Engaging the customer to enhance the shopping experience through personalization and relevance is the key factor to winning and keeping customers. Of course, it’s not surprising that meeting the expectations of today’s customers has become extremely challenging. Besides that, the networks in the past were unreliable, slow and expensive, but today’s networks are robust, reliable and resilient network technology.

Please check the below findings of the survey which sheds the light on the customer experience:

Personal:

• 75% are planning to use Wi-Fi to identify customers with their mobile devices in the store by the end of 2019.
• 80% will suggestive sell based on previous purchases within the next three years.
• The most prevalent technologies that retailers are currently using to identify customers are Wi-Fi (43%) and mobile websites (40%).

Mobile:

• 89% will offer mobile solutions for associates within three years.
• 84% will use mobile point of sales (POS) within the next three years.
• Offering cross-channel have seen a sizeable increase.

Seamless:

• 71% of respondents plan to have a unified commerce platform by the end of 2019.
• 60% of respondents plan to have centralized POS within the next two years.

Secure:

• E2EE (end-to-end encryption) has increased significantly over the past year with a reported 68% of retailers utilizing it – up from 49% last year.
• 96% of respondents will have E2EE by the end of 2019.
• 73% of respondents will offer a single token solution across the enterprise within the next three years.

Unified Commerce Platform:

• Bandwidth is the top network priority for 70% of retailers.
• Middleware/SOA layer implementations have increased from 18% total implemented last year to 34% implemented this year, although there is still much improvement needed.

The Current State of POS:

• 22% of retailers are planning to keep their current mobile devices as a POS in use for more than 5 years.

A Chart Shows the Alternative Payment Methods & the Acceptance Level of Every Method, 2017

Methodology:

Data were driven from an online survey of more than 500 top North American retailers The survey was conducted during November and December of 2016.