Multi-channel: BUT Setting Up Tablets in its Stores
- The French retailer BUT is relying on a strategy designed to modernise its points of sales through providing its salesmen with tablets and enhanced customer service tools.
- With these devices, customers will be provided information on products lists as well as their availability, prices and technical features.
- The selling process might be conducted using tablets, through registering customer purchases and allowing them to pay with the associated mobile POS terminal.
- Beginning November 2011, pilot tests have been run in two stores (in Avignon and in the department of Yvelines). BUT now hopes to provide the same kind of equipment to all its salesmen before summer 2012. Four to eight tablets should be made available in each store.
- The notion of connected commerce deployed in BUT stores has been developed by communication specialist OYEZ ! and PHIDIAS’s mobile POS terminal system.
- Transactions’ digital/physical interoperability now allows points of sales to propose enhanced and interactive services. BUT stands as a pioneer in France, though likewise initiatives have been noted these past weeks: Sephora, for instance, has equipped its salesmen with an iPod Touch for them to access the store’s CRM programme.
- This trend has also been illustrated by the implantation of Internet pure-players in the physical world: for instance, after five years online, the contemporary furniture retailer Achatdesign.com, has opened its first two physical stores to cater for customer relation. Its employees have been equipped with iPads, with augmented reality app allowing customers to “stage” the furniture in their homes.