Our friends at Modern Marketing Today published a story on interactive, immersive displays and how they are changing the game for workplace collaboration, team on-boarding, and the sales experience.
So we got to thinking about how would these immersive displays change the game for retailers. With the rising trend of experiential shopping and hybridized store approaches, there are some serious advantages that come with immersive displays for retailers, both internally and externally. Better workplace collaboration for global brands like Under Armour is crucial to business success and ensures that the brand mission is aligned around the globe. Better employee training and collaboration also powers a stronger customer support approach, a top concern for any retailer. From the storefront perspective, nothing modernizes a shop like an interactive display – that’s a unique opportunity for retailers to make a lasting impression on customers in an increasingly competitive space.
Here’s the full article from Modern Marketing Today with some of our own commentary on the retail applications of this technology:
A recent report released by leading analyst firm, Gartner, identified some of the key challenges that businesses are facing when it comes to keeping pace with customer and employee expectations around digital transformation. Deliver Digital Business Results by Boosting Workforce Digital Dexterity revealed that digital dexterity, a business strategy designed to encourage workforce agility and engagement by promoting employee autonomy and building a more consumerized work environment, should be a priority for businesses looking to deliver a truly forward-thinking, digital culture.
One technology that is helping organizations boost digital dexterity and prepare to adapt as workplace and customer expectations mature is immersive displays. Immersive displays offer intuitive, interactive collaboration platforms that, 30 years ago, could only be realized by movie magic. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.
Applications for an immersive display in your corporate digital strategy are threefold:
- Powering a more collaborative, interactive workspace among employees, regardless of location. This ensures that the right team members with the most applicable expertise are involved, not just employees that are geographically convenient.
- Creating a more enriching, cohesive recruiting and training approach that boosts employee engagement, ultimately resulting in a more competent and enthusiastic workforce. [This is important to creating a thoughtful, enjoyable shopping experience. Genuine enthusiasm is something that customers respond very positively to. – RTI]
- Driving more effective, memorable, and technically impressive business development opportunities that customers and prospects value and remember when it comes time to make their decision about their solution provider. [This applies to shaping the shopping experience as well. Customers that remember their shopping experience will want to return to that brand again and again. A brand that positions itself as forward-thinking and technologically savvy will likely resonate with many key target markets. – RTI]
For these reasons, companies like Prysm have developed leading edge immersive displays that harness this collaborative power and bring it to the offices of world-renowned companies like General Electric, Under Armour, and Sprint. These companies utilize Prysm’s immersive displays to augment the experience for both their customers and their employees.
“There’s now a premium on teamwork and collaboration, as opposed to older schools of thought that incentivized individual success and intelligence,” stated Darrin Brooks, Director of Strategic Engagements at Prysm, in a recent interview with Modern Marketing Today. “Companies realized that better solutions come out of groups that work together, so now we are faced with the challenge of incentivizing and improving the circumstances for that group behavior.”
A workspace that you can work with, not for
Through the integration to immersive display technology, teams can more easily collaborate around the globe. This has become an important business functionality from a recruiting standpoint, with “remote/work from home” being the fourth most popular job search term of 2017, according to data from FlexJobs.
Bill Schmidt, Sales Director at AVI-SPL (a channel partner of Prysm’s), explained that this newfound access to better remote collaboration adds a great amount of potential team participation to content being created. He said immersive displays act “as an enabler to let the remote workforce join in and allow everybody to collaborate in the same visually immersive workspace.”
He added that the interactivity involves remote employees on a deeper level than before by enhancing how they can engage with the data being presented. “This really highlights the difference in how people are actually working, where they can interact with the data that’s being displayed and not just stare at it.”
This isn’t only an advantage for employees, although it’s a big one. By being able to engage with employees anywhere around the world through a platform that is far more interactive and comprehensive than an email or teleconference, the right talent and expertise can be applied to the task at-hand, strengthening the relationship and trust with the customer. [A more connected, collaborative team enables better customer support and strengthens the relationship with the customer in general. – RTI]
Finding talent that wants to find you
Beyond the obvious appeal behind remote employee engagement, companies that prioritize digital dexterity and an innovative culture attract a larger pool of talent. This is especially true among millennials and Gen Z employees, who embrace and almost expect cutting-edge workplace technology like immersive displays.
Not to mention, immersive displays offer an opportunity to start off on the right foot with new-hires by flaunting a forward-thinking onboarding program that is far more memorable and engaging than an employee handbook. Sparking that enthusiasm for a company from the get-go is key to employee retention and building their confidence in the company for which they work (and it doesn’t hurt that it saves money on recruiting efforts).
With higher employee retention comes higher customer retention – team churn is often a red flag for customers and could prompt them to look elsewhere for their desired solution. In fact, according to data from Aberdeen, “Companies with engaged employees see 233 percent greater customer loyalty and a 26 percent greater annual increase in revenue.” [Customers like to see employees that are enthusiastic about the company they work for – it shows them that they are making a smart choice in investing in that brand and its products. – RTI]
Bringing sales into the 21st Century
The last thing any company wants in a customer interaction is for the customer to leave feeling bored, confused, or underwhelmed by the content shared with them. Customers want an experience that they will remember and will make them feel confident about their decision to partner with your company. Immersive displays transform a customer meeting into a true dialogue because it’s interactive by nature and encourages all parties to participate in the discussion.
Customers are engaged with what you’re sharing with them right out of the gate with this technology, maximizing time to discuss the important relevant content and minimizing logistical hang-ups and niceties. “What immersive displays like LPD 6K do is put the content being presented at the front of the conversation instead of at the tail end behind all the handshakes and hellos,” explained Brooks.
Obviously, an impressive immersive display like Prysm’s LPD 6K also exudes innovation and technological savvy to a customer as well, and to essentially every industry right now, outdated technology is simply not an option. [Create an experience that shoppers will remember, return to, and tell their friends about. The benefits to that reaction are obvious. – RTI]
In an upcoming feature on Modern Marketing Today, they’ll be digging into this discussion further with Darrin Brooks and Bill Schmidt about best practices in the workplace that immersive display technology enables and challenges seen across industry lines that it addresses. Register for upcoming discussions on this topic here.
Learn about how immersive displays can up-level your sales and marketing efforts in a new eBook from Prysm titled, 5 Ways Immersive Presentations Help Marketers and Sales Professionals Close the Deal.
