Bosch offers highly secure digital solutions to scale-up retail business

How is IoT revolutionizing the retail industry?

IoT is bridging the gap between physical and digital stores and bringing in a seamless customer offering. While on one hand, physical stores are adopting digital practices (in-store mobile marketing, omnichannel, apps etc), e-commerce sites are bring in physical stores with a digital stronghold.

 

In what ways has IoT transformed customer experience?

IoT is transforming customer experience in a positive way by improving the ad relevancy, by bringing in personalization providing better ads and offers, saving time on reducing queues and enabling quicker checkouts. Overall, it is enabling the retailers with deeper insights about their stores and their consumers, thus helping them address the needs of their consumers in a better way.

 

What is the current state of smart retail in India?

Smart retail in India is picking up pace where the retailers see that there is a return on investment due to improvement in operational efficiency, reduction in costs and improvement in customer experience. Energy management systems, In-store personalized marketing, indoor positioning systems and maintenance digitization are the key aspects for smart retail in India. Apps and omnichannel marketing are becoming a norm in the modern retail scenario.

 

How do you foresee the growth of smart retail in India? What has been the impact of Government of India’s aggressive move towards digitization on the growth of smart retail?

Growth of smart retail in India will still be in a conservative mode, with safe investments and lots of paid pilots and proof of concepts expected from the retailers. Another important thing to note would be the change in business models where retailers would work on a shared revenue or a transaction based or subscription based business models which would mean that collaboration between retailers and technology partners would be the key for growth and success. 

Government’s aggressive move on digitization has paved the way for non-cashless transactions which in turn has made it easier for people to adopt mobile transactions even in the retail sector. A mobile is surely becoming the front end for any consumer touch point.

 

In what ways is RBEI contributing towards the growth of smart retails. Could you please highlight some of the products and solutions offered by the company?

RBEI has various solutions in smart retail ranging from Managed Assets which include Cold storage monitoring, Cold chain fleet management, IoT asset management, Energy monitoring to Customer centric solutions like in-store personalization, proximity marketing, in-store analytics including heatmaps and marketing analytics. 

The whole solution set focuses on the key aspects of reducing costs, increasing revenues, increasing operational efficiency and improving customer experience. 

 

Highlight some of the key trends in smart retail 

 

a. Unique in-store experience for customers

b. Mobile based offerings

c. Mobile payment solutions

d. Personalization will become extremely important to consumers

e. Investment in omni-channel 

f. Retailtainment

g. Analytics for a better perspective

 

As smart reality becomes a reality in India, how prepared are the retailers to circumvent any kind of data breach? 

Retailers are quite conscious of the data breach and do not share the entire data with the technologists. This is a sentiment which is a generally accepted thought and principle from the major brick and mortar retailers. On one hand though this is good for the consumers, the retailers are left with a huge amount of data which cannot be used without sharing with others.

 

In what ways is RBEI contributing towards strengthening the security within the system?

Bosch solutions ensure privacy and security of the data while ensuring that the customer still benefits through the encapsulated machine learning engine built into the system. Bosch’s built in mechanisms for checkpoints during software development, checked use of data during transactions as well as a highly secure IoT cloud environment ensures retailers that they can work with Bosch as partners who protect data privacy and security.

The whole solution set focuses on the key aspects of reducing costs, increasing revenues, increasing operational efficiency and improving customer experience. 

 

As smart reality becomes a reality in India, how prepared are the retailers to circumvent any kind of data breach? 

Retailers are quite conscious of the data breach and do not share the entire data with the technologists. This is a sentiment which is a generally accepted thought and principle from the major brick and mortar retailers. On one hand though this is good for the consumers, the retailers are left with a huge amount of data which cannot be used without sharing with others.