Retail Customer Service: It’s Really About How You Connect To and With Your Customers

In retail, customer service is the name of the game.   As countless vendors work to commoditize even the most sought-after brands, vendors need to stay ahead of the game regarding customer product quality, marketing differentiation, and customer service. Connectivity plays an important role in customer service, and often, in the digital age having a variety of connectivity services working for your retail business and brand can make or break a customer relationship and establish brand loyalty; and this holds true both within their stores as well as from afar. 

Let’s take a look at several different areas where connectivity plays an important supporting role in retail.

Point-of-Sale
Now more than ever, the power of 4G and 5G mean that wireless-based connectivity can be equally if not more efficient than a wired connection, as safe, and much faster to set up for businesses who do not want to waste time waiting for a carrier installation slot.  Businesses are moving to 4G LTE and 5G for POS because it makes good business sense and offers great flexibility.  

One of these flexible applications for POS is business continuity.  We all agree that downtime means lost revenue, therefore using 4G LTE or 5G as a backup connection to your primary wired POS connectivity makes perfect sense.  In fact, the costs of downtime can be devastating for a business so make the risk assessment for your specific business using the MACH Downtime calculator.  With failover using 4G LTE or 5G, organizations now have the flexibility to maintain operations in case of a WAN link failure – no interruption necessary!

Pop-Up Locations
With LTE and 5G solutions for pop-up retail, you can quickly and securely provide WAN connectivity and Wi-Fi to any location, from a holiday storefront to a local market, carnival, or music festival.  The solutions are simple to launch without the need for IT professionals and are especially attractive for places where wired links are a challenge and when you need immediate connectivity.

In-Store Marketing
As a retailer, you know all too well how important marketing is to help increase foot traffic into and within your store. But with the proliferation of digital marketing options and channels today, in-store marketing can often be overlooked or neglected. However, in-store marketing still has an invaluable role in building customer loyalty and ensuring your retail business runs smoothly every day. With LTE-connected devices and displays, in-store marketing can easily become an essential tool for retailers looking to promote their products and attract new shoppers – even in the age of digital consumerism. With a fully managed solution and using SD-WAN, a single marketing manager can easily manage multiple locations, easily change displays and conduct mass marketing at scale and cost-effectively.

Customer Wi-Fi
Retailers can now utilize a 4G LTE or 5G edge networking solution that enables hassle-free provisioning of customer Wi-Fi and, at the same time, control content with cloud-based content filtering.  This ensures that users are secure whilst surfing the web at all times, as well as isolating customer versus employee traffic through separate channels.

Store Within a Store
To maintain a secure corporate network and still enable secure data connections for partner vendors, many retailers are turning to all-in-one wireless edge solutions that instantly provide LTE access and isolate their network from the host facility.   This allows businesses inside larger stores or facilities such as department stores, warehouses, outdoor markets, or airports the peace of mind of knowing that essential customer information is securely stored and separated from the hosts’ network.

Leveraging a wireless edge solution can give retailers access to LTE connectivity and secure connection to the cloud while ensuring that their data remains completely isolated from a larger host facility’s network.   This provides advantages when implementing store presence and implementation of point-of-sale equipment or marketing in popular locations like department stores, malls, transportation hubs, train stations, and airports.

IoT in Stores
By leveraging data gathered and processed at the edge of a wireless network, businesses can improve their operational efficiency, gain new and real-time insights, boost sales opportunities, and positively affect customer service.  An all-in-one managed solution connecting IoT devices and sensors can be compiled and sent to the cloud for processing or stored for future use.   In cutting-edge environments, beaconing for proximity marketing means the best offerings are seen by your clientele, and the personalization of experiences is achieved.

Kiosks
Kiosks are a powerful tool for retailers to grow their customer base, services, and proximity coverage.  By utilizing fully managed LTE-based edge networking solutions, maximum flexibility, management efficiency, and security can be achieved.   Why worry about hard-wiring these units and dealing with third-party scheduling, outages,and wires that are susceptible to hijacking?  By deploying LTE-connected kiosks throughout their network, retailers can increase customer service options and enable seamless point-of-sale transactions.  

Video Surveillance
Maintaining a safe and secure retail environment is paramount for any business. Today, the use of video surveillance has become an increasingly popular way to monitor both customers and employees in stores, as well as combat theft and other criminal activity. By taking advantage of fully managed LTE connectivity for their video security systems, retailers can easily and cost-effectively benefit from improved peace of mind and better protection against potential risks.