Just how solid are brick-and-mortar stores? For every brand that closes a store, two others open a new one, according to an August 2018 IHL Group study. And certain segments — such as food and grocery, drugstores, convenience stores, and superstores and warehouses — see almost four openings for every closure. Increasingly, what separates the…

How much do you really know about your customers? The answer goes a long way toward determining how much money your business makes — or loses. That’s why banks and other financial services firms are increasingly using artificial intelligence to get deeper insights into customer needs, wants, habits, risks and more. The lessons learned —…

In recent years, many retailers have rolled out solutions that rely on mobile beacon technology in their stores, only to find that these solutions have failed to yield the results that users craved. The problem hasn’t been with mobile beacons themselves. The technology still holds a lot of potential, which some retailers are using to…

With mass store closures by Sears, Toys “R” Us and other major brands, conventional wisdom says brick-and-mortar retail has one foot in the grave. Wrong. Online sales make up just nine percent of all retail sales, according to a new Deloitte study. The study also found that brick-and-mortar sales are actually growing — to the…

A few years ago, regional and midsized financial institutions raced to deploy customer-facing mobile apps, afraid of being left behind. When the dust settled, managers at many banks took a look around and realized that their apps were near copies of their competitors’. This was because most financial institutions launched their apps through their core…

Digital transformation is about digitizing manual and analog business tools and practices so organizations work better, such as operate more efficiently, be more responsive to customers or make smarter, more informed decisions. Many businesses — large and small — use radio frequency identification (RFID) technology as a key component of their digital transformation strategies. Here…