02 February 2023
Ben Holland, enterprise team leader UK&I, Extreme Networks
Retailers never seem to have it easy. From COVID-19 restrictions to changing customer behaviours and squeezed profit margins, retailers are constantly fighting to keep pace in an incredibly competitive and dynamic marketplace.
In light of the pandemic, digital interactions have become even more important than they were pre-2020. Today’s retailers are digitally interacting with customers across several different channels and touchpoints, and this trend is only going to grow in the future as more consumers favour the online shopping experience.
This is all putting an increasing focus on retailers’ technology infrastructure – namely their networking and data capabilities. The ability to gain actionable intelligence from data analytics has quickly become paramount to future success. This is what empowers the most successful modern retailers, enabling them to deliver superior customer experiences and generate stronger business outcomes.
But this data doesn’t just appear by itself. It requires the right network infrastructure that can act as the source of data insights, informing important business decisions to help improve operational efficiency, maintain customer safety, and increase sales. In particular, cloud-based wireless networking has emerged as a true value generator, allowing data to move more freely and providing the level of customer intelligence that separates the best retailers from the rest.
The goal of any major retailer is to deliver high quality shopping experiences. This requires data to be able to move smoothly across multiple systems and applications, which is exactly what cloud-based networking infrastructures allow. High-density environments offer retailers plenty of valuable insights. But, as the number of connected devices continues to grow, retailers must invest in modern WiFi capabilities to capture these insights and provide the exceptional experience that consumers now demand.
With wireless networking, retailers can enhance how they collect, analyse and store user data in order to gain actionable insights. Effectively, it lets retailers derive greater business and IT intelligence from the user data they collect, in turn enabling them to deliver better and more personalised customer experiences.
There’s a wide range of intelligence on offer that can help retailers take this next step. From a business perspective, this could include insights on real-time and historical visitor trends across distributed locations, in-store shopper behaviours and preferences, or the impact of targeted mobile promotions. It can also enable staff tracking for enhanced resource optimisation.
On the IT side, valuable intelligence could include network performance benchmarking for coverage and capacity planning, store-to-store comparative analytics across distributed region, or a 360-degree view of device usage and quality of experience. To achieve these data-driven competencies, retailers need to be able to easily access their information from an intuitive, centralised platform with robust data durability – which is exactly what cloud-based wireless networking provides.
The Colruyt Group – one of Europe’s largest retail companies – is a perfect example of a company that has driven efficiencies and experience improvements by deploying a wireless network to connect all its supermarket retail stores, warehouses, and corporate offices. As well as providing a more reliable and efficient mobile experience for its customers and employees, the implementation has enabled Colruyt to optimise its business operations through analytics. With insights into the usage of its wireless networks, Colruyt can evaluate how to improve operations and the customer experience, whether through technology deployed in its warehouse or within its stores.
Of course, it’s not all about the experience. These wireless infrastructures also provide several other business benefits. For example, they empower retailers with the flexibility and scalability needed to seamlessly adapt to shifting demands. Retailers can scale their networks up or down when needed – such as during the festive period or around other holidays – leveraging cloud’s elasticity to help accelerate growth.
They improve operational efficiency thanks to greatly simplified network operations and centralised cloud management across wired and wireless, LAN & WAN – while enhancing security and data protection. Having a properly configured wireless network has been proven to boost security and confidentiality of information, both of which are extremely important for ecommerce transactions.
Retailers have recognised that to compete with today’s online vendors, they must invest in new technologies that will help them gain more in-depth insights and business benefits such as flexibility, scalability and security. This will allow them to build better relationships with customers and achieve operational excellence. WiFi networking solutions tick all the right boxes, giving retailers the tools they need to take their businesses to the next level.
