Enhancing customer experiences with location-based technology

Today's retailer has a lot to contend with to capture — and retain — a consumer's attention. Between the continued expansion of e-commerce, the changing patterns of in-person shopping and growing competition, it will be the retailers who focus on perfecting the consumer experience that will stand out from the pack.

While there are many approaches to enhancing the consumer experience, location-based services are one of the emerging technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the retail industry by both improving in-store shopping and optimizing warehouse operations.

Focusing on the experience

By incorporating personalized and localized services, retailers can make shopping seamless and engaging. Location-based services offer an array of next-generation features that can significantly enhance the retail adventure for customers.

Retailers can use various technologies, data analysis packages and tools - including beacons, sensors, GPS-based tools, Bluetooth low energy technologies, and Wi-Fi triangulation solutions — to enable LBS. In conjunction with an organization's networking solutions, these technologies can enable retailers to deliver real-time, contextually relevant information to customers through personalized smartphone notifications, creating interactive and immersive shopping experiences.

By leveraging LBS, customers can be engaged with digital coupons, turn-by-turn wayfinding, personalized promotional reminders, real-time product information, upsell recommendations, or even hazard alerts. Imagine a customer entering a store and receiving instant notifications about ongoing promotions, personalized discounts, or recommendations based on their preferences. Such localized services not only enhance customer satisfaction but also increase the likelihood of purchase and foster customer loyalty.

With LBS, retailers can create a tailored and convenient shopping journey that ultimately drives increased sales while gathering valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences that can be used to inform future promotions.

Optimizing the backend

Location-based services are not limited to enhancing the in-store experience; they also offer valuable applications in optimizing warehouse operations.

Through asset tracking and route optimization technologies, retailers can streamline inventory management, improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.

Real-time tracking of high-value product inventory and corporate assets, coupled with automated inventory management systems, ensures accurate stock levels, minimizes losses, and enables efficient order fulfillment. By leveraging location-based services in warehouses, retailers can achieve greater operational agility, faster order processing, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Becoming proactive

One of the key advantages of location-based services is their real-time predictive capabilities.

By analyzing historical data, customer behavior patterns and external factors, retailers can anticipate potential issues before they arise. For example, during the holiday season, retailers can use historical footfall traffic data to forecast capacity challenges and proactively manage crowd control measures.

This enables retailers to optimize staffing, inventory levels and overall store operations, ensuring a seamless and stress-free shopping experience for customers and adequate in-store staffing levels.

People flow

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, managing people flow and adhering to social distancing guidelines was paramount for retailers.

Location-based services offer valuable solutions to address these challenges. While the days of hand counting consumers as they enter and leave a store are thankfully in the past, an added benefit of LBS is the ability to quickly "switch on" a solution to this issue if ever needed again.

For example, retailers can efficiently manage foot traffic within their stores by leveraging real-time occupancy monitoring, queue management, and heat mapping technologies.

During busy seasons, these capabilities could help retailers proactively minimize wait times and optimize the utilization of store space — signaling to customers that they genuinely value their time and are working to make the experience as positive and convenient as possible.

Changing the industry

Location-based services technology has the potential to revolutionize the retail industry, providing retailers with a powerful tool to enhance the customer experience, optimize operations, and drive business growth.

The key to success will be determining whether a specific location-based offering or a combination of them makes sense for your consumers and what you want to present them with.

From a management perspective, it's also important to embrace automation and integration with existing equipment as much as possible in establishing an LBS. While they can truly enhance the consumer experience and provide a competitive advantage, LBS technologies still need to be easy to deploy and operate by your team and create demonstrable value for the consumer.