All Your Retail Tech Questions, Answered:
An Interview with GoSpotCheck VP of Sales Cory Knopp
Our VP of Sales, Cory Knopp, recently spoke with Conversations on Retail about the current state of technology in retail, and how our image recognition AI solution is empowering frontline workers and improving profitability. Watch the full video here, and check out some of Cory’s responses to some trending industry questions below.
What defines a high-performing retailer today?
There are two main attributes that separate high-performing retailers from the rest. The first one is adaptability and agility. A lot of times it’s not the company with the biggest data set or the best marketing, it’s the companies that are agile and can adapt to the changing landscape. One of the things that I refer back to often is the Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) trend. Before COVID, that was already somewhat of a thing, but during COVID we saw retailers strategically innovate and deploy those types of programs. We saw that the retailers who put structured processes around BOPIS and were constantly iterating to make improvements are the ones that mitigated some of the damaging effects of COVID.
The second element is contextual data utilization. In retail, it’s hard to keep your eye on the ball at all times, especially if you’re an above-store leader and you have a lot of stores to think about and you can’t be everywhere at once. At GoSpotCheck, we feel a really important part of keeping your eye on the context and the conditions of what’s going on in your stores will help people be everywhere without having to be everywhere. So really the second thing is putting that context to the big data sets that they’re seeing and examining.
What retail execution inefficiencies does GoSpotCheck help solve?
There are a lot of things that can impact the efficiency of a retail operations team— legacy processes and procedures, old tools, pen and paper spreadsheets—all of those things that take you away from the flow of work can lead to inefficiencies. Another area of inefficiency is communication from headquarters to the store—whether it’s via text, email, Whatsapp, etc. One of the major roles of GoSpotCheck is helping streamline and centralize a lot of that communication to and from the store. It’s not just about watching what the store is doing, it’s about giving the store a structured and effective way to communicate back to HQ.
How is GoSpotCheck adapting to emerging retail trends?
There are a lot of emerging trends driving the retail landscape—unattended retail, inventory tracking, and AI-driven automation. What we focus on at GoSpotCheck is more about the capability of the platform to augment and support the work of the human. With the emergence of AI, there have been some organizations that have tried to take the human completely out of their mix. What we’re trying to do at GoSpotCheck is provide technology, regardless of form—whether that’s a phone or a tablet or an autonomous device— that enables and empowers the decision-making process of the human. It’s really about understanding that humans are still retailer’s biggest asset. They’re the ones that are out there making adjustments on the floor and to the shelves, so our focus has been on how to support them.
What retail transformations do you foresee, and how is GoSpotCheck preparing?
It isn’t about replacing the human being—it’s about supporting and augmenting the human being to make decisions about the millions of data points that we have access to every day. At GoSpotCheck, we’re thinking about things like augmented reality, large data, and our integration with key partners. One of the other things that we’re doing to continue to support the retailer customers that we serve is creating some valuable partnerships with titans like Salesforce and Google, including our augmented reality which we had the opportunity to demo on Google Pixel devices. There are a lot of fun and interesting things that are here now. We’re not talking about years down the line, they’re available now—and we’re taking advantage of them.
How will GoSpotCheck’s role evolve as retail technology advances?
With all the amazing technological advancements we see today, we remain steadfast in taking the human-first approach. One of the ways we see that evolving is the form factors—maybe it’s a phone, maybe it’s glasses, maybe it is a robot we can’t really be sure, but what we do know is that people want their data faster, more accurate, and more predictive. When we talk about shelf execution data, it can be relatively hard to define. However, there are a lot of data sets around inventory, industry trends, and particular product categories. When you start looking at shelf execution and combine it with some of those other data sets, you can start doing some cool stuff with predictive analytics. recommendations on what should be there versus what shouldn’t be there, and recommendations to swap out products, etc. I foresee GoSpotCheck taking a front-row seat in that evolution of how we’re going to optimize our technology and help people optimize their stores in the future.
Conversations On Retail is a one-of-a-kind platform where suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts come together to exchange ideas, share insights, and pass along best practices—all while expanding their professional networks.
To learn more about how GoSpotCheck can drive bottom-line impact for your retail team and help you adapt to the ever-changing retail landscape, follow us on LinkedIn.
