Curbside Pickup to Help Retailers Meet Demands of COVID-19
Kibo, a leader in cloud commerce, is releasing Curbside Pickup, a new fulfillment offering designed for retailers to meet growing demand for buy online, pick up curbside options (also known as BOPAC) resulting from COVID-19. In order to support retailers through the uncertain future of COVID-19, in Q4 and beyond, Kibo is offering promotional discounts throughout 2020 to help retailers launch curbside pickup operations in 30 days and weave it into their long-term order fulfillment strategy.
Many retailers quickly adopted curbside pickup fulfillment to serve customers in a safe manner while maintaining social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Curbside pickup, which is a subset of the growing trend of buy online pickup in store (BOPIS), has been embraced by customers. According to the NRF, half of consumers have used different types of BOPIS/BOPAC as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more than 90 percent of those who have tried it said curbside was convenient.
Yet managing curbside pickup presents its own sets of challenges to the customer experience, especially for retailers who did not have BOPAC operations prior to the pandemic. Two of the primary issues are confusion that arises from inadequate or lack of messaging between customers and stores during the pickup process, and difficulty implementing a customer notification system for curbside quickly and at a low cost.
To address these challenges, Kibo has created an easy-to-use and fast-to-implement curbside pickup web application designed to optimize the curbside experience for both retailers and their customers that can be ready in under 30 days. In addition to addressing these challenges, Kibo has added in an extra layer of personalization, powered by Monetate and Certona, to create a more personalized curbside experience.
Curbside enables an easy transition for retailers to experience Kibo’s best-in-class Unified Commerce Platform and solutions such as order management, ecommerce and personalization solutions. Kibo’s modular, microservices offerings also enable clients to quickly implement additional omnichannel offerings including BOPIS, ship from store (SFS) and Personalized Recommendations.
Curbside benefits include:
• Fulfillment UI: A simple user interface that enables in-store associates to trigger customized, two-way communication between the retailer and customer through SMS and email during curbside fulfillment.
• Customer Notifications: Automated notifications with order status updates, prompts to schedule and inform store of pickup intent, QR codes to confirm order identification at pickup, and fulfillment confirmations once the process is complete.
• Retailer Notifications: SMS/email messages for store associates to notify of orders assigned to the store, when customers are en route or arrived for their orders, and detailed instructions on where to leave orders and how to identify customers.
• Integrated Yet Independent: Retailers can purchase and use a standalone instance, regardless of their current order management or ecommerce technology.
• Lightweight Implementation: Retailers can go-live with curbside pickup within 30 days, with the solution only requiring order, location and customer data from anywhere in the tech stack.
“Curbside pickup was an integral part of retailer order fulfillment during the early days of COVID-19, and is here to stay,” said Ram Venkataraman, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Kibo. “Kibo is excited to provide an updated, frictionless curbside offering that can be easily integrated into an omnichannel commerce strategy. We’re excited to build off the learnings of several successful curbside implementations of our order management platform to deliver a differentiated, superior solution.”