We’ve just published the all-new “The Forrester Wave™: Point Of Service, Q3 2018” report – and it turns out that brands and retailers have a lot to choose from to deliver the best experience for their customers.
Whose Customer Is This?
As a retailer that must provide your customers with great experiences, your expectations for your point of service (PoS) only continue to rise. Consumers shop both online and in stores: We still shop in-store (quite a bit), and we buy online, collect in-store, and sometimes return unwanted online purchases there, too. But as customers transition across online and offline touchpoints, and despite it being most convenient for them, they’re also unwittingly crossing an invisible border between the world of the eCommerce leader and the world of the store operations executive.
Safety First Versus “Death Or Glory”?
Your PoS selection conundrum: It’s hard for eCommerce and store operations executives to agree on the application they should use to deliver customer experience across their organization. Store operations executives love reliability. They are the safety-first “Volvo buyers” of the software selection world. eCommerce leaders prefer excitement and, frankly, a glimpse of glory.
Fortunately, our research this year finds that a new generation of PoS applications offers both safety and excitement. Judiciously exploiting cloud and mobile distributes data and functionality for secure reliability. Plus, coupling artificial intelligence enterprise views of inventory and of the customer advances PoS from transaction to experience.
The Forrester Wave™: Point Of Service, Q3 2018
To help retailers make the right choice, Forrester evaluated the 13 most important vendors. We conducted in-depth executive interviews to understand how they use shared cross-channel pricing and promotion engines, enterprise views of inventory or customers, and personalized recommendations to deliver consistent compelling brand experience. Plus, we conducted a survey of current users to gauge their level of satisfaction with their chosen solutions.
You can download the spreadsheet showing each vendor’s scores across 25 criteria. To develop a shortlist of solution providers that is right for your business and reflects your priorities, you can customize the results by reweighting the criteria and redrawing the graphic. And if you’d like to discuss any of the findings in further detail, please schedule an inquiry with me.
