Bogdan Shestakov, Head of Solutions Team Imagine a grocery store wherein as you browse and pick your items, you receive personal recommendations, offers, and digital information that pop up on digital screens hanging over the shelves. The sensors, robots, interactive screens and apps adopted by the supermarket walk you through the production chain, assisting you to learn about the products before you buy. This is followed by a checkout process that takes seconds with digital payment options. Sounds far-fetched? A fictitious scene perhaps; the reality is closer than one can think.
The world of retail needs to reinvent their physical stores and supply chains to meet digital consumer needs. The end-to-end cycle—from merchandise shipment to customer checkout and feedback—is facilitated by leveraging technological advancements at the back-end. “Evidently, retail is beyond the mere interaction between consumers and retailers,” states Bogdan Shestakov, Head of Solutions Team, Ciklum.
According to Shestakov, while digitalization has rewritten the rule of competition in every retail function, startups that have embraced digital and envisioned new ways to serve their customers with lively and immersive environments are leading the game. On the other hand, adapting to the new trends becomes time-consuming and highly expensive for businesses with legacy frameworks and tools. This is precisely what Ciklum intends to change with the power of automation. “Ciklum’s business intelligence (BI) tools automate the entire process, thereby eliminating the time consumed in the transformation process,” reveals Shestakov.
The company assists clients to alleviate the overall business costs, further extenuating the gap between high volumes of goods and low-profit margins. In an ambitious bid to unlock new sales opportunities and build personal customer relations, Ciklum equips its clients with omnichannel retailing solutions that easily integrate with their POS applications, CRM systems, and inventory management software.
In the age of tech-savvy consumers, Shestakov believes that every business should possess its own loyalty program mobile app, which will consequently improve the communication between the consumer and the retailer. Customers can choose items via the app and pay through a digital payment interface, following feedback about the products after consumption. Besides, organizations can inform the customers about the new entries into the market via push notifications and help them make informed purchases. On similar lines, BI tools enable retailers to extract huge amounts of data, which can further help in addressing a larger group of consumers, says Shestakov. Retailers can analyze the big data to predict how customers can interact with their offline or online shops and make real-time adjustments based on the changes in demand as well as technology.
“Ciklum strives to build tools not for tools but for people,” observes Shestakov, “while designing a solution, we simultaneously think about the users as well as the consumers who would interact with the tool.” Ciklum is working on integrating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into its solutions with an aim to enhance customer experience for its clients. Customers can take a virtual walk through the store and choose the required product. Teamed with artificial intelligence (AI), AR/VR will assist customers in choosing the right product at the right place. Ciklum leverages AR/VR into systems along with touch interfaces, wherein users can make changes with the aid of specific gestures. Added to that, the users will also be able to hear and feel certain products before making purchase decisions.
Ciklum assists retailers to build up their eCommerce solution from scratch or redesign their existing solution to increase customer engagement. The company solutions portfolio also include complex logistics solutions for GPS tracking, analytics and reporting, online ordering systems with payment systems integration, data analytics and other retail industry solutions. Moving ahead, Ciklum will continue to integrate technologies into its solutions and enhance the customer success rates for its clients.
