At the NRF Big Show, Honeywell demoed technology to help retail associates scan, checkout and communicate.
Honeywell's Smart Pay software, used on a mobile device. (Courtesy photo)
Through its work in retail, teams from the technology company Honeywell visit with many leaders and associates in stores over the course of a year.
In recent years, Global Retail Marketing Principal Tony Boncore said that a common theme emerged: “How do we reduce friction between the shopper and the associate, or the shopper and the experience?”
There are three distinct drivers of retail in that question: The customer who is browsing and buying an item, the associate answering questions and providing service, and the experience guiding customers through the store.
Devices from Honeywell are designed to help to bring all of these together. At this month’s NRF Big Show, The Current visited Honeywell’s booth to see the technology in action. Branded with Tractor Supply, the booth offered a look at devices that are reshaping the shopping experience around people, and helping associates more seamlessly serve customers throughout the store.
Here’s a look at several devices and use cases:
In listening to customers, Honeywell received feedback that associates want to use technology that had the look and feel of a mobile device. That’s exactly how the CT 30 XP is designed. The device is also ruggedized.
This technology is at once familiar and innovative. Associates want to use the type of device that they are accustomed to in everyday life, and the mobile format fits that mold.
It also opens up new use cases. A shopper may have completed checkout, but forgot an item. With the device, an associate can scan an item and complete checkout – whether it’s an in-store or purchase or online transaction for pickup.
The devices also have fluctuating scanning capabilities that allow associates to scan items that are overhead or on the ground from a standard standing position, without the need for a ladder or crouch.
In the end, the devices are designed to make tasks easier for associates to complete, and free them up to be available to customers.
With mobile wallets, Buy Now Pay Later and more, there are a growing number of payment options available to shoppers. Retailers are looking for ways to continuously add new forms , while doing so within one checkout system.
Honeywell’s Smart Pay software is designed to enable this to happen. The software enables a transaction from a store device with anything that’s enabled with the communication protocol NFC. This could be a mobile device with a wallet installed, or a credit card.
As it continues to improve software, Honeywell is aiming to evolve with the payments industry. Credit card companies are increasingly phasing out magstripes altogether as chips gain popularity. Soon, chip-only and contactless payments will be the dominant modes. Honeywell’s software enables them to be accepted on a single device.
When combining Smart Pay and the mobile device for associates, there are other advantages, too. There’s no longer a requirement to have 10 checkout registers at the front of the store. Rather, associates can be appointed to a device, and move throughout the store. This changes the experience for customers, who can meet associates when they are nearby, as well.
These devices also enable more flexible fulfillment options for certain sizes or styles of items that might be from an online assortment, such as ship-from-store, or pickup from another store.
Honeywell is also aiming to reduce friction when it comes to work between associates. Through an integration with Microsoft Teams, Honeywell developed the Push to Talk app. This creates a walkie-talkie-like functionality for in-store devices.
Associates can ask each other about the availability of items within a store, or speak to a counterpart at another store.
Overall, Honeywell’s devices are equipped so that associates can serve customers to meet their specific needs wherever they are.
“It’s a tool I have just in time,” Boncore said. “You never know when that time is going to be, but when it is, I am equipped and prepared.”
In developing new technology, a key to Honeywell’s approach is a mindset of seeing associates not as mediators, but as end users.
“The team members are also customers,” Boncore said. The key is to listen to them, and build with serving what they want as the end goal.
Then, they have all they need to delight customers.
"Fashion ecommerce is one of the most cumbersome customer experiences that exists," said Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman.
Photo by Daniel G. Wells III, used under a Creative Commons license.
The rise of generative AI is bringing with it a groundswell of interest and concern about how the capability to automatically synthesize information and create something new will change how we work.
Given that AI will sit within the architecture of our digital lives, it’s also worth considering how the technology will introduce new tools for other aspects of life, as well.
For two ecommerce innovators in the apparel space, it’s a time to explore how it will transform shopping. Rent the Runway is set to roll out new AI-powered search capabilities, while Stitch Fix is drawing on a long history with data science and machine learning to personalize the inventory buying process.
Here’s a look at the initiatives underway at each company, and their visions for the future:
Rent the Runway is putting a focus on the customer experience this year as it seeks to retain more subscribers and continue a yearslong push toward profitability.
This is resulting in the introduction of a variety of new initiatives, from the addition of an extra item to all orders to speeding up page load times. Yet as CEO Jennifer Hyman zooms out, she sees change being necessary on an industry-wide level in fashion. Beyond adding new features, AI can play a transformational role.
“I think that fashion ecommerce is one of the most cumbersome customer experiences that exists. You are searching through pages and pages and pages of content to find the items that you like and no one likes doing this,” Hyman told analysts on the company’s earnings call this week. “As an industry that still is selling physical products, AI is going to be -- fashion is going to be a major beneficiary as an industry.”
As a rental service, Rent the Runway has a distinct niche in fashion that lends itself to AI’s advantages, Hyman said. As opposed to a retailer that a consumer may visit a couple of times a year, RTR is used frequently by customers. So Hyman said there are opportunities to turn Rent the Runway into a “utility” by creating a more seamless experience.
This frequent use also provides a “highly unique” dataset, Hyman said. They know what a customer is planning to do based on what they rented. They know whether she liked or disliked an item, and many customers are reviewing 10 items per month. They know her size and how an item fits. This can be put to work in tools that allow customers to ask questions, and find answers.
The first application that combines AI and these advantages will appear in the coming weeks, when Rent the Runway plans to launch a beta of AI-driven search. The tool will allow customers to search for common terms or use cases for an item. So a person will be able to write “Miami vibe,” “‘clambake in Nantucket,” or “tropical motifs,” and receive results about what to wear for such an occasion.
The goal is to help customers sift through the endless aisle, and instantly finds what's right for them.
“I think that across all fashion sites, all over the world, the way that people are searching for product is fairly vanilla, it's fairly functional, right?" Hyman said. "You can go to a site and search for a T-shirt, you can go to a site and search for a black-tie gown. The fact that we're going to be able to enable our customers to search how they actually want to use this closet in the cloud, to search for items to wear to my beach bonfire this weekend, that is a completely different way to search, and I think that it really brings out the value proposition of what a closet in the cloud is all about."
Hyman sees this as a first step in the company using AI models to improve the product experience, and expects more tools to appear in the coming months. RTR is also introducing an SMS concierge experience for onboarding that allows customers to text with a member of the customer service team. The company is already exploring ways that AI can be incorporated into that tool, as well.
In the longer term, Hyman said the company has a vision that will leverage AI to allow customers to communicate with Rent the Runway asynchronously across different modalities, and have a stylist that is constantly available to recommend items, pick out new inventory and answer questions.
“If we are utilizing AI appropriately over the next few years, I see no reason why someone even has to come to our website,” Hyman said.
Stitch Fix has long married AI with human curation to provide outfits on a subscription basis.
“For years, we have utilized capabilities in generative AI, injecting scores and language into our personalization engines and, more recently, automatically generated product descriptions,” CEO Katrina Lake told analysts. “We have also developed and implemented more advanced proprietary tools such as outfit generation and personalized style recommendations that create a unique and exciting experience we believe is unmatched in the market.”
A new area where the company is applying AI is inventory buying.
“We have historically utilized a number of tools to make data-informed decisions with our inventory purchases,” Lake said. “Now, directly leveraging our personalization algorithms, we have developed a new tool that creates an exciting paradigm shift, which will utilize math scores at the client level to drive company-level buying actions. We expect the clarity of demand signals at the individual client level to drive more proactive and efficient inventory decisions as a company. And because of this, we expect to see higher success rates on fixes and drive increases in keep rates and [average order value] over time.”
Early results are promising. When compared with existing buying tools, testing showed a 10% lift in keep rate and AOV. By the end of this quarter, Stitch Fix expects 20% of all purchase orders to be algorithmically informed.
With experience using AI and a team in place to build, Stitch Fix is investing in the technology. Like Rent the Runway, it also has a unique dataset that offers an immediate advantage.
Here are Lake’s thoughts about how Stitch Fix’s AI strategy:
One of the things that I love about our experience is that we have generative AI that's really in more of a visual format. And so, the outfits that we have in our app, those are actually taking into account your preferences, what we know about you, and then in combination with what we know that you own in your closet. And to be able to kind of continue to push that technology and to be able to continue to give people more value in their experience with Stitch Fix, that's a really good example of, I think, a capability that is, firstly, really aligned with our capabilities around data and personalization and really unique to us.
And then I think it's also really compelling because I really think that pushes us as we think about what that addressable market is. I think if we can push outfits to be something that can be an asset to everybody, I think that is a universal thing that people would love to be able to have, is to have access to advice on a daily basis around what to wear and how to wear it.
While these are distinct companies, their plans lead us to a common conclusion: While the talk around generative AI might be new, many technology-forward companies already have assets sitting inside them that can be leveraged to build new tools. Uncover what’s already there, learn about the AI’s capabilities and develop a solution that's right for your organization. Then, talk to customers to determine how to improve it. It might mean commerce looks different, but that’s okay. The point is to create a better experience.
