Publicis Sapient

Experience Transformation: Connected Retail Store Experience

Offering Summary

Drive real change in customer behavior by activating cohesive, streamlined customer experiences across your brand’s digital and physical channels. Bring the convenience of online shopping and frictionless checkout together with valuable in-store benefits like local offers and immediate fulfillment. Create meaningful customer touchpoints by optimizing the physical design of retail spaces, merchandising and zone communication strategies, and digital experience execution. Our team can help design and implement tools and platforms that enable connected experiences at scale.

Solving Digital Transformation Challenges

Customers still prefer to shop in-store, even as digital channels become increasingly important. “Omnichannel” has become a buzzword in customer experience, but its true meaning is often lost. With so much focus on digital, many businesses have neglected the in-store experience, which remains critical. According to Forrester research, 72% of U.S. retail sales will still occur in-store in 2024.

While online experiences have seen significant enhancements, in-store experiences may not have kept pace—and customers notice. Brick-and-mortar locations are an essential part of the holistic brand, not a separate silo. It is more important than ever to make the store experience a compelling, connected part of your customer journey. The in-store experience should be as effortless and enjoyable as a purely digital channel—potentially more so, with the advantage of enhanced sensory experiences and instant gratification.

Yet, in every challenge lies an opportunity:

Mixed experiences like “buy online, pick up in store” break down too often.
→ A successfully implemented and maintained connected retail store experience encompasses both the physical and the digital for an overall frictionless experience.
Checkout is a regularly frustrating experience for shoppers and employees.
→ Taking a holistic approach enables insight into the entire customer journey, revealing points of friction that need to be reworked and how to solve for them.
Organizing around channels, not the customer, leads to disjointed experiences that do not drive authentic loyalty.
→ Focusing on the connection between the physical and the digital—and how they work together—elevates shopper experience, driving both greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Service Design: How Service and Actors Flow Through Space at Scale

Taking a service design-led approach enables us to obtain a holistic view of the front and backstage in a way that is not possible when thinking just about store design. We focus on designing for customer need states, building a zone strategy to support the customer journey, backed by a holistic view of supporting technology.

The net result is a consolidated view of how customers and employees come together in the space with digital affordances to create mutual value.

Frontstage (All Experiences):

All customer touchpoints
Marketing
Mobile
Digital signage
Kiosk & self-service
Associate digital tools

Customer & Employee Experience
Organization and Operations

Backstage (Operating Model):

POS/Inventory
Customer data
Product design
Pricing
Operations
Technology

Service Design: End-to-end across the enterprise

Multi-disciplinary teams connect front and backstage across every customer and employee touchpoint.

Outcomes:

Drive customer relevance
Reduce cost to serve customers

Benefits of Connected Retail Store Experience

What Sets Publicis Sapient Apart?

Set your experience strategy up for success with Publicis Sapient’s full suite of Experience Transformation offerings.

How We’ve Made an Impact

Global Quick-Serve Restaurant Leader

The imperative for change: Drive-thru represented over 50% of the company’s global revenue, making it critical to modernize for customers and crews. Testing digital coupons in the drive-thru showed that service times slipped by as much as 30 seconds per car, which could have catastrophic revenue implications at scale.

The transformative solution:

Exhaustive redesign of the drive-thru service, focusing on the intersection between the physical flow, customer experience on the mobile app, the role of the digital menu board, and the POS and crew experience in applying coupons and offers
Provided groundwork for integrating new digital capabilities to identify, personalize, and integrate loyalty and mobile payment

The business impact:

Pilots in the market performed above initial objectives
Enabled the launch of the company’s first national loyalty program
Digital sales topped $6 billion in its top six markets, representing roughly one-third of systemwide sales for these segments combined during the period
The mobile application is currently the number one most downloaded and rated food app

Major Automobile Company Dealerships

The imperative for change: With rising customer expectations, the company needed to represent its entire model range through both physical and digital boutique dealerships, using virtual technology while offering personal advice and service.

The transformative solution:

Designed and implemented an entirely digital dealership, where virtual, life-size cars are displayed on massive screens, and buyers use touchscreen panels to customize their cars
Images of virtual, life-size cars are displayed on massive screens, powered by seamless gestural control and one-to-one rendering
Included private space for in-depth conversations, combined with tactile sampling to tie the digital to the real world
Real-time pricing, availability, and build-to-order shipping time give buyers a new approach to car shopping

The business impact:

Debuted the first digital, portable automobile showroom in London, later launched in Beijing, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris
70% rise in unit sales
65% of purchases made without a test drive
30% increase in margin per unit
90% of customers were new to the brand

Largest Physical Retailer

The imperative for change: For this large Canadian retailer’s Supercenter Concept, a major pain point was the ability to scan items throughout the store and skip the checkout line.

The transformative solution:

Developed a solution that integrates with Fast Lane, allowing customers to scan items using an app, process orders at dedicated checkout lanes, and complete purchases using a credit card on file
Bridged the gap between physical and digital experiences, bringing the convenience of online shopping and frictionless checkout with in-store benefits like local offers and immediate fulfillment

The business impact:

20% increase in conversion
98% increase in mobile orders

For more information, visit publicissapient.com/solutions/customer-experience-transformation.

Why Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain a competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data. Combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, this enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses by reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe, with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.