PRIOS: An Associate App Solution- Features and Technology

Over the years, the retail industry has experienced a huge makeover and it has established a substantial baseline that customers thrive only in an interactive world. Today, there are no boundaries to customer expectation. Increased customer engagement is crucial for enhanced customer experience and none other than your store associates can fulfil this role of being in the frontline of customer service.

Store Associates – Upholding Your Brand

Store associates represent your brand and transforming and empowering them to serve customers better should be one of the biggest priorities for retailers. This is because 93% of customers don’t complete their shopping only because they don’t find the right person to help them.

As the pace of technological advancements is accelerating exponentially, retailers feel the need to invest in educating employees to quickly adapt to these dynamic changes and engage with customers more effectively. According to A.T. Kearney, 75% of retailers are looking forward to invest more in the latest technologies and training their staff over the next few years simply because of their significant role in customer service.

Did you know?

More than 80% of shoppers think they know better than their Retail store associates. Despite that, 79% of consumers think store associates are quite important during their shopping.

PRIOS – The Ultimate App Solution for Store Associates

Customers no longer have the patience and can easily get frustrated over the slightest dim in their shopping experience. SAs should be smart enough to win over these customers by helping them to find and buy exactly what they want. For this purpose, Aspire’s retail solution aims at helping SAs to sell smartly by capturing customer’s buying behavior, bridging the gap between their online and physical store purchase history and enabling them to serve customers with omni-channel technology solutions.

Adding a Personal Touch

Regardless of customer’s shopping interests over online or physical stores, personalization is an inevitable quality that customers seek and expect retailers to understand. Keeping this in mind, PRIOS is designed to seamlessly integrate customer’s shopping behavior across channels and notify the store owners to relate to customer’s interests.

When Joan entered the store, the SA had complete information about Joan’s purchase/browse history, his shopping activities on social media and other sources. He surprised Joan by offering additional discounts on the sweatpants by learning that it was his birthday. Similarly, the SA also found Joan’s liking for a particular brand after he quickly went through his browse history. Fortunately, the brand had several apparels which were on sale the same day. The SA used this knowledge to persuade Joan buy a crisp white linen shirt from his favorite brand. By building a strong customer relationship, the SA can now confidently follow up with Joan and send him more personalized products with attractive discounts and thereby encourage repeat customers.

Customers Prefer Smart SA'S

Tulip Retail survey shows that 72% of customers who dealt with a store associate who uses a mobile device to provide things like product information, checkout assistance, and inventory look-up, said it resulted in a better shopping experience.

SAs need a framework like PRIOS that holds the latest technologies like pricing, CRM, big data, IoT and social media to be aware of the customer’s shopping journey.

Big players in the Cosmetic space like Sephora uses smart technology called Color IQ as a result of their partnership with Pantone Color Institute which helps their store associates to easily connect with customers. This device gives the SAs the confidence to recommend the best possible options to their customers as the device effectively scans the customer’s skin to suggest the ideal concealer or foundation matches. They believe in empowering their employees so that they are well equipped to handle the digital customers.

Boosting Mobile POS

Customers hate to stand in long queues and Joan thought he would encounter the same at a store. But this time Joan went to look out for a pair of converse and as soon as he entered the store, his mobile app went into store mode and directed him to the footwear aisle. The SA was immediately alerted about Joan’s store visit where he soon came to his customer’s assistance and suggested a couple of sweatpants that could go perfectly with the converse. But since Joan couldn’t find his perfect fit, the SA quickly checked online from his mobile device and found that it was available. Joan couldn’t resist but add it to his shopping cart. That’s when the SA noticed that Joan had items in his online shopping cart which were available at store. The SA was equipped enough to move those items from online cart to store cart and close the purchase where he made the online payment together with his converse after the SA helped him scan the barcode.