HFS Highlight: Capgemini launches CornerShop to transform the in-store shopping experience

In February 2021, Capgemini, SharpEnd and The Drum launched a new retail innovation store, the CornerShop. It’s an innovative brick-and-mortar store based out of London (Occupying the ground floor of The Drum Labs) that redefines and reimagines the shopping experience in a post-COVID world. The store will explore the transformation of shopping and customer engagement in the ‘new normal’ using emerging technologies.  Consumers will be able to purchase items in-store at Cornershop and experience new shopping experiences across food and drink, cosmetics and fashion. It will also help retailers understand how digital innovation and new technologies can better serve the customer and streamline operations.

COVID-19 has changed the world, leaving last customer behavior shifts, and cause retailers and brands to radically rethink and replan their store and omnichannel transformation agendas.  These businesses need to innovate their customer experience and business model to keep them alive and attract fresh consumers. Brick-and-mortar in particular needs to evolve to engage more meaningfully with its customers, getting customer experience to another level than merely being a point of sale.

CornerShop is a live testing environment for brands, retailers, and shoppers to get hands-on with the latest technologies

CornerShop can be defined as a hybrid store of tomorrow, that uses digital innovation to enhance the customer experience of a brick-and-mortar shop as a ‘real store’, whilst also acting as a live lab for retailers and brands to learn how to improve in-store operations and customer engagement model.

CornerShop is split into four corners, as showed in exhibit 1.

Exhibit 1: Different sections in the CornerShop store

Source: Capgemini

The success or failure of the shopping experience will be what makes the difference in the post-pandemic world of stores, and exploring this is at the heart of Cornershop. Once the visitor enters the store, their mobile phone becomes the retail experience remote control, helping them engage with the new shopping concepts. Capgemini has experimented with technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Augmented Reality (AR), computer vision, and LIDAR and Photogrammetry to enhance the customer experience.

Some of the shopping experiences currently testing in-store have been explained in exhibit 2:

Exhibit 2: Shopping experiences currently testing in-store

Source: Capgemini

“While the long-term impact of the pandemic on retail stores is yet to fully reveal itself, the events of this year have radically escalated retailers’ need to build out their digital capabilities. The industry is on the cusp of a new era, driven by advances in technology that are totally reshaping consumer expectations. A glimpse at what retail could look like in the near future, CornerShop has been specially designed to bring to life the most innovative technologies and show brands how they can blend the physical and digital to create a seamless, differentiated in-store experience.”

Steve Hewett, Global VP, Retail Customer Experience, Capgemini Invent 

Bottom line: CornerShop will act as a retail innovation center for Capgemini and will also fuel innovation solutions in the coming years

Brick and -Mortar is not dead, and retailers need to work on brick-and-mortar customer experience in the digital era with entirely new thinking. Post pandemic traditional stores will transform into technology showrooms where the retailer will be using AR, VR, AI, IoT, Bigdata, making shopping a more personalized experience for their customers. So, CornerShop will act as an innovation center for Capgemini to experiment with new solutions. Capgemini will monitor in-store customer data or feedback, which will help upgrade the existing solutions and roll out different types of retail solutions to fulfill unmet customer needs.