Omnichannel

2016 will be a year when many niche innovations in customer experience will become mainstream as consumers expect more out of their shopping experiences, forcing traditional retailers to step up or risk becoming irrelevant. Marketplace buzzwords and emerging trends, such as personalization and seamless mobile access, will become table-stake elements of the customer experience.

Here are ways retailers will take their customer experience to the next level:

Personalization

As always, it seems to have blurred by before it even started, but NRF 2016 is over. As the retail industry collectively unpacks it bags, sorts through business cards and decompresses, I’d like to offer a few key trends I observed during my own three days of Big Show immersion.

Count Macy’s among the retailers who realize a seamless customer experience starts in the back end.

Macy’s is supporting a new omnichannel order fulfillment program called “Pick to the Last Unit” (P2LU) with Tyco’s TrueVUE RFID inventory visibility platform,

If this past holiday season was any indication, American consumers can expect to receive even more email from retailers in the coming year as improved targeting has increased the efficacy of the marketing tactic.

Swire Properties Inc, one of South Florida's leading international developers of urban real estate, along with retail co-developers Whitman Family Development and Simon Property Group, announced new tenants set to join Brickell City Centre's, a 500,000-sq.-ft- open-air shopping center under construction in the heart of Miami’s Brickell neighborhood.

Abandoned carts get plenty of attention. Retailers run reports on lost revenue from abandons. Email campaigns start hitting customers as soon as an hour after they abandon. A day later, another email comes.

Targeting cart abandoners is definitely effective. Statistics show that as much as 25% of lost revenue can be regained via abandoned cart emails. But what if you didn't lose that revenue in the first place?

We'll never live in a zero abandonment world. But we can definitely limit the chances of abandonment.

Mobile technology is helping shoppers at Scranton, Pennsylvania-based Gerrity’s Super Market Inc. check out much more conveniently.

Gerrity’s is beta testing a checkout app from mobile grocery solution provider Skip. The app, which Gerrity’s is the first retailer to test, lets customers scan items with their phone and place it in their cart or basket. For produce or other items that need to be weighed, shoppers place the goods on Skip scales that weight them and present a barcode for the price.

Ahold USA on Wednesday announced net sales of $26.4 billion for the full year of 2015, an increase of 1.4%.

Ahold USA successfully converted the 25 acquired former A&P stores during the quarter. Identical sales excluding gas were up 1.6%, positively affected by competitor store closures in the New York Metro market. Market share for the fourth quarter and full year increased compared to last year, as the chain added a net 20 stores in 2015 to 788 locations.