Using technology to create a more meaningful shopping experience

What frustrates you most when it comes to shopping in a store? Is it long queues? Lack of in-store help to find what you're looking for? The difficulty of comparing products? If so, you're not alone. These irritants (and a few others) are the reasons online shopping has soared in popularity. In fact, in 2016, of those people that shopped online, 56 per cent of consumers in the Middle East and Africa made their most recent purchases from an online-only store, with the average person completing 11 online transactions per year.
Online shopping allows you to easily find products, read customer reviews and pay without ever needing to stand in a line. But there are two things it can never do: Give you the experience of physically touching and exploring a product before buying it, and provide the personal connection between vendor and customer that has defined the shopping experience since trading and bartering began.
These experiences are still valuable, especially for millennials. What young consumers want is a blend, where the convenience and intuitiveness of online shopping is merged with a tangible and personal in-store experience "Click & Collect". And technology like the cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence is making this possible.
Disruptive evolution
Many leading regional retailers in the Middle East have modified their structures and strategies, incorporating digitisation in general and customer analytics in particular, as key enablers rather than supporting capabilities.
For example, Majid Al Futtaim, the leading shopping mall, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East and North Africa, relies on continuously measuring customer needs and developing a single view of the customer - a 'Golden Customer Record' - across its 13 business units. This allows the company to understand and predict customer behaviour, focus its marketing campaigns and, by doing this, positively impact customer experience and satisfaction. A report by Booz Allen Hamilton adds that the benefits of such services are yet to be fully embraced - and indeed be made available - in the region. However, research indicates that 43 per cent of Middle Eastern consumers report making purchases online at least once a month, while statistics from Euromonitor International indicate that e-commerce as a whole grew 21 per cent in Mena (Middle East and North Africa) between 2011 and 2015. According to a research done by Wamda in 2016, 66 per cent of Mena consumers use the Internet to research products and services before visiting stores.
Having the proper customer analytics capability as well as an unstructured data analytics technology environment, allow retailers to tap into the deluge of Big Data streaming from their customers' social media exchanges and derive meaningful and actionable insights.
Introducing supermarkets of the future
In Milan, Italy's largest retail chain, Coop, showcased its Supermarket of the Future at a recent trade show. The store uses robots, sensors and apps to guide shoppers to their ideal products. Using interactive screens, you can source information about any one of their 6,000 products. Want to know where your olive oil is from? Just point to the bottle on the shelf to pull up all the information on-screen. Have any allergies? Mention this and you'll be shown which products contain the specific allergens and which don't.
Or there is the SKIP app, which allows you to build shopping lists at home and then have your list organised by aisle as you walk into the store. As you place an item in your cart, you scan it and then check-out on the app when you're finished, delivering a frictionless shopping experience. The app also uses artificial intelligence to study your purchase history and preferences, providing personalised offers and promotions on the items you like most. In the African and Eastern Europe markets, 34 per cent of online consumers make decisions based on prices or promotions. As these become more personalised, this number is set to increase.
What about human employees?
Although these technologies are studying your behaviours, preferences and tastes to give you a more personalised shopping experience, what does this mean for human interaction and personal connection?
While apps like SKIP remove the need for traditional cashiers, they aren't making supermarket employees obsolete. Instead, they are taking care of the back-end admin, freeing up staff to focus on what matters most - customer service. We see this in new digital systems that help servers at restaurants, enabling staff to spend more time on the restaurant floor and less time in the kitchen.
While shelf robots monitor stock levels and maintain accurate SKU assortment, and video surveillance technologies observe buying patterns and queue times, staff are being redeployed to the store floor to better assist shoppers. A missed SKU on shelf, is a 30 per cent revenue loss, allowing retailers to never run out of stock and yet never overstock. Armed with devices and rich data, staff can know their customers better than ever before - how many times they've shopped at the store, what price range they shop in, or what size and style shoe they usually buy. With this knowledge, they're able to make informed recommendations, have clothes in your online wish-list ready in your size to try on before you arrive at the store, or let you know first when your favourite items are in stock. According to Deloitte, shoppers increasingly want their favourite retailers to immediately fulfil or even predict their needs and desires.
It's just getting exciting
The global IT spend for retail is expected to exceed $111 billion by 2020. While the digital divide means emerging markets may not see technology like virtual change rooms yet, the trend is in motion. Consumers are using smartphones to research products, supermarkets are building apps and loyalty programmes, and e-commerce sites are recommending products based on purchase history.
Outside of emerging markets, even retailers in the US and UK are still discovering the many different benefits technology can bring. In both markets, the biggest uses for artificial intelligence in retail are for search, recommendation engines and dynamic pricing, with applications like chatbots and virtual shopping assistants coming in last. All this means that it's going to be an exciting space to watch over the next few years. With the high number of consumers in the Middle East and Africa already shopping online, we look forward to seeing the many local innovations that are sure to emerge to meet evolving needs. Whichever way stores go about it, you can be assured that these revolutionary technologies are here to do one thing - make your life easier.
The writer is head of retail, travel and hospitality, Microsoft Middle East and Africa. Views expressed by him are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.