As Jon Lloyd sees it, leveraging UCaaS and SD-WAN technology to meet retail business challenges is a lot like using your athletic skills wisely in competitive sports. Every player has strengths and limitations, and you can’t control what the competition does. However, you can control your own effort, and if you do that, you can win, says Lloyd, who is a senior solution design engineer for CBTS.
Jon’s been with CBTS for the past six years, designing voice and data systems that help retailers and other businesses of different sizes gain ground over their rivals by getting ahead of the technology curve. Over the past year, he’s focused on SD-WAN as an alternative to the much more costly and less efficient MPLS.
To get a solid leg up on the competition, says Jon, C-Suite executives need to take advantage of technology as a tool for fostering better interactions with their customers as well as for improving communications among employees. Here are more of Jon’s thoughts on how technology can help retailers overcome business challenges.
In their advertising, retailers have always highlighted their own competitive advantages, whether that’s being the best, the biggest, or the least expensive. Now, however, there’s an increasing push among retailers to emphasize their mobile apps and other aspects of the online experience. I call this the Amazon effect, or ‘Keeping up with the Joneses.’
For example, Starbucks a few years back came out with a pioneering mobile app. Dunkin’ Donuts recently followed suit with a huge, six-month advertising blitz for its own new mobile app.
Today, even a small pizza shop needs an online presence. Restaurants use their web pages to play up promotions like, “buy one pizza, get one free.” Companies like Grubhub work with restaurants of all sizes to provide web-enabled meal delivery.
With the right call center technology in place, for instance, a small retailer can look like a Fortune 500 corporation, providing an omnichannel experience to customers.
Through Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) systems, a retailer can receive a fully managed, company-wide network that might include Internet access as well as services such as call centers, VoIP, instant messaging, email, videoconferencing, and data.
This is all without any upfront capital expense. Retailers pay only for the services they need, on a monthly OpEx basis.
UCaaS architectures are also highly scalable, enabling companies to quickly add or drop branch locations and apps in keeping with the business climate.
SD-WAN technology permits easy and affordable any-to-any routing among headquarters and far-flung branch offices, while also letting businesses give priority to any apps they want.
On the whole, retailers don’t want to be technology nerds. They don’t want to be spending their time counting how many packets are crossing the wires. What they do want is to attract customers who’ll spend money on their goods and services.
CBTS is not a chef. We don’t know how to whip up delicious meals for hundreds or thousands of guests a night. What we do know is how to support a retailer’s business challenges and brand messaging with technology.
We have 140 years of experience as a technology innovator, and 20 years as a UCaaS provider. CBTS allows retailers to keep up with – and even to far surpass – the “Joneses,” by offloading the IT portion of the competitive equation and letting retailers concentrate on what they do best – their core businesses.
To learn more about how CBTS is helping retailers leverage technology, please click here.