As the pulse of where the industry is heading in 2017, all eyes will be on the latest and greatest technologies that will help drive retailers’ business forward. And in my 20-plus years participating, there’s never been a more exciting year to attend.

Today, technology has evolved to a point where the time is right for retailers to embrace digital transformation—re-imagining their customer experiences and business processes from the ground up to stay relevant and competitive.

These advancements are opening new doors to transform the future of retail by empowering people throughout the shopping experience—from the digital experiences that make shopping fun, to the productivity and collaboration solutions that allow retail employees to provide outstanding customer service, to the intelligent systems that provide deep insights and empower advanced decision-making and personalization.

When retailers hit the Javits Center floor, we’ll be showcasing how we believe digital transformation can, and is, reinventing the customer journey, providing consumer-centric experiences that meet and exceed the shopper’s constantly increasing expectations for personal, relevant, and differentiated shopping experiences.

Here are the key things you won’t want to miss in the Microsoft Booth #2803!

1)     See the power of digital transformation in action. Our customers and partners will take center stage in our booth, and we are thrilled to have some of the world’s leading retailers and consumer goods brands sharing their digital transformation successes with you.

From a major department store using the Internet of Things (IoT) to transform the in-store digital customer experience to a leading beverage company applying data and machine learning technology from Microsoft to optimize inventory assortment, and lots more, you’ll want to witness what these industry innovators are doing!

2)     Immerse yourself into personalized shopping experiences that will create differentiation with your customers. In today’s customer journey, personalized experiences that span both digital and physical environments will be critical to meeting consumers’ expectations, and the brands that can provide these experiences will set themselves apart among the competition.

In our booth this year, you can step into a day-in-the-life of a digital shopping journey as you shop for groceries and apparel, experiencing first-hand how technology advancements like machine learning and the Cortana Intelligence Suite, conversational bots, artificial intelligence, beacons, recommendation engines, beacons, and mobile solutions, can make true retail personalization a reality.

3)     Check out technology that will empower your store associates with information and tools to improve productivity and sales effectiveness. Today, mobile devices and role-optimized dashboards provide anywhere-access to product and customer information, and productivity solutions enable better collaboration and productivity so employees can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on the floor serving customers.

Explore new ways for store leaders to collaborate inside and outside the store; support associates with better training, knowledge bases, and social tools for sharing best practices; and pull in-depth product information directly with the sales floor with Microsoft tools like Office 365, Surface and StaffHub.

4)     Learn how the latest advancements in data and analytics will empower you to drive optimized outcomes and evolve your business practices to meet consumer expectations. Computing power is digitizing nearly everything around us and is giving retailers ten times the insights on their customers and business processes in one-tenth of the time.

You’ll see how Microsoft innovations like Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions power advanced analytics and predictive capabilities to enable retailers to gather insights on shoppers’ demographics and preferences, improve customer service and response time, optimize forecasting and inventory levels, personalize offerings, and better manage their supply chains to accommodate customer demand.

5)     Visit our Innovation Zone. Here you can get up close and personal with even more new, game-changing technologies to enhance customer relationships and optimize operations. Try on a new outfit in our virtual dressing room. Watch an intelligent robot scanning shelves for products. Experience the benefits of innovative lighting that can understand traffic patterns. See the value of smart shelves and smart buildings. And beyond your physical walls, learn how blockchain technology with RFID is poised to transform supply chains with increased transparency and verifiability for product traceability and fair labor practices.

6)     Hear from cutting-edge technology industry leaders. Don’t miss our Exhibitor Insights Session (Tuesday, January 17 at 11:30 a.m.) where I’ll be moderating a customer panel of leading industry retailers as they share their stories of digital transformation. And in our Booth Theater, we’ve also assembled a full line-up of expert speakers for you to learn from on the latest technology trends and advancements you’ll want to know about to drive transformation in your business.

More details and full schedule will be coming soon on our event site here. Retailers can also access a free NRF Expo pass, courtesy of Microsoft.

I also encourage you to schedule time to meet with Microsoft executives to discuss your transformational journey and see how we can help you. Go here to learn more and request an executive briefing or hosted booth tour with the Microsoft leadership team.

And for all our NRF news, links and photos, follow @MSretail and @MSFT_Business on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing you at this coming year’s event!

LinkedIn: Brendan O’Meara

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At Microsoft, our approach to empowering the retail industry has always been based on weaving intelligence with experience, backed by our relentless pursuit of more secure, private computing. Our core principle to developing technology solutions is to make sure they’re easy to use and familiar, while ensuring organizations have the intelligence, data and capabilities needed to improve performance in an increasingly competitive retail marketplace. Our vast ecosystem of partners unleash business transformation with innovative business capabilities by extending a platform that inherently provides security, performance, agility, and global scale.

Technological innovation is enabling a new era of retail where leaders have ten times the insights in one tenth the time – enabling them to outperform the market and take share from laggards. Key to being a leader is leveraging every Point of Sale and Service to better understand and serve the customer. To accomplish this, the leaders are modernizing their legacy “POS” systems with modern, digital points of interaction inside and outside of the store. They are bringing “born in the web” technology, like click-stream data and streaming analytics, into their stores where they can provide real time, personalized offers and experiences that enable great shopping experiences, while at the same time driving quantifiable increases in traffic, conversion, basket size, promotional effectiveness, customer satisfaction and profitability. It’s a new era of retail indeed.  And the distance between the leaders and the laggards is widening.

By modernizing their Points of Sale and Service, the highly effective personalized suggestions and offers that once were only available online, are now delivered by leading retailers inside and outside their stores on customers’ mobile devices. Leveraging a solution from San Francisco-based vMob, retailers are capturing streaming information about shopper interactions and interests in near real-time and responding immediately with the best offer – leading to improved sales conversion at every touchpoint throughout and beyond the store. vMob runs a mobile engagement platform on Microsoft Azure which optimizes mobile offers to customers by using sales history and live data streams to put the most relevant and profitable offer in front of the customer at each point in time. The system captures data from modern Point of Sale and Service devices, wearables, interactive digital signage, geofence location systems, weather and beacons resulting in tens of thousands of inputs every second into an optimization system in the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud.

The system then delivers the best offer in near real-time to millions of customers around the world, including customers of McDonald’s across several European and Asian markets. The vMob solution uses Azure Machine Learning optimization models to determine and present the best offer resulting in dramatic improvement in promotional effectiveness and customer engagement.

Compass Group, the world’s top food service provider, recognized the importance of modernizing its Points of Sale and Service to better serve customers with self-service kiosks, order-ahead capability, and secure payment technology for its customers – a need underscored by the United States’ recent adoption of EMV chip cards. To meet this need, the company selected FreedomPay and Microsoft hospitality commerce solutions to transform the customer experience at the point of sale. The collaboration provides Compass Group with EMV-ready payment terminals and card data tokenization that captures a customer’s transaction through a mobile device connected to a café’s point-of-sale system, all operating on the Windows platform and secured by Microsoft Azure cloud. The solution meets the industry’s highest standards for payment data security and is the world’s first PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) payments solution with EMV, NFC, and real-time data capabilities that deliver on a global scale.  And Compass did all this while transforming and advancing the customer experience leading to higher customer satisfaction, greater transaction capacity, and increased sales.

Our customers are now moving aggressively to modernize their Points of Sale and Service and tap into the power of the Intelligent Cloud.  We are committed to supporting the digital transformation of retail businesses as they invest in new technologies and modernize existing ones.  We look forward to working with our vast ecosystem of partners to modernize the points of sale and service to enable Unified Commerce shopping experiences across online, stores, and mobile devices, and harnessing the power of the Intelligent Cloud to gain near real-time business insights resulting in dramatically improved customer engagement and business performance.  Envision is a great opportunity for the most forward thinking minds to get together and talk industry, tech and business trends. We look forward to connecting with you in New Orleans to ensure you will be able to leverage data and intelligence to create more personal, connected experiences for your customers.

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In the industry’s quest for innovative ways to connect with customers and personalize their engagement, today’s wave of digital technology—in all its different forms—is making it easier to do that. In this month’s Retail & CG update, we put the spotlight on three technology advancements we’ve been discussing that can help you get closer to your customers.

Three Technology Innovations for Customer Engagement

Personalized marketing through mobile devices is one way to get closer to your customers. It offers an opportunity to reinvent the shopper experience by increasing promotion redemption rates and nurturing a deeper level of customer engagement.

In a recent discussion with RIS News and mobile engagement platform provider VMob, we dig deeper into IoT’s potential for optimizing shopper engagement in store, highlighting examples and real ROI results including cases with 700 percent increased engagement and 40-50 percent spend increase on repeat visits! Go here to learn more and access the on-demand webinar.

In food retailing, restaurants are also shifting IT focus away from efficiency and governance, towards customer-centricity, and going digital as they explore new ways to better serve and engage with their customers. In this area, digital tableside technology has tremendous benefits for both customers and restaurants.

Having tableside access to technology lets guests control their experience while also engaging directly with the restaurant brand in more meaningful ways. These latest technology innovations have now opened the door for Chili’s to take its loyalty program fully digital, becoming the first leading restaurant to integrate its loyalty program with tabletop technology. You can hear more from us on the tableside digital dining experience, and read STORES magazine’s perspective as well.

And the real power in getting closer to your customers lies in your data. Those retailers and consumer goods manufacturers that take advantage of today’s advancements in analytics and connectivity to successfully harness their data will have a significant advantage over companies that don’t. In manufacturing, those companies have the potential to raise an additional $371 billion in revenue!

By bringing together big data insights, predictive analytics and powerful visualizations, consumer goods manufacturers can build better customer engagement models and uncovering new value-added and personalized services and experiences for consumers that go along with their product like contextual information for a video game they are playing or predictive maintenance for their car. Read more in our recent CG-related blog post.

In my next update in August, we’ll bring you Microsoft’s perspective on the annual Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit and connecting marketing, sales, service and data to help brands shift to a proactive customer experience model. We’ll also share insights from The Global Summit of the Consumer Goods Forum later this month.

In the meantime, make sure to mark your calendar for the release of Windows 10 on July 29!

The post Getting closer to your customers — Retail & CG Highlights: June Edition appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Upgrading to fight cybercrime

Today most US retailers are using legacy magnetic stripe technology that is inherently insecure and prone to fraud and theft. Many of the payment processing systems do not adequately protect the card data and related customer information as it passes through the retailer’s networks and systems. Later this year there will be new payment standards designed to protect consumers. Credit card issues are replacing consumers’ cards with those that have chip and PIN technology and in October, US retailers must implement card processing systems that transact with the new technology or they will assume increased liability for credit card theft. The new standards are driven by a global standard called Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV).

Panasonic POS goes mobile and more secure

Panasonic introduced their first tablet-based mobile POS system at NRF. A fully integrated EMV solution, the tablet has the ability to accept any sort of digital payment in minutes. It’s also a mobile POS device with an optional dock for standard counter service, and can house apps and services to meet many essential customer needs. Employees can do inventory management, while associates on the store floor can access customers’ information for cross selling opportunities.

FreedomPay brings the POS hardware to life (with EMV compliance)

Microsoft partner FreedomPay is announcing the FreedomPay Commerce Platform, a secure payment switching technology running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud that works with EMV certified devices, and implements PCI Validated Point to Point Encryption capabilities that safeguard the sensitive card and customer data. FreedomPay’s solution minimizes retailer risk by preventing the sensitive data from being passed through the retailer’s networks and systems, thus removing liability from the business. The platform also allows retailers to engage customers based on the data captured at checkout. Using Machine Learning capabilities and Business Intelligence platforms on Azure, merchants can offer the customer real-time purchase recommendations, loyalty programs, coupons, warranties, and the chance to donate to charity. FreedomPay is enabling merchants to reinvent and personalize their checkout experience to drive better customer engagement.

HP partners with FreedomPay and Microsoft to deliver a mobile, engaging POS experience

HP released a new EMV capable ElitePad Retail Case, a flexible and versatile piece of hardware that enables retailers the ability to switch from a fixed to mobile POS whenever needed, including FreedomPay’s Commerce Platform. This allows store associates to walk around the store with their tablet to help customers, then easily switch it back to a conventional counter check-out service in no time. Retailers can simply dock the mobile unit into the HP Retail Expansion Dock and connect to all of their peripheral systems. The ElitePad can also be mounted and used as a customer viewing display or a fixed POS setting, offering the type of versatility that retailers need in today’s modern retail environment.

More than ever, retailers must find innovative ways to protect, connect, and engage with their customers. Upgrading the POS will also retailers maximize customer satisfaction and promote sales throughout the store, giving retailers another way to compete in the modern retail landscape.

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