The world’s largest shoe store, the 96,000-square-foot Level Shoes in the palatial Dubai Mall, has it all: top designer brands, attentive stylists, personal concierge services, even a pedicure lounge and a cobbler. But what it lacked until recently was a modern checkout process befitting its sophisticated clientele.
The store’s checkout process was inadequate in several ways, says Olivier Leblan, CIO of Chalhoub Group, which manages Level Shoes and 650 other luxury fashion, beauty, and gift stores across the Middle East.
It took too long for cashiers to look up customers, process credit card transactions, and print out receipts, leading to long queues. Meanwhile, cashiers weren’t able to capture nontransactional customer data electronically, and associates on the store floor had no way to check product inventories or access customer purchase histories. “In a data-driven world, this was very sad,” Leblan says.
And because the checkout process was built around static registers, customers often had to walk long distances in the huge store from where they tried on their shoes and picked out accessories to where they purchased them.
“The retail industry has changed a lot, because customer expectations have changed a lot,” Leblan said in an interview at the National Retail Federation show in New York last month. “Our customers want to have a seamless experience in our stores. They want more consistency—the same experience in our stories as they have online—and they want us to know them so that we can offer them personalized service. We needed to empower our staff, to give them the tools to be able to interact with our customers and move to the next level of agility.”
Know Thy Customer
Working with systems integrator Logic Information Systems, Level Shoes deployed the latest version of Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service, under a six-month pilot project wrapped up in October. The rollout—the first for Oracle Retail Xstore in the Middle East—initially is on 37 stationary terminals and 30 iPhones. When the $1 million rollout is completed this year, it will include 97 terminals, 60 of them iPhones, bringing expedited mobile checkout, integrated payment systems, and improved store operations to the luxury retailer.
Parent company Chalhoub Group, which tested point-of-sale systems from multiple vendors, chose Oracle Xstore because of its intuitive user interface, rich features, and ease of deployment, Leblan says. The POS software not only lets stationary and mobile store associates process purchases and collect basic customer data, but it also enables them to access customer purchase histories, check product inventories, input comments relevant to each customer interaction, book appointments, and jot down tasks. Customers will be able to get receipts printed out at one of 37 kiosks throughout the store, or go green and opt to have receipts emailed to them.
“We want our staff to interact more with customers, to be able to know them better, to be able to advise them better, to be able to select the product that meets their requirements,” Leblan says. “It’s a bit more of a consulting kind of role. We have departments dedicated to the guest experience. These departments now need to redesign the guest experience based on this mobility, based on the features now available to the staff.”
A next step is to tie Xstore into the retailer’s marketing automation tool, ecommerce site, and customer relationship management applications in order to share data across channels, he says.
Broader Rollout
Chalhoub Group plans to eventually roll out the Oracle Retail product to its 650 other storefronts, but at a pace dictated by each of its brands (which include Saks Fifth Avenue, Carolina Herrera, Michael Kors, Christofle, La Pâtisserie des Rêves, Baccarat, and Tumi). Leblan estimates that about 80% of Chalhoub Group’s brands will migrate to the system in 2018, the rest next year.
Leblan says Level Shoes’ deployment is already increasing customer satisfaction. As for a hard return on the company’s $1 million investment, however, ROI “has always been a myth in IT,” he says. “It’s very complicated to calculate, because most of what we’re doing has an indirect impact on sales, on staff efficiency. It’s extremely difficult to measure.”
Nonetheless, he adds: “This is a significant improvement over the way we were doing things in our store, and our customers are happy.”
Rob Preston is editorial director in Oracle’s Content Central organization.
