The future of retail isn't at some distant point in time — it's happening right now. The fast pace of technological development and customer preference is spurring broad adoption of new Internet-based services that appeal to customers' individual tastes and extend their shopping experience beyond traditional brick-and-mortar environments.

 

This evolving retail environment includes online store fronts and mobile applications that will start building relationships even before customers step in the door. Inside the store, interactive displays and more mobile applications will customize each retail experience, deliver superior customer service and collect customer feedback to glean insight into the person's next purchase. According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and TNS Retail, "Stores able to respond to individual tastes" in this manner "will become dominant" in future retail markets.

 

Network technology, from the Web to internal networks, is the foundation of this retail evolution. Internally, companies must be able to roll out a steady stream of new services over their in-store networks to take advantage of evolving customer expectations. More than 50% of all retail transactions will be affected by the Web, according to market research firm Forrester, by 2013.

 

"Socially empowered customers are also influencing retail merchandising, with a major shift in increased reliance on technology to analyze rapidly changing consumer trends as they happen, which empowers retail merchandisers to make quick decisions," says Nigel Fenwick at Forrester. 

 

Many new services entering the retail environmental rely on a store's ability to securely manage multiple flows of information across multiple networks. Some more notable examples of services emerging in the near and distant future are:

 

Customer-specific customer service: The same technology that enables dating sites to find your future spouse will also match shoppers with sales people. Live customer support kiosks will transform a retailer's ability to engage consumers with sales people who match their demographics in multiple, meaningful conversations in their own language regardless of which store they visiting — live or online.

 

Mobile employee solutions: will not only prepare employees to engage the educated consumer, but also coach the employee in assisting each customer based on factors such as the consumer's past purchasing behavior, other similar consumer activity, satisfaction survey responses and current market trends. All customers are not equally profitable. Employees will know when they are dealing with high value customers and will be able to prioritize appropriately.

 

Mobile personal assistance: will start with a specific customer need (e.g. "I need a warmer jacket") and provide them with information including current fashion trends, product purchase considerations, similar purchases by friends in the shopper's social network, etc. It will even guide the shopper through the store to find recommended products using advanced voice recognition and interpretation algorithms.

 

Activity-correlated video surveillance will drive product placement strategies: Tomorrow's video surveillance solutions will provide marketing intelligence on how shoppers evaluate potential products. The simple act of consumers handling products provides retailers with valuable insight into their needs. When a product doesn't sell, retailers need to know the difference between a neglected product that needs to be removed versus a product that encourages higher end purchases. Such solutions will also dramatically reduce theft by intelligently sifting through thousands of hours of footage to highlight the handful of suspicious events.

 

A constant, reliable flow of data is a major factor in these services' success. Today's highly developed retail data networks ensure a steady stream of updated inventory and product information to retail outlets. Combined with the flow of new customer service applications emerging into the retail environment, they will help retail outlets appeal to customers' individual preferences and keep them in the store no matter what form — physical or virtual — that store takes.