The world of fashion and beauty retail today has been forever transformed by technologies aimed at improving the customer experience. Innovation comes in many forms, from operational optimizations to seamless checkout (e.g., RFID) to VR/AR changing rooms — all designed to provide a greater shopping experience and better personalization for the consumer.
Understanding The Competitive UK Apparel Market
Retail managers have to work fast to keep up with the pace of innovation to stay competitive in markets such as the UK, where the apparel market is projected
1 to generate $85.85 billion in 2024 alone. Globally, the apparel market is massive—valued at an estimated $1.79tn
2—and projected to continue growing at a 2.8% rate through to 2028.
The characteristics of the UK market are changing, with 94% of sales forecasted to be generated by non-luxury apparel items in 2024—a key metric for understanding the amount of financial pressure consumers are facing. This data is also in line with previous findings
3 on multi-year drops in consumer spending via ‘high-street’ outlets.
Enhancing Customer Experience in Fashion Retail
Those cash-strapped consumers are going to be looking for affordable, value-oriented, yet high-quality in-store experiences that don’t compound their frustrations or waste their time.
Notes one recent Forbes Council
4 analysis, “…in the context of retail, understanding convenience is as simple as recognizing the customers' need for two key things: speed and options.”
“Fast service is essential in today’s retail environment. Customers don't want to wait around for help from a store associate, stand in lines or even wait for a page to load online. They want to arrive at the store, find the items they need and check out seamlessly,” Forbes continues.
Facilitating seamless experiences is where modern self-service technologies are truly going to shine, even more so in the fashion world where that speed, convenience, and excellent service are paramount.
How Modern Self-Service Tech Facilitates Next-Gen Customer Service
While the fashion industry faces many of the same challenges as the rest of the retail industry to compete with eCommerce and provide a unified-commerce-powered customer experience, fashion’s particularly strong emphasis on the customer experience has strategic implications.
Competitive CX in fashion requires the right tools and innovations to ensure that the associates you do have are available to create the kind of bonding interactions with customers that generate satisfaction, conversions, and ultimately loyalty.
Those improved customer relationships are within reach for any retailer ready to transform their CX game with modern self-service tech such as the
Vynamic® Self-Service solution. Picture this: seamless integration with existing systems, plus a building-block approach that lets you customize everything to fit your exact needs. That's what this solution is all about.
Tailoring Self-Checkout for Fashion Retail
DN Series® EASY--a highly modular solution that includes Vynamic can be tailored to specific goals and targets, automating those once-manual aspects of the self-checkout process and ameliorating common consumer pain points while increasing security. That security comes, for example, in the form of RFID integration that makes inventory management and tracking a breeze, ensuring greater consistency.
RFID helps to address chronic retail pain points like theft and long wait times while also helping store associates track and manage inventory. It facilitates next-generation self-checkout by speeding up the process into a truly seamless experience.
In fashion, your brand identity is everything because it motivates the value and desirability of your product, which in turn differentiates your brand and generates customer loyalty. Indeed, the highly competitive fashion landscape requires a strong loyalty scheme to keep consumers engaged with your brand and provide the right promotion at the right point of time in the customer journey. Solutions like
Vynamic® Engage help to manage, execute and personalize your CRM strategy in a way that is effective and consistent.
By streamlining that self-service process, manual intervention by associates becomes less and less necessary, freeing staff up to create meaningful customer interactions. Within the fashion world in particular, leveraging RFID has been a true game changer for creating seamless, fast, advanced self-checkout experiences.
Today’s consumers expect knowledgeable in-store staff who can help them understand and experience the brand. Sales staff are no longer tied to checkout duties but are dedicated to serving consumers in the best possible way. Enabling the use of
mobility technologies makes their jobs easier, freeing up time to better serve consumers.
A recent survey by RETHINK Retail of industry decision-makers found that ‘unavailable staff’ is one of the most commonly reported pain points (75% of all respondents). About 84% agreed or strongly agreed that “employee availability impacts customer engagement and is important to drive sales,” while 42% indicated that they were already invested in self-service kiosks.
The Flexibility to Meet All Needs
Recently, multinational fashion retail chain C&A debuted its investment into seamless self-checkout technology in partnership with Diebold Nixdorf—specifically
DN Series EASY ONE solution. In a talk with Jochen Probst, Domain Lead Selling & Markets with C&A, one immediate advantage was the flexibility offered by the solution:
“Diebold Nixdorf’s solution is high resolution, which means you can use this either as a self-checkout system or as a regular till, which gives the retailer the full flexibility to use it in both scenarios,” helping to ensure that all types of customers are served via the channels they prefer. This flexibility also allows retailers to decide how they want to tackle peak times and seasons.
It’s one of several key features of modern, adaptable solutions that helps to ensure the transition to those solutions is flexible enough to cope with emergent needs rather than locking retailers into a solution that may not be able to address every consumer want.
When you combine that flexibility and speed with modern, AI and computer-vision-powered security solutions, you form an offering that allows associates to focus on the human-to-human interactions that truly define high-level customer service.
To learn more about how Diebold Nixdorf is transforming the fashion retail industry’s future,
visit or
contact us to speak with a retail expert.
Sources:
1 https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/apparel/united-kingdom
2 https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/apparel/worldwide
3 https://reports.retail-week.com/high-street-rebooted-2021/index.html
4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/10/20/delivering-convenient-personalized-and-seamless-retail-experiences/
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