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August 11, 2020

Retail solution provider gets to the finish line fast with Azure IoT solutions for reimagined in-store experiences

Closing the retail gap between brick-and-mortar and the online space takes imagination, ingenuity, and innovative technology. Ombori and its part owner, ITAB, a leading European consumer experience solution provider for retailers, help stores bring the in-person shopping experience in line with the convenience of online purchasing. They’re overcoming the traditional barriers of low connectivity in stores with Microsoft Azure IoT Edge. Now they’re responding to a global pandemic by creating solutions that help retailers with social distancing. Ombori and ITAB rely on Microsoft solutions to respond quickly to market demand, swiftly creating digital products at scale.

Ombori

“The Azure IoT stack gives us a ready-made foundation for building our products—and tremendous flexibility. We delivered our first pandemic-related solution live in the store within 72 hours of meeting the customer to outline requirements. That wouldn’t be possible without a sophisticated foundation.”

Andreas Hassellöf, Chief Executive Officer, Ombori

Microsoft approached digital experience provider Ombori with a high-profile opportunity: Create a novel, engaging customer experience for the H&M flagship store in New York City’s Times Square. In response, the Swedish company delivered a Microsoft Azure–based solution that delights customers and promotes in-store purchases. Specializing in innovations for a rapidly evolving world, the Stockholm-based solution provider focuses on the finance and retail sectors. With other offices in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Makati City in the Philippines, the company and its partner/co-owner ITAB strive to be a multicultural organization, using the talents of an international team to aid retailers around the world with its Ombori Grid platform. 

Understanding the brick-and-mortar lag

E-commerce has surged far ahead of brick-and-mortar stores. Andreas Hassellöf, Chief Executive Officer at Ombori, knows why. “Physical stores haven’t caught up with the very high pace of innovation in e-commerce,” he says. “And when even mature, well-known brick-and-mortars invested in technology, they focused on the online part of the business. That deepened silos within those companies and kept technology in the store at a standstill.” 

He recounts the issues: The few touchscreens available often don’t work—they’re slow and “laggy.” They present static information that doesn’t add value, when what shoppers really need is the interactive help found online, such as recommendations for alternatives to out-of-stock items or additional inventory locations. And they reinforce those silos between the online and physical shopping experiences; often a purchase made online can’t be exchanged in-store. Until now, it all added up to a frustrating in-store experience. Hassellöf had one word for his aspirations for the ideal brick-and-mortar experience: frictionless.

Getting an 86 percent customer response rate with a reimagined in-store experience

Partner company ITAB was inspired by Ombori’s ideas for updating the in-store retail experience. “The missing piece was a bridge between online and offline business,” says Mikael Bengtsson, Product Manager at ITAB Group. ”We believed that Ombori’s vision for a unified experience in a store was the perfect solution.” 

The overall vision for the H&M flagship store was to engage customers in the store with an alluring experience that offered shopper advantage—hence, the H&M Voice Interactive Mirror. Shoppers take selfies in front of the mirror. It converses with them, inserts the selfie on one of a selection of magazine covers for a tongue-in-cheek souvenir, and sends the image to the shopper’s mobile device for social media sharing. That interactive experience was a win for H&M, returning an 86 percent response rate for shoppers scanning QR codes to share their experiences on social media. 

The technology that Ombori deployed to such enchanting effect is part of the Microsoft Azure solution family.

Realizing the vision with Azure

“We first began building our solution with a different platform,” says Hassellöf. “But we heard great things about Microsoft Azure, and when we entered the Microsoft BizSpark program, we pivoted to Azure and never looked back.” Ombori took advantage of what is now the Microsoft for Startups program, gaining access to the technologies and resources that it needed to execute on Ombori Grid, its vision for a span of creative retail solutions. Clearly, a range of Azure Cognitive Services was invaluable for the speech and vision recognition needed for the H&M Voice Interactive Mirror to detect and interact with customers. The solution uses Azure IoT to manage devices, supporting workloads during low connectivity with Azure IoT Edge and coordinating communication between devices with Azure IoT Hub. That availability is crucial to Ombori’s goal of changing shopper perception that technology isn’t reliable. Ombori and ITAB monitor and analyze IoT data to optimize decision making with Azure Time Series Insights, adding location intelligence with Azure Maps for improved location data.

The company delivers fast response time with Azure Cosmos DB for the large data volumes generated by those in-store encounters. “Azure Cosmos DB was a game-changer for us in dealing with transactions at scale while minimizing maintenance,” says Hassellöf. “The Azure cloud platform is solid. It’s a much better fit for us than competing platforms.” 

Ombori solutions are highly flexible; retailers can extend the basic functionality to a variety of devices. Azure IoT Edge containers make it easy to configure and drive digital signage players, for example. Hassellöf’s team stores the content for those digital signs in a content management system that distributes updated content to the digital sign or other device as required, according to the complex logic that they’ve built into the Ombori Grid platform. The platform far exceeds the possibilities of ordinary digital signage solutions, bridging IoT, Cognitive Services, and digital screen technologies to the customer’s mobile device. “By running our solution in containers, we have complete flexibility with what is running on the devices. Yet we can manage it in a unified way,” says Hassellöf.

Bengtsson points to the value that interactive signage can bring to in-store shopping. When visiting a country where they don’t speak the language, shoppers can be reluctant to seek assistance. But the translation capability in Azure Cognitive Services gives them a reassuring option. And some shoppers have speech issues that make them uncomfortable with conversation with salespeople whom they don’t know. “Consumers who have speech issues or who are simply in a hurry may want another option for accessing in-store help,” he says. “We’re able to supply that with Azure Cognitive Services technology.”

Closing the loop for sustainability and safety

Engaging retail solutions like the H&M Voice Interactive Mirror are not just frivolous artifice. Ombori and ITAB customized the technology to help H&M promote sustainable fashion with its Smart Garment Collection Bins. The company enabled IoT at scale on the bottom of each recycling bin, connecting it to Ombori Grid. Now live at the H&M US flagship store on New York’s 5th Avenue, the bins accept used clothing of any brand. H&M uses the platform to educate customers about H&M Group’s sustainability goals and its quest to become a 100% circular fashion company. After interacting with the Smart Garment Collection Bin, the customer receives a link to H&M’s sustainable garment collections. And when the Smart Garment Collection Bins have been deployed to the other US stores, the screen over the collection bin will display the tally of clothing recycled at each store, leading to friendly inter-store competition that encourages recycling and engages customers to help. 

Ombori also harnesses the technology to help essential businesses maximize safety during a pandemic. It created flexible apps that stores use to ensure that the ideal social-distancing capacity is maintained, using digital notifications to make physical lines at pharmacies or grocery stores unnecessary. Ombori’s retailer customers can choose and deploy the apps in the way that makes the most sense for their business. They can either use digital signage on an external display to update shoppers about available shopping times or use push notifications to the mobile devices used by gatekeeper staff, or directly to the shoppers’ mobile devices. “We use the power of the Ombori Grid built on Azure to achieve the solutions that so many are depending on now,” says Bengtsson. 

Hassellöf credits the building-block nature of Azure technologies as a key part of Ombori’s quick pivot to meet market demand. “We would never have had that capacity to create our solution from scratch,” he says. “The Azure IoT stack gives us a ready-made foundation for building our products—and tremendous flexibility. We delivered our first pandemic-related solution live in the store within 72 hours of meeting the customer to outline requirements. That wouldn’t be possible without a sophisticated foundation.”

Find out more about Ombori on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Consumers who have speech issues or who are simply in a hurry may want another option for accessing in-store help. We’re able to supply that with Azure Cognitive Services technology.”

Mikael Bengtsson, Product Manager, ITAB

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