Technology Record - Issue 27: Winter 2022

I NT E R V I EW 176 According to a report from PwC titled Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right, 32 per cent of customers are willing to leave brands after just one bad experience. Donna Stevens, senior vice president of product and marketing management at Flooid, shares how unified commerce and Flooid’s products can help brands to meet evolving customer expectations by improving their current offerings and preparing them for the future. How does unified commerce support retail transformation? Unification is about having one source of data that is seamlessly accessible and consistent across all channels, and cloud-powered solutions are essential to this. For example, if a retailer wants to offer mobile shopping, the products and prices must be the same as in stores to avoid consumer frustration, confusion or disillusion. How does Flooid’s portfolio give retailers new ways to engage or reach new markets? Flooid understands that both retail associates and shoppers want easy, frictionless and efficient processes. Ensuring data is consistent is one of the ways to make that happen; the other is to ensure that the journey itself is familiar, consistent and reliable from beginning to end, regardless of where it takes place. Associates are shoppers and shoppers can be associates in this new world where both groups can pick items, assess price and availability, and make purchases. As such, it’s really important that applications have a logical look, feel and workflow and that people don’t require a lot of training or experience to use them. Where do you think retail is headed, and how are you preparing your clients for these changes? At Flooid, we like to say that “our heads are in the cloud”. We know that we’ve gone beyond the early adopter phase of cloud technology and into wider acceptance and adoption in retail store operations. We also know that retailers must work very hard to continue to stay competitive and relevant to retain the loyalty of their shoppers. To do that, we build cloud-first technology, knowing that we must also prioritise resilience, performance and flexibility. As we look to the future of retail and shopper-retailer engagement – which includes augmented reality and the metaverse – we are incorporating composable architectural concepts and adaptable user experiences into our products to ensure that retailers can tailor solutions to their needs today, tomorrow and in the future. Flooid’s Donna Stevens discusses how the cloud and omnichannel offerings can help retailers to deliver the experiences that customers want The power of unified commerce BY E L LY YAT E S - ROB E R T S “We build cloudfirst technology, knowing that we must also prioritise resilience, performance and flexibility”

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