With rapid digitization, business enterprises across the globe are evolving to adopt the relevant changes and complement the customer experience, thus ensuring greater customer acquisition and retention. Kroger Co., the second-largest supermarket chain in the US (in terms of revenue) has recently deployed the novel concept of Digital Shelves to add value to the user’s shopping experience. Digital Shelves are the outcome of technical collaboration between Microsoft Corp. and Kroger Co. which certainly is driving very positive changes in the customer service, operations, and user experience while employing technology to leverage Kroger’s market positioning.
How do Digital Shelves work @ Kroger Co.?
Essentially, digital shelves are the display stripes replacing the traditional paper-based price tags in the Kroger superstores. These shelves can display the prices, coupons, advertisements, promotions, and anything which the management of the stores wants to show to the walk-in customers. These shelves have built-in NFC tags; customers, via Kroger Mobile App (in an NFC enabled smartphone), can make a list of grocery items which they want to shop and while passing through aisles, the digital screen over the required item can blink and display the emoji so that customer can quickly pick it up. In the customer journey, users can then put all such products in the cart via scanning from the app and self-checkout.
On the architecture side, digital shelves lay their foundations on the cloud architecture of Microsoft Azure; not only can it perform NFC but also can employ AI algorithms to gauge the gender, age, and preferences of the shoppers which might certainly help target the advertisements and optimally arrange the items on the shelves for significant uptake in sales numbers.
Why use Digital Shelves?
Digital shelves at Kroger Co. have multi-faceted positive impacts for business as well as for customer experience. It significantly reduces the shopping time for customers as required items can quickly be located with the help of a mobile app while the emoji is displayed on the digital shelf. In the case of online orders, the subject technology can significantly reduce the efforts of the Kroger staff in locating the items and packing them in time for delivery i.e., digital shelves are equally useful for both the internal and external stakeholders of the organization. More so, customers shopping via the app and digital shelves don’t have to wait in long queues as they can self-checkout due to bills automatically being calculated via the custom-built Kroger application. All in all, digital shelves can create rather a more interactive customer experience which can increase the footfall in stores and thus the subsequent revenues as well.
NFC-enabled digital shelves have revamped the shopping landscape of Kroger Super Stores. The solution has successfully been in a variety of localities (a synergy of multiple stakeholders), to ensure a seamless customer experience for the users. It has not only gained a lot of traction for Kroger but has also helped the organization bring a lot of efficiency, effectiveness, and optimization into the business processes. Although digital shelves require a handsome amount of capital investment, Kroger Co. is already working to provide the same solution to other retail chains as well, in return for revenues; the rapid deployment of subject architecture can significantly help Kroger breakeven in no time, rather can achieve very high ROIs as far as customer acquisition and retention is concerned.
