Optimising networks & boosting retail revenues with SD-WAN

Digital transformation is revolutionising the retail industry, redefining many processes and streamlining others creating innovative and efficient operations.

As they face competition from e-commerce players, retailers are looking to modernise their networks to reinvigorate the industry for the digital era and seeking networks to complement developments in new retail models, applications, and services. These can run the gamut of new digital customer experiences such as creating virtual fitting rooms in a clothing shop, virtual furniture placement for a home furnishings store or even having pop-up locations sent to the customer’s mobile phone on demand.

The goal is to enlarge their operational capability with digital tools but reducing both the capital and operating costs of their networks: for example, shifting small stores to broadband-only connectivity to reduce overhead.

Today, the retail industry is more technology-driven than merchant-driven, utilising the latest in software and hardware systems to streamline their operations and improve customer service, whether they are a brick-and-mortar location or online.

Some of these technology-driven changes include:

Adopting Augmented Reality (AR) - from virtual fitting rooms to designing your living room layout in a virtual furniture simulation, retailers are increasingly turning to AR to support the customer experience. But AR demands capacity on the WAN without fear of packet loss and is generally jitter-free.

Virtual Product Consultation- many retail staff lack the specialist knowledge that customers want especially when purchasing complex products such as audio equipment or power tools. Allowing a face-to-face consultation with real experts in-store via a video uplink is a viable option as long as the WAN can deliver the video and audio with clarity, consistency, and quality.

Pop-up stores - increased competition is driving many retailers to get closer to their customers by adopting a flexible and dynamic store strategy. The goal is to open more stores in many locations that are smaller, mobile and seasonal to respond to changing customer tastes. To support this, they’ll need WANs that can add and move locations with low lead times, easily, quickly, and without disruptions.

Delivering innovative shopping experiences and boosting revenues demands an always-on WAN. The retail WAN must be high capacity and deliver these new retail applications reliably: problems such as jerky, variable response rates, or garbled audio, or jaggy, glitchy video make new digitally-enhanced shopping experiences unpleasant, and often times, unusable.

Attempting to run these applications and deliver massive amounts of data over a traditional WAN can actually do harm to the retailer, slowing the network to the point of non-productivity. Should a location’s network go down or need servicing, it can take hours or even days for an IT person to show up onsite to fix the issue.

But these issues, along with other retailer concerns including data security, PCI compliance and customer retention, can be addressed via SD-WAN. SD-WAN improves retail branch connectivity without having to replace their existing hardware.

SD-WAN centralises the provisioning system that connects all of a retailer’s locations, enabling the management of all locations from one central place—the corporate IT department. Not only does this reduce the retailer’s reliance on one or two IT people in the field to service all locations, it also ensures all locations’ networks are up to date with the most recent application versions, security updates and compliance requirements.

Under a traditional WAN architecture, the corporate data center and access to internet resources such as SaaS-based POS systems or other productivity SaaS/cloud applications such as Skype/VoIP can be impacted, as the centralised approach creates a bottleneck.

Branch-to-branch communication facilitated through VoIP or video calling is subject to the bottlenecks of traditional WAN architectures, which also can impact customer service. SD-WAN can detect the fastest path (or paths) for network traffic in real-time and dynamically reroute packet flows for the best performance to ensure continual uptime.

SD-WAN also can enable retailers to offer services that can help rein and retain customers, including in-store WiFi or location-based marketing such as pushing coupons or sale alerts to customers’ smart phones when they are close to a store. Even data-intensive digital assistants, which remember shoppers’ sizing information, past purchases and likes and dislikes, are possible with SD-WAN.

Singtel’s SD-WAN solution can help take the pain out of managing multiple retail sites, whether you’re a retailer with multiple locations or a service provider with retail clients in multiple locations. Singtel delivers industry-leading SD-WAN technology to help companies control the cost, increase the reliability and improve the security of their networks

In their quest to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive market, retailers are relying on technology more than ever. It’s imperative their networks work with them, not against them. SD-WAN can help ensure an optimal network experience—which can result in higher revenues and happy customers.