Think of a ski resort village. Or an outdoor mall with your favourite shops. Sounds nice. Now think of them during the winter, with COVID restrictions, and each store, restaurant and shop using different signage and strategies (or no strategy at all) to deal with their occupancy limitations and customer service. Sounds not so nice, right?
Hotspots of retail activity don’t have to operate like individual stores.
Large retail villages and outdoor malls can benefit from a solution that is flexible enough to apply to a wide variety of retail and is scalable so each location can implement only what it needs. Technological solutions allow for multi-location integration and a consistent experience for shoppers. Each location can utilize the improved efficiency and functionality of the solution, potentially even enhancing their in-store customer service beyond what it was pre-pandemic. (Wait, there was a time when there was no pandemic? Hard to believe, but historians say it’s true.) Solutions, such as Wavetec, for example, offers virtual queue management and appointment booking, and integrations with loyalty programs, inventory and point-of-sale systems to provide the potential for efficiency gains from analytics and data insights for the retailer, incentives and personalized offerings that provide better experiences for the shopper across all the locations in the network.
Wavetec is a digital system that checks all the boxes of a complete solution for any destination retail locations, like Whistler village or outlet malls.
Appointment booking isn’t new, but it has been limited to certain industries. With the pandemic, we can see these technologies having a greater role to play across multiple industries, perhaps even allowing some industries to have a fighting chance in this tough economy.
Giving customers the ability to book appointments to visit each retail location gives you the potential to truly transform your customer experience and staff. With Wavetec appointment booking you know who is coming and when, giving you the opportunity to offer a personalized shopping experience. This can include integration with POS systems paired with your customer’s profile for a wide variety of offers and incentives to enhance service offers and provide heightened value for the customer, and more insights and opportunities for staff At the minimum, your queue will be reduced by appointments, while the potential to create a unique and remarkable experience is ready to be taken advantage of with this straightforward tool.
Virtual queues, on the other hand, replace the physical queue, allowing customers the freedom to wait wherever they wish. This will eliminate the physical queue as arrivals are given their digital ticket and when it’s their turn to enter the retail location are notified by popular communication methods like SMS, WhatsApp, or email. So now, instead of standing on carefully placed pieces of tape outside of your stores in the rain and snow, customers can walk around, wait in their car, or do anything they like, and arrive when they’re notified it’s their turn in the store. This is an important benefit for disabled and elderly customers who may not have the stamina to wait in long lines in bad weather.
So, why leave customers in the cold? At Aequilibrium, we believe in delivering a remarkable customer and staff experience. To that end, we’ve partnered with Wavetec, a digital experience solutions company that has 20+ years of experience with a wide range of world-class clients. The solutions are quick to deploy, most can be up and running in a week or less, and are highly scalable, so any retailer you are managing can with whatever services they need and then have the opportunity to expand, or not, as customer, staff and management expectations evolve.
