Cegid’s Innovation Store: the new retail challenges

The Innovation Store of Cegid — a software and services giant in France, and worldwide, of which Aton is a Platinum Partner together with Allspark and Aton Allspark Iberica — is one of the reasons that made us take a plane on a warm day in late April.

I have always admired and somewhat envied French grandeur. The feeling that reaches you as soon as you step onto the entrance steps of Cegid’s Lyon office is extraordinary: the huge spaces emptied by smart working take your breath away, but at the same time leave room for creativity and ideas.

We are talking about digital innovation in the retail world. A sector that has been literally shaken by the pandemic — not only it, I might add — and that needs to find new life and lymph from the experiences of the last two years.

The wait is over: together with Cegid, we want to use what we have learnt to complete a journey of retail digitisation that started many years before.

Customers are ready for a different, immersive shopping experience,
that truly merges the digital and physical worlds.

This is not rhetoric, nor is it a war between online and physical shops, but a true, almost indissoluble compensation in which the customer’s shopping experience can be merged, minimising the differences with online shopping.

It is difficult to give an order to the many possibilities that combine to enrich the experience that the retail world will offer:

• It starts by equipping sales assistants with all the tools and data to help you choose: a kind touchscreen invites us to sign up for a kind of affiliate programme to improve our experience
• The till is no longer the only place where you shop, you can pay anywhere within the shop, even in self-checkout if the value of the goods allows it
• All items in the shop are constantly counted and monitored by invisible sensors which communicate their availability to the assistants and warn if any item goes out the door without having ‘mistakenly’ passed through the till
• You can return items bought online, or buy online and pick them up in store. Or buy in shop and receive at home after trying on an item in the right size, but in a definitely awful colour
• If we chose to pay at the till, the items are not read by a barcode, but simply placed on the table which ‘reads’ the label invisibly
• The store manager and his supervisors see sales and stock data in real time, even thousands of kilometres away

Innovative, science-fiction technologies? Not exactly.

We are talking about established and improved technologies, which we are ready to deploy without any infrastructural changes for the shops.

In my next article I will elaborate on how to support companies on a journey towards digital that does not start at the shop, but well before.

Stay tuned!