More than 20 persons: technological entrepreneurs, retail specialists and innovators joined us for our informal evening Smart City: Digital Innovation in Retail in Berlin. The main design of this another great meeting was to share our vision and expertise, to meet potential partners and make new friends. Short key-note speeches were followed by a real-time test-drive of cutting-edge navigation technologies and top-notch face to face discussions.
Retail is one of the most unpredictable and volatile industries. Retail-companies need to be flexible in order to adjust to a constantly shifting customer behaviour and to succeed in a new economic reality. That is why such companies are always ready to test, pilot and implement new technologies assisting them in facing relevant challenges. According to Damir Zambelli, a senior development manager of Navigine, these challenges are an enhancement of customer impression and complementing it with online experience, a search for new marketing tools, including personalized advertisement messages, an increase in sales and customers’ loyalty and creation of shops without salesmen and cashiers.
“Such Tech Talks provide a great opportunity to meet closer new people specializing in various spheres and from different European countries. We are happy to share our ideas and to receive a feedback from our colleagues”, - said Alexey Panyov, CEO of Navigine.
Alexey told to our guests how indoor positioning technologies are changing retail and how they are being used, and presented a few customer cases. Smartcart was an example. A well-established Finnish retailer developed a sophisticated shopping assistant, which helps consumers in product searching and choosing. This assistant looks like an ordinary shopping cart equipped with a tablet. A customer takes a cart, chooses a recipe (or downloads his own shopping list) and starts a guided tour through a shop. Such carts are available now in 87 supermarket in Finland. More than 85% of customers were happy to use Smartcart, and 86% are going to do it again. An information app with integrated loyalty program for Hamley, a toy supermaket, and apps for RIO and Atrium, the malls, are other user-cases of indoor positioning in retail.
Christoffer Segercrantz, our partner from Quuppa, Finland, provided also some more experience and illustrations of how navigation technologies are being used in retail.
After three short pitches all guests were welcomed to special demo-zone with a wide range of different gadgets and devices featured by navigation solutions. The final part of our meet-up consisted of Q&A session and face to face discussions with our guest. And pizza, of course :)
Don’t miss our next meeting! We promise it will be interesting, useful and tasty. Stay tuned!
