With the recent news of Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, media outlets have been awash with speculation on what this acquisition means for a range of companies. If your business is consumer-facing, you may be concerned about what this acquisition means for you.
At Enplug we often spend time considering how our product can help businesses with issues they face. Here are some of our ideas about standing up to the Amazon behemoth and how Enplug can help:
Employee commitment can improve customer-facing service:
Even Amazon must work on keeping employee morale high in order to provide good customer service. If you want to compete with Amazon, you want your company’s morale to be high too.
One way of keeping employee morale high is to regularly include employees in company information and to reward employees for their above-and-beyond contributions. (For a blog post on what is internal branding click here.)
Using the Enplug App Market to create digital signage for internal communications can be an important part of this employee morale strategy:
Run contests for the best employee recommendations on customer service or cost savings or information gathering. Share all suggestions via digital signage within your business and let employees votes on the best recommendations.
Feature achievements of employees internally(top salesperson, Employee of the Month) or externally (head of a community-wide fundraising drive?).
Share company milestones and then celebrate when those milestones are reached.
Loyal customer commitment can improve company sales:
Frequent buyer programs (which at this moment Amazon does not have) can spur customer repeat purchases. Yet how many companies celebrate these frequent buyers?
Consider (with the permission of the customers) showcasing your loyal fans on your customer-facing digital signage. Display a photo and perhaps a testimonial from these frequent customers. Even better, tie your frequent buyer program into Enplug’s platform using our SDK so that an alert displays as soon as a loyal customer makes a purchase.
Of course you want to encourage your loyal fans to hashtag their social media to appear via the Enplug Social Media Wall App and the Enplug Instagram Wall app on your company’s customer-facing digital signage. Just another way for loyal fans to get recognition.
Amazon makes it easy for people to say yes; so can you!
One thing that makes Amazon so formidable in the marketplace is how easy it is to buy from Amazon or any of the other third-party vendors on the site. Have you reviewed your own buying process to ensure that you make it as easy as possible for your target audiences to buy from you?
One way to do this would be to use social proof to encourage more purchases of your products or services. You could do this by building an app (with the Enplug SDK) to enable your checkout counters to display on large TV displays what everyone is buying. If, for example, you have a special on children’s denim clothes and the digital signage indicates how many people are buying children’s denim clothes right now, you may have encouraged additional sales.
In conclusion, as convenient as purchasing on Amazon can be, the other businesses competing with Amazon do not have to simply roll over and play dead. There are numerous ways that businesses can stand up to the Amazon behemoth, and using digital signage for internal and external communications can be part of your company’s battle plan.
Click here for a free demo on using Enplug for your David and Goliath fight.