The retail industry has evolved from the realm of traditional brick and mortar stores to individual customers who “click” and “like” and have increasingly high expectations for convenience including home delivery and “Buy Online, Pickup in Store.” Today’s shoppers have an “I want it now” attitude and expect immediate gratification for purchases across multiple channels. A single “like” on a fashion e-store can attract the attention of hundreds more shoppers, thereby increasing the prospects of a purchase, either online or in stores.

“Retail in real-time” is the new imperative with customers expecting a seamless experience in the store or on the web. Traditional retailers can leverage their investment in people and stores as a competitive advantage over online-only retailers. However, they must invest in technology to protect the customer experience. “Previ-ously, stores were staid places where assortments and go-to-market strategies were planned months in advance. Now, they must be able to anticipate and respond to customer demands in real-time,” says Prashanth Palakurthi, Founder and CEO, Reflexis Systems. Reflexis provides software that helps retailers simplify store operations processes such as task execution, labor scheduling, and omni-channel fulfillment ─ and directs best-practice response to late-breaking alerts and trends.

“Stores are bombarded with disparate systems, applications, reports, and metrics that are supposed to help them serve customers,” Palakurthi explains. “All these systems with varying interfaces have the opposite effect of helping store associates serve customers. The applications don’t work the same, causing training headaches. They keep store managers in the back office, and take time away from customer service.”

The Reflexis StorePulse real-time store execution application solves these problems by freeing teams from having to search for the best way to respond to real-time events and customer demand. StorePulse provides a mobile dashboard to update and respond to multiple store systems ─ giving back time and aligning actions to provide optimal associate/customer engagement.

“Instead of having to work with and switch in and out of multiple apps, StorePulse provides a single place to view alerts from and update numerous store-facing systems,” Palakurthi says. “Alerts can come from Reflexis task management, labor operations, and retail auditing solutions, and also from third-party traffic intelligence, Big Data, social media, and other sources.