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Defining a New Customer Experience
Retail competition is fierce. A number of factors may drive customers away from one store and directly to a competitor. Amidst an overabundance of commodity items, customers expect more selection, value, convenience and entertainment. If an item is unavailable, shoppers simply go elsewhere to find the merchandise. This is one of the core reasons for the substantial customer loyalty declines found in retail. To win in the customer loyalty arena, retailers must compete more aggressively and deliver a more compelling, memorable shopping experience at a personalized level.

To achieve these goals, retailers have long acknowledged that it's critical to get store managers out of the office and onto the selling floor. However, few enterprise-class mobility solutions targeted store managers and executives in the past. These mobile retail professionals are typically equipped with consumer-grade personal digital assistants (PDAs) that fall short of the capabilities needed for many of today's business applications. Until now, the lack of enterprise-level mobility presented a barrier to getting managers and supervisors back into the selling environment.