How Can Virtual Shopping Experience Ramp Up Your Festive Sales?

By Author: Sukhdev Singh
Total Articles: 8
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Customers like to shop during the festive season. They splurge on products and usually postpone their buying activity throughout the year until the festive season. It also brings a new opportunity for products in the premium category to be sold for businesses. With the virtual shopping experience given by organizations to their customers, they become sure about buying their products without even visiting the stores. Brick and mortar stores have become a point of delivering goods and after service/sales experience more than just a purchasing outlet. Users sometimes even check the stores to complete their purchase journey once they study the product online.

Enter Virtual Shopping Experience
Virtual shopping experience – a perfect blend of the offline and online world – has made last-mile delivery possible to locations where no stores were giving the product demo.

This AI-based technology uses high-resolution cameras, TMT plates, AR and VR glasses so that customers can virtually touch and feel the product. As a result, customers are engaged on a higher level in such virtual showroom demos where there is ...
... real-time engagement. Such strategies can help giants overcome losses in the struggling sectors.

Conversational platforms are the next big thing for about 40% of the Indian entities.

Based on a survey by Scalers, about 61% of users like to shop from brands that provide phygital customer experiences.

Know how to implement a phygital plan
The go-to strategy is 3I’s, which stands for Immersion, Immediacy, and Interaction. The first two, in this case, are about making sure the physical space is perfect, and Interaction takes care of the digital space in the virtual setup.

Understand where to implement your phygital plan
Given phygital involves a lot of money for space and technology to set up, you must think about which products to sell using this strategy. Say, if the product is a medium-priced product in a category and your expenses on providing a user phygital experience is greater than the sales earned, it might be a wrong option to phygitalize your product. The phygital category mainly caters to the premium products wherein the users aren’t satisfied just by looking at the product.

Give complete product knowledge to your employees
Your employees must be aware of how to operate in a phygital environment to give a demo. Hire employees that are well-polished can face the camera and have good communication skills. Understand which language you would like to use while providing such demos. Training sessions for employees regularly can go a long run in query resolution and product updates.

Setup the right way
Now that you know which products you are selling, you have hired the right employees and know a plan to do phygital work. Next, it’s time to evaluate the s Use high-tech resolution cameras, proper lighting, and AR/VR glasses – these three would be the basic requirements for a phygital environment.

Complete your sales funnel with a payment mechanism
Phygital experiences, whenever implemented, have usually shown a high NPS (Net Promoter Score) and customer satisfaction scores. It also means that you have a higher chance of customers purchasing the product. In such a case, it becomes even more crucial to have a payment mechanism to complete your sales funnel for the prospect. Therefore, have a ready RFID (Radio- Frequency Distribution) mechanism to allow customers to pay instantly through a scan on a QR code visible on the screen. Not just this, to give users a hassle-free experience, you can allow them to pay through multiple ways such as debit card, credit card, cash on delivery, and more.

Allow customers to give you a feedback
Since you are implementing this strategy for the first time at your business, there are high chances that you may not have to test, try and implement it over time. To ensure you are enhancing customer experience regularly, allow your customers to rate NPS (Net Promoter Score), Camera Quality, Demo Experience, etc. This evaluation would be customer-centric, and your business can filter out the best way out for each step. Also, note and measure through your revenue growth metrics to understand if you are going the right way. Real-time interaction also allows you to get queries resolved rather than other omnichannel support such as email, chatbots, etc., where there may be a gap for communication.

Learn More: Phygital in the automotive industry: Wind of change in delivering CX

Summing Up
Brands like Nike have already implemented a phygital experience; when will you?

It might be the case wherein your business may not have sufficient bandwidth to cater to this experience. If you have made up your mind that a phygital strategy for premium products will be a hit but are unsure of its implementation, this is how you can still do it.

Not having proper resources and workforce can be a bottleneck that you can overcome through outsourcing services.

Hire an expert to take care of your phygital services. Check their background, partners, authorization, and feedback before joining hands with your partner. Outsourcing partners usually have a workforce trained to give such demos. You can even check previous results of an outsourcing partner to understand their credibility. Save in-house costs of hiring, training, and a whole phygital setup by outsourcing your requirements.

I am a Digital Marketing executive at maxicus. Best Business process outsourcing service provider.