A phygital point of sale with digital queuing

Digitizing your points of sale, yes, but why? For at least three main reasons. You can join the trend with a few screens here and there, for fear of having your poster stolen by the competitor across the street. But that would be to overlook what phygital can do for the customer experience and your conversion rates in the long term. We suggest three ways to adopt phygital effectively, starting with the adoption of digital queuing.

1. Make the point of sale the embodiment of a successful customer relationship

Phygital", or the installation of digital devices in stores, has made its way into our lexicon in recent years. Its main use remains fairly basic: to enhance the product. However, this use of the term raises fears of all-out digitization, at the risk of offering nothing to the person who actually benefits from it: the customer.

Why is the customer at the heart of the digitalization of your points of sale?

Firstly, because digital has become part of their habits, which may surprise you! E-commerce and smartphones give them the freedom to make purchases they've come to expect and value. Your point of sale will benefit from following in the footsteps of the online customer experience to improve its figures, traffic and transformation. In so doing, you'll be responding to a customer desire: 60% of French people believe that the presence of digital devices is an incentive to visit a store (Baromètre "Digital Store", Extrême Sensio digital agency with Ipsos, 2014).

Your store also needs to get closer to the ease of e-commerce. Your customers make the effort to go to the point of sale, and expect to be "rewarded" for it. Firstly, by seeing their overall effort reduced. If you do away with queues at the checkout, for example, you compensate for the effort involved by saving them time. You make them want to come into the store by eliminating the things that put them off, such as waiting at the checkout. By streamlining the in-store experience, the digital queue, or any other phygital support useful to your customer, comes closer to his online experience. Above all, phygital is useful to your customers: it meets their needs and is a means of guaranteeing their satisfaction.

2. Prepare your marketing campaigns

Phygital is also a new way of collecting customer data. Addresses, first of all, to ensure your emailings. Purchase histories, too, to optimize your product marketing and communications. And relevant analytics, depending on the tool. You'll be able to analyze the time spent by your customers in-store, better allocate your teams, identify a realistic average waiting time and the products most in demand. So phygital is also a way of optimizing your performance.

3. Enhancing the humanity of offline

Your salespeople embody the human touch that e-commerce doesn't bring to your customers. They are therefore part of the appeal created by phygital. It's essential to train them in your new tools and make them aware of the improved customer contact they bring. A digital queue reduces the risk of impatient customers at the checkout. It therefore facilitates the customer/sales assistant relationship, allowing them to concentrate on their essential mission: selling.