Last week, Premise hosted a webinar on how to leverage the gig economy with your next retail execution. Hosted by Business Development Executive Carol Fleishman and Solutions Engineer Ryan Furey in conjunction with Progressive Grocer, the session touched on many of the conversations Premise has had with retailers and the challenges they typically face, as well as our recent ebook on how in-store mobile discovery helps solve many of these challenges.
Below is a quick recap of what was covered. For a full copy of the ebook, click here.
A New Approach to Retail Execution
It’s difficult to know where to begin when commencing a retail execution for your stores. You likely have many questions regarding what areas of the business require the most attention, and might be left to guesswork when coming up with your strategy.
But what if you could take the questions you have about the performance of your business and turn them into actionable tasks? What if these specific tasks were completed by numerous smartphone users to provide a holistic answer to your questions?
Here are a few examples of questions you might have as you prepare to begin your in-store execution:
“Why do customers always seem to pass the condiments aisle when they walk in the store?”
“What are my competitors doing differently in their stores to attract customers?”
“Where in the store will this particular display perform the best?”
As you come up with these questions based on observations you’ve made on a day-to-day basis, it’s easy to start feeling overwhelmed by the notion that the right changes can lead to increased success – it’s just a matter of finding the answers in a matter-of-fact method that leaves no room for ambiguity.
The best way to gather credible answers to these questions is by monitoring every step of the customer journey using on-demand data collection. By leveraging a global network of smartphone users, you gain a barrage of information to work with to guide your retail execution.
Uncover important pieces of information, such as where shoppers are most likely to stop in their tracks and add impulse purchases to their baskets. Dive more sales from a given display by taking questions you may have about it and rendering them into simple tasks for Contributors to complete.
How?
Leverage In-Store Mobile Discovery
In-store retail has experienced immense change over the past few years, but ultimately has proven itself durable, even with the convenience and efficiency afforded to customers through online shopping. “2021 was the year that grocery retail became truly omnichannel. Retailers who delivered on their customers’ evolving needs in-store and online performed best,” said Grant Steadman, president of North America for Dunnhumby, in an article from Progressive Grocer.
Through the emergence of the gig economy, online shopping services like Instacart and Shopify have thrived by focusing on this level of convenience for the customer. They provide service to shoppers by allowing them access to the products on your shelves, but from the comfort of their own home, with a third-party shopper being the one to physically experience your store.
With the hefty transaction fees often charged by third-party apps, retailers have been forgoing margins just to ensure they keep their lines of business open.
At Premise, we figured it was about time there was a gig economy product tailor-made for the retailers of the world. We’re seeking to not only change the relationship between retailers and gig workers but flip the script almost entirely on its head by having customers go out of their way to provide you with fast, quality insights that are rapidly aggregated. And like Uber or Shopify, we have the ability to scale these services globally.
When it comes to retail executions, traditional methods only go so far in regards to providing data that is actionable. A great deal of simple guessing still goes into understanding the customer journey – even the most detailed after-the-fact reviews or surveys leave plenty of gaps in visibility for stores and retailers in terms of having a real-time view of the period of time from when a customer enters the store up until the moment they leave. Customers will come into the store with a myriad of intentions – some come simply to take a picture to later make a purchase online and vice-versa.
Crowdsourcing using this method offers actionable, flexible data from smartphone users around the world leveraged to provide an accurate, instant view into your stores globally. Using hyper-specific tasks for gig workers to complete, you can set up a monitoring system that is persistent in your stores everywhere. And with this direct line to customers, the insights you are gathering are human – not produced from an algorithm or prediction model. There’s now a gig economy product for your store.
This approach to retail execution is what is known as in-store mobile discovery. In our recent webinar, we dove into how to take these small bits of actionable information that are used to paint a granular view of your stores, the items on your shelves, as well as the way in which customers are interacting with them.
To view the full webinar, you can watch it here.
And if you’d like to check out the full ebook, you can find that here to add further context to the conversation.
Thank you to the Progressive Grocer team for working with us to help spread the word about these exciting developments in the retail space.
For more information, visit www.premise.com.