From digital + physical to phygital. Make the connection! · Kega

Build your in-store digital experience on four layers
How do you, the retailer, arrive at the perfect mix for enticing, engaging, servicing and activating your shopper, now and in the future? Well, you put that mix together by making your best selection from the four 'layers' of customer-focused phygital experiences:

1. Information, Inspiration & Activation
2. Interaction
3. Transaction
4. Production

1. Layer 1: Information, Inspiration & Activation
How do you establish contact between your store and potential buyers? How do you slow them down in their walk through the shopping centre and tempt them to step inside your shop? And once they are inside, how do you guide them along all your merchandise, motivate them to shop with you, and share their positive experiences? That is what this first digital experience layer is all about.

Create impact in the street and stopping power through eye-catching videos, animations or digital artwork on screens in your shop window. Tempt your shoppers with inspiring videos and guide them through your shop with smart digital signing.

Motivate buying with electronic shelf labels and activating animations, such as Alibaba's "Home Times" with its electronic price labels, which show the lowest prices on the Tmall platform fully automatically.

Obviously, you focus on the added value for your (potential) customers. After all, if there is no added value and no willingness to use it, then every innovation is doomed to failure. Visitors to physical stores appear to have three major frustrations, which we can use to convert interactive digital experiences into attractive benefits for your concept:

1. 71% find it difficult to compare products in the shop.
2. 65% find it frustrating when they fail to find a certain product.
3. 65% are negative about the lack of personal offers in the shop.
4. 64% experience insufficient guidance and explanations / demos.

If you want your shoppers to experience as few of these frustrations as possible, then you should first focus your interactive phygital experiences on these applications:

• Guiding & Guided selling
   Guide your shopper to the right products, to prevent lost sales and to make the shopping experience as positive as possible, including personal advice tools that help them to make the right product choice, with personal advice linked to this.
  Take for example the smart shelves at JD.com's 7Fresh or Coop's Future Store, which recognise products and automatically provide more information about them, or the Amazon Alexa experiment from the Bottlerocket Wine & Spirit independent liquor store, where the smart speaker provides customers with advice on the perfect whisky and smart lighting leads them directly to it.

The trend: Proximity services
Proximity services are still in their infancy, but will take off in a big way in the coming years, led by major players like Google. Shoppers are increasingly recognised, personally informed and activated through a variety of localisation technologies. Have you just jumped off your bike at the station? Google will immediately tell you the timetables. Are you entering a shopping centre? Google will tell you where you to find the shop you want.

What are the next steps? As you enter your favourite retailer's shop, the app will immediately tell you which items on your wish list are still in stock and ask if you want to be led to them, or whether you want the items set aside. And you will do this with a single voice command (after all, voice is becoming an increasingly dominant interface).  The boundaries between cool and creepy are continuing to fade, but, in combination with big data and predictive analysis, proximity services are going to have a major impact on how we shop.

One of the biggest frustrations of shoppers in physical stores is queuing up at the checkout. In the coming years, shoppers will start to wonder more and more: "Where is the checkout?" After all, in the phygital retail reality, shops are an extension of your digital retail instead of the other way around and the checkout moment is less frequently at a specific cash register, as we know it today.

Another issue is lost sales. Research shows that two thirds of Dutch consumers would like to be able to order an item that is not in stock directly in the store and have it delivered to their home (for free).