Create Modern Store Experiences

Cultivate unified commerce experiences that exceed customer expectations with this guide to the five essential elements of the modern store.

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First Essential Element of Modern Store Experiences

Modern Stores Are Empowering

Modern stores put their associates at the forefront of redefining in-person retail experiences by empowering them with deep customer and product insight and enabling digital and mobile technology.

Performing as brand ambassadors, product advisors, sales and service specialists, and fulfillment expeditors, associates guide customers at every stage of their buying journey with distinct advice, personal engagement, and precise execution. By offering value-added services and support unavailable in other sales channels, shoppers gain a unique partnership with the retail brand, making the store shopping experience more convenient and valuable.

Empower Your Associates

Essentials of the Empowered Store

Empower associates to expertly orchestrate modern store experiences and create value for shoppers with strategies and capabilities that include:

Unifying the Store Associate Experience

In modern stores, store associates have access to all customer-facing and omnichannel functions in a unified experience, allowing them to adapt quickly to the needs of modern shoppers.
Mobilizing Store Processes

Store associates can assist customers and complete checkout anywhere on the store floor via access to processes, information, and tools on mobile devices, improving customer satisfaction.
Optimizing Use of Information

Unfettered access and navigation to rich customer, product, inventory, and ordering information are essential to empowering store associates to deliver delightful customer experiences.

Unified Experiences Are Empowering

One App For Everything

According to the Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail in North America, only 43% enable associates to quickly access product information, inventory levels, and order management via a unified platform.

Learn How to Empower Your Associates

Second Essential Element of Modern Store Experiences

Modern Stores Are Seamless

Seamless selling is crucial in modern stores as it provides the convenient and complete purchase experience that shoppers value. It caters to shopper needs by seamlessly managing omnichannel purchases in the store.

Even if an item is not available in the store, an associate can find it and arrange how the customer wants to receive the item, such as shipping or pickup. Purchase checkout is optimized for omnichannel purchases, supporting the completion of mixed shopping carts with items ready for walkaway and future fulfillment. The store streamlines all checkout steps and details into a single efficient transaction, enhanced by various payment options to enable fast checkout.

Modern shoppers reward stores that embrace seamless selling with more visits and increased sales.

Sell Seamlessly

Essentials of Seamless Selling

Improve customer convenience and increase foot traffic and sales by adopting essential seamless selling strategies and capabilities, including:

Selling Inventory From Anywhere

Store associates are omnichannel closers, equipped with tools to find, quote, and order from inventory across a retailer's global inventory network to always satisfy customer needs.
Streamlining Omnichannel Checkout

Checkout is optimized for omnichannel purchases, allowing customers to personalize and pay for items for walkaway and future fulfillment in a single transaction quickly and easily.
Expanding Payment Options

Modern stores can attract and delight more shoppers and increase sales conversions by offering popular alternative payment methods, such as digital wallets and contactless payments.

Seamless Selling Reduces Cart Abandonment

Faster Checkout

According to the Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail in North America, 71% of retailer leaders focus on improving store checkout speed, directly addressing the major reason for in-store cart abandonment and creating a significant new revenue opportunity.

Learn How to Sell Seamlessly

Third Essential Element of Modern Store Experiences

Modern Stores Are Personal

Today’s shoppers appreciate the personal touch of modern stores. Store associates use customer and product insights to personalize every customer interaction, creating engaging and meaningful experiences.

By accessing rich customer data through mobile devices, associates can greet customers by name and provide tailored services and recommendations. Associates offer unique advice via extensive product information, providing customers with valuable guidance that enhances their shopping journey. Engagement tools, including appointments, digital lookbooks, and remote selling, enable elevated services that distinguish the in-store experience.

In an increasingly digital world, personal retailing helps modern stores stand out by providing customers with added value beyond the purchase transaction.

Personalize Interactions

Essentials of Personal Retailing

Enhance customer relationships and realize increased sales conversions by adopting essential personal retailing strategies and capabilities, including:

Personalizing With Rich Customer Insights

By leveraging rich customer insights, including omnichannel profile, history, and preferences, associates personalize customer interactions and deliver meaningful and differentiating store service.
Turning Associates Into Product Advisors

Modern stores are trusted sources of product insight and guidance, empowering store associates to add value to customer shopping journeys through product knowledge and advice.
Elevating Service With Advanced Engagement

Elevated shopper services, such as personal appointments, create emotional customer connections that incite feelings of appreciation and value, building greater customer loyalty.

Knowledge Enables Personalization

Product Catalog + Availability

According to the Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail in North America, 49% of shoppers surveyed said what they value most from retail stores is store associates possessing knowledge about the product they are thinking of buying.

Learn How to Personalize Interactions

Fourth Essential Element of Modern Store Experiences

Modern Stores Are Fulfilling

Omnichannel shoppers have high expectations for the speed of online order fulfillment. Modern stores offer a reliable solution to this demand by acting as fulfillment centers for digitally influenced commerce.

By leveraging automation technology like RFID, store associates excel at efficiently and precisely managing inventory and processing order picking, packing, staging, and shipping to meet customer order promises, such as consistently meeting promised pickup times. The order pickup experience — enhanced by clear customer communication — becomes a value-added customer service, adding convenience to modern shoppers' lives.

With optimized store fulfillment, stores can consistently fulfill the customer's desire for immediacy, creating a positive experience that encourages repeat business.

Optimize Fulfillment

Essentials of Store Fulfillment Performance

Deliver the store fulfillment performance that delights customers by adopting essential store fulfillment performance strategies and capabilities, including:

Employing RFID for Greater Efficiency

RFID technology seamlessly integrated into store inventory management and fulfillment operations significantly improves the store’s ability to fulfill customer orders reliably.
Scaling Fulfillment Capacity

Modern stores sufficiently prepare associates to execute fulfillment efficiently and precisely, reducing cycle times to meet customer expectations consistently — especially during peak times.
Turning Pickup Into a Service Differentiator

Customer pickup becomes a customer service differentiator in modern stores, with elevated features like real-time messaging and order add-ons at pickup that satisfy modern shoppers.

Responsive Store Fulfillment

PVH Corporation

“Our store operations played a vital role in quickly adopting new procedures to pick, pack, and ship online orders to consumers. These efforts are a proof point of our overall ability to adjust to shifts in behavior to best serve the consumer now and into the future.”

Eileen Mahoney, EVP & CIO, PVH Corporation

Learn How to Optimize Fulfillment

Final Essential Element of Modern Store Experiences

Modern Stores Are Insight-Driven

Utilizing comprehensive insights to enhance operations continually is standard practice in modern stores. The entire store team is equipped with easily accessible and understandable insights to make informed decisions.

Store systems visualize data in key performance areas, motivating store managers and associates to increase their use of insights. These insights go beyond internal performance data and compare store performance against competitors to identify additional opportunities for improvement.

By leveraging real-time insights, store teams can closely monitor changes in customer behavior, track sales, measure productivity, and manage customer commitments. Providing store teams with the right insights brings opportunistic decision-making that impacts customer experience.

Use Performance Insights

Essentials of Store Performance Insights

Master the use of data insights to improve performance and experiences by adopting store performance insights strategies and capabilities, including:

Empowering Your Entire Store Team With Insights

Trustworthy insights available to store managers and associates facilitate data-driven decisions to resolve issues and improve performance, bringing opportunistic decision-making closer to customers.
Simplifying Use of Insights

Modern stores eliminate barriers to accessing and understanding data, leveraging capabilities like data visualization to encourage users to adopt and use insights in daily store work.
Progressing Into Comparative Insights

To win in the always-competitive retail industry, modern stores go beyond internal performance analysis and benchmark performance against industry peers to identify new opportunities for improvement.

Data Insights Differentiate Experiences

In-app Performance Analytics

According to the Harvard Business Review, data leaders outperform their peers in customer loyalty and retention with 77% of leaders indicating performance improvement, compared to 45% for all non-leaders.

Learn How to Use Performance Insights

Ready to Transform Your Operations to Deliver Modern Store Experiences?

Elevate your store into a dynamic hub of unified commerce experiences and deliver an omnichannel journey that meets and exceeds modern shopper expectations.