Global Retailer Improves the Customer Experience with Mobile

Rapid mobile deployment improved the customer experience just in time for Black Friday

The Challenge 

A leading specialty retailer with five distinct brands wanted to create “flagship store” experiences across each of its 2,400 locations in North America. The retailer saw mobile as the technology that would allow sales associates to save the sale when customers wanted to buy merchandise not available in store. Using their mobile devices, the retailer wanted its associates to order out-of-stock online while the customer was in the store and then ship the merchandise to the store for pickup or directly to the customer’s home. The retailer also wished to leverage Line Busting to shift customer check-out away from traditional cash register queues to mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) devices which would allow associates to serve customers more quickly and efficiently. While the retailer already had applications and a specific use case ready, they needed staging/deployment services for this mobile program.

The Ask 

This leading retailer needed a standardized way to create, deploy, and monitor mobile solutions across the US, Canada, and Mexico, and asked Stratix to: 

• Develop an enterprise mobile plan for deploying and managing a large-scale mobile point-of-sale solution, as well as replace their legacy fixed cash registers with a tablet-based platform
• Stage, deploy and repair over 110,000 mobile devices across thousands of locations
• Provide custom reporting for each mobile asset to support PCI compliance and validate vendor performance 

The Solution 

Stratix designed a secure end-to-end solution that included mobile deployment, life cycle management and real-time reporting. This program involves more than 110,000 consumer and rugged mobile assets, with an additional 20,000 yet to deploy or allocated for spare pool inventory. The solution included: 

• iPods, Verifone payment sleds and Zebra mobile printers for Mobile Point-of-Sale 
• iPads time clocks for store associates and tablet POS along with Epson printers and Zebra scanners
• Android-based Zebra CC5000 tablets functioning as interactive customer concierge kiosks dedicated to price checks

The Result 

Stratix has completed several massive Pre-Black Friday deployments , with as many as 25k devices ahead of the kickoff of holiday peak shopping season – having since continuously grown the installed base since 2015. Based on the mobile initiative’s success, the company engaged Stratix to roll-out the retail solution to all of its 2,400 stores across the US, Canada and Mexico.

Rapid mobile deployment improved the customer experience just in time for Black Friday – the official start of holiday shopping