Why Retailers Value Wi-Fi and Location-Based Services for New Connected Customer Experiences

By: Todd Johnson, Director of Vertical Marketing at Juniper Networks.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience has never been more challenging. Retailers need to leverage technology to embrace new consumer habits and shopping styles while also meeting their in-store expectations with enhanced and personalized experiences and an interactive physical shopping journey.

To understand the emerging demands for retail customer experience, Juniper conducted two surveys: the Juniper Workplaces and Public Spaces Enterprise IT Survey and the Juniper Remote Workplaces and Public Spaces Consumer Survey.

The surveys showed that 95% of customers and 78% of retailers value new, connected retail-customer experiences that will provide a faster and more personalized service to customers, as well as the added growth opportunities that come with winning new customers. Our survey revealed what IT teams are doing to deliver these connected retail experiences and how Wi-Fi has become the top retail investment priority.

There are three important criteria that will help retailers build an amazing experience for their customers, including:

1. Customer expectations of the retail experience
2. What retail IT teams are doing to bring new retail experiences to market
3. Why reliable, heightened Wi-Fi is the keystone of retail experiences and how retailers can evaluate new solutions

The retail customer experience is more than a store visit

Customer experience spans every touchpoint in the customer journey. It’s the sum of the entire customer journey within a retail organization. This includes online mobile, website, and offline in-store experiences that determine how retailers organize their stores to create an interactive, engaging experience with their customers.

A secure and highly reliable Wi-Fi network is a critical requirement for all retail operations, and it must have consistent performance for all facilities, offices, and stores across the organization. This brings us to connected retail customer experiences, which are helping to create the retail of tomorrow.

What is a connected retail customer experience?

Every time a customer uses a mobile device in a physical store, there’s an opportunity for a connected retail customer experience. These connected experiences act as the cement between a retailer’s clicks and bricks.

For new retail customer experiences in 2022 and beyond, 78% of retail IT teams agree that new customer experiences are important to growth. Almost all surveyed consumers (95%) prefer retailers that offer a connected convenience over ones that don’t. Additionally, 93% of consumers say they download retailer mobile apps, with more than half (52%) saying their shopping routine includes the help of a smartphone. All of this tells us that consumers are ready for retail reinvention.

Customers in today’s shopping environment expect a connected convenience, which has become one of the main customer experiences. Retailers must be able to combine customer experience (CX) and retail omnichannel engagement with mobile technology and retail application usage. This enables the seamless sharing of information throughout the customer journey.

By utilizing customer data, retailers gain a better understanding of customers and markets, which leads to better planning and expansion decisions that allow retailers to take great advantage of cross-channel marketing campaigns. Without the right kind of location data, it’s much more difficult to achieve the desired goals. Juniper provides a 100% standards-based indoor location solution delivered via a variety of cloud-hosted services that are tailored for specific use cases, such as customer contact tracing.

And equally important, insights also drive automated operations that make personalization possible. Finally, customers can get personalized and differentiated experiences as they move through stores. Knowing that consumers are driven toward connected shopping experiences, retailers need to utilize a hybrid approach in their in-store shopping experiences to draw consumers back to brick-and-mortar locations. As the Juniper Enterprise IT survey tells us, many retailers are busy deploying these projects.

Throughout the customer journey, each satisfying physical or virtual consumer touchpoint is a step forward toward an overall enhanced connected customer experience before, during, and after the experience with a product or service. Retailers that think about the entire journey and how the customer navigates across each touchpoint within this journey can visualize and identify a consistent flow of information about the customer, leading to customer convenience.

For more information, visit the Juniper Networks retail solutions page to learn how Juniper can help you create best in class retail customer experiences.

To explore the full survey results, please download the report here.