The Smart Store:
How Digital Technology is Redefining the Brick and Mortar Experience
SUMMARY
The “digital retail experience” involves targeting shoppers with individually tailored product offers and special promotions, delivered via a mobile device. Insight into customer preferences is gleaned from analyses of data gathered from sources such as purchasing history and online activity. Under the existing model the physical space of the retail establishment is largely limited to being the staging area for delivering the product and the experience. Increasingly, however, innovative retailers are exploring the potential of store space to be a key component of the digital strategy, in terms of both creating a unique experience as well as providing an intelligent platform for ongoing data collection, analysis and insight into customer behavior. Leveraging the full potential of retail space, however, requires a fundamentally new mindset and a clean break from traditional business models.
MAIN TAKEAWAYS
Physical space has been largely ignored in retailers’ digital strategies
The “smart store” model has the potential to significantly enhance the shopping experience and provide critical insight into customer behavior
Retailers need to rethink traditional approaches to brick and mortar to effectively deploy smart technologies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kallergis 
John “JJ” Kallergis partners with retail executives to transform IT operations and deliver greater value to the business. He focuses on improving operational effectiveness and ensuring that technology organizations are aligned with business strategies and contributing to an enhanced customer experience.
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Founded in 1982, Softtek is a global provider of process-driven IT solutions with 30 offices in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. With 15 Global Delivery Centers in the U.S., Mexico, China, Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Spain, Hungary and India, Softtek helps improve time-to-business-solution, lower costs of existing applications, deliver better engineered and tested applications, and produce predictable outcomes for top-tier corporations in over 20 countries. Through on-site, on-shore and its trademarked Global Nearshore™ service delivery models, Softtek teams with CIOs to constantly increase the business value of IT. Softtek is the creator and a leader of the nearshore industry.
