Retail’s digital transformation was already well underway before COVID-19 arrived and turned the industry on its head. Today, retailers who have reopened for business are still navigating complex challenges around social distancing and significant staffing shortages, with retail currently experiencing one of the highest increases in job openings of any industry, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is especially true for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as they’re still building the resilience to withstand a major disruption like the pandemic.
On the other hand, if your stores are still closed, you are innovating as you learn to run your business remotely and serve customers online. For SMBs, it’s an opportunity to adapt to the ever-changing digital environment and ultimately keep up the pace.
Either way, mobile technology can provide solutions to help you automate, save labor and come back stronger than ever as the industry returns to normal.
Redundant workflows of the past
If you’re a small retail store owner or manager, chances are you’re juggling as many devices as you are tasks. Your day starts before you even leave the house, as you check inventory, yesterday’s sales, your customer relationship management (CRM) and social media from your laptop. During the time it takes you to get to the store, you check emails and respond to text messages on your phone.
Once you get to the store, you have to reauthenticate logins on your work desktop to access the same websites and accounts you were just looking at. And before you get out on the store floor, you need to print out planograms, inventory outages, compliance checklists and schedules.
Throughout the day, you bounce back and forth between the floor and the back office to accomplish all the administrative responsibilities that pile up while you’re out serving customers and supporting associates.
This is the way your workflow has always been, so you may not even recognize how inconvenient it is for the growth of your small business. But wouldn’t it be great if you could do everything — from the store floor to the back office and everything in between — using one device instead?
The mobile-only future of retail technology
Now consider a contrasting vision. Over breakfast, you skim emails on your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G smartphone — a three-in-one powerhouse that lets you consolidate your productivity to a single device — then check your CRM and social media apps at the same time. You need to write an urgent response to a vendor, so you quickly connect your Galaxy Z Fold3 to a monitor in your home office. This instantly launches Samsung DeX, a mobile-powered desktop experience. With a paired keyboard and mouse, you type up the email in one window while referencing the supplier’s online catalog in an adjacent window. Your phone has become your PC.
Arriving at the store, you again dock your smartphone and launch DeX. All your apps are already open and ready to go. If you do need to authenticate again, all it takes is a touch of the fingerprint scanner. Now, when you head out on the store floor, you don’t have to print anything out. This is increasingly beneficial today as staffing shortages have pushed many store managers out to the sales floor — minimizing time spent in the office away from the actual business. Now, you can access all your apps and files directly from your mobile device.
Your Galaxy Z Fold3 becomes your business lifeline throughout the day, so you can see more and do more.
Show and tell
When a customer asks a question about a particular item they’ve pulled up on their phone, you can quickly bring that item up on your Galaxy Z Fold3, rather than taking the customer’s phone into your hands. You can even connect the smartphone to an in-store digital signage display to review additional options with the customer. Using your phone as the touchpad, you can point, click and share information on the larger screen.
Quickly track inventory
When you head to the delivery dock to review new inventory, you can use a camera-based scanning app to capture barcodes and confirm everything has arrived. If some boxes have sustained damage, you can quickly take photos on your Galaxy Z Fold3 and email the documentation to the distributor.
Upselling
Say you have a meeting with your most loyal customer to discuss new options for their remodel. To prepare, you can take several photos of the current design choices. With Galaxy Z Fold3’s optional highly responsive S Pen, you can annotate the photos to illustrate your ideas. During the meeting, you can use Samsung DeX to connect your Galaxy Z Fold3 to the meeting room display, where you can share the photos with the customer and review the designer’s initial proposal. It’s a collaborative discussion, and you use your smartphone and S Pen to power an impromptu whiteboarding session on the meeting room display. At the end of the discussion, you can share the drawings and notes via email right from your phone. The device also supports near-field communications (NFC) for payments — so you can take a deposit on the design you just created with the customer.
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This seamless experience can be achieved today using Galaxy Z Fold3 smartphone and DeX, giving you accelerated productivity through your entire workday — from your home office routine to customer service to front-of-house administration to back-office meetings.
Using Galaxy Z Fold3 with 5G, you can work at hyperspeed, with near real-time file interactivity. Galaxy Z Fold3’s all-day-plus battery stands up to the demands of 5G — and store managers’ long workdays.
Mobile-only helps streamline IT
Moving to mobile-only doesn’t just simplify work; it also simplifies IT management. Fewer devices means less upfront cost and less time spent on device setup and maintenance.
Today’s IT retail teams are often caught managing dual infrastructure — traditional desktops and mobile devices — as well as an array of single-purpose tools. By moving to mobile-only, teams can focus on one platform and have more time to drive strategic projects.
Working with customer information comes with some security risks, whether you’re an SMB or large enterprise retailer, which is one reason businesses often don’t use mobile devices for everything. But the right security platform and tools make it possible to perform all of your duties — from social media to mobile point of sale (mPOS) — from one device without fear of data leakage or breaches. With the built-in, defense-grade security of Samsung Knox, you can remain productive while tapping into the power of security and manageability from the chip up.
The bottom line in streamlining your retail technology means more time serving customers and employees and less time juggling devices. The combination of a Galaxy Z Fold3 smartphone and Samsung DeX gives you the power of performance and speed, adjustable to your needs as you transition between different types of tasks. As an SMB in today’s new retail environment, it simply makes sense to manage your tasks from a single, versatile device that gives you the connectivity and functionality you need, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. It’s time to grab this moment and make it a transformational one.
Get exclusive discounts, financing and other deals on Samsung business solutions such as Galaxy Z Fold3 5G through Samsung Advantage. And explore the benefits of providing your employees mobile devices on the sales floor in this free white paper.
