It helps in having a 360-degree view of how customers interact with the brand.
In-Store Insights: Leveraging Customer Data
The brick-and-mortar stores fall short of this usage of a common platform. But implementing facial recognition in retail can be of several benefits including developing a Unified Commerce space.
Facial recognition technology can be used in several ways to improve the customer experience. Be it personalization of service, employee engagement, merchandise planning or even bringing in sustainable fashion.
For example, in-store cameras can be used to recognize customers as they enter a store, and then provide personalized recommendations or coupons based on their previous shopping history. This helps to create a more seamless and personalized experience for customers, which can ultimately lead to increased loyalty and sales.
Additionally, facial recognition technology can be used to enhance the security of online shopping. By using biometric authentication, retailers can ensure that customers are who they say they are when making purchases online. This not only helps to prevent fraud but also helps to improve the overall customer experience by reducing the need for lengthy and inconvenient authentication processes.
Facial recognition technology can also be used to enhance customer service in brick-and-mortar stores. For example, when a customer enters a store, facial recognition technology can be used to identify them and notify store associates, who can then greet them by name and offer personalized assistance. This can help to create a more welcoming and friendly environment for customers, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. These parameters of customers can also be included in the online platform of the retail store. Thus, whatever experience ended when the customer justify the store could be continued when he or she logs into the online shopping portal of the same retail store, providing the customer with a 360-degree shopping experience with personalization.
Facial recognition in retail thus can create a seamless environment for customers, where customers can easily transition between online and offline modes of shopping. The retailers too can understand the customer behaviour throughout these augmented spaces to provide more personalized service and attractive prices.
