Mirum’s Store Associate App Delivers Efficiency and Agility to Retailers

The Experience Manager Mobile team challenged some of Adobe’s technology partners to create Proof of Concept (POC) apps that highlight the possibilities of AEM Mobile and other Adobe Marketing Cloud services. Mirum developed an app to improve communications between retailer headquarters and retail locations to showcase how – with the right tools, technologies, and systems – apps can be developed quickly and serve as valuable business tools. Ensemble and Valtech recently created some new POC apps that are worth checking out, too.

We spoke with Lorenzo Vallone, SVP and CTO at Mirum, a global digital marketing agency and long-time Adobe technology partner about their example app solution that is personalized, targeted and available on and offline so store associates can use it whether or not they have continuous Internet access.

Adobe: Tell us about the in-store associate app you built and the business challenges it solves.

Vallone: Mirum recognized in talking with clients, agencies and with Adobe that there was a need to transform the way that retailers communicate between headquarters and all of the employees at retail store locations. Today, many retailers have an antiquated way of providing information to stores like sending pdfs to store locations which then have to be printed out and distributed or sending printed workbooks which is time consuming and expensive. Oftentimes the training and merchandising information is out of date as soon as it reaches the store associates hands. This means that the staff doesn’t have the latest information so they aren’t able to keep up with requirements and the stores risk falling out of compliance by not presenting a consistent shopping experience. Bottom line, they are missing revenue opportunities.

In order to show how AEM Mobile could solve this business problem, we built a proof of concept app that enables retailers from headquarters to create, manage and distribute content and information about merchandising and training, to hundreds of store associates across all retail locations.

Adobe: How does the app improve communications between retail headquarters and dispersed retail location?

Vallone: Not only does the app provide an effective way to share up-to-the-minute information to stores, it enables powerful two-way communication. AEM Mobile makes it easy to leverage device features like the camera and video camera, allowing the store associates to communicate back to headquarters. Imagine that the store associate in a remote location receives planograms, visual merchandising content and product information on their tablet on their mobile phone. They can now use the same device to take photos of the store after they’ve configured it and to take live video streams and share with headquarters all in real time. All that content is being captured on the cloud, stored in the assets component of AEM so it creates a completely closed loop solution.

Adobe: How does your POC rely on content from AEM?

Vallone: The solution leverages the built-in AEM content management system as a key method for creating, editing and publishing content to the app. This makes it very easy to pull existing, approved digital assets and rich, interactive content into the app. By leveraging AEM we can create, edit and publish visually stunning mobile app content using the powerful and easy to use point and click functionality of AEM authoring. AEM Mobile with AEM app authoring delivers a scalable, enterprise-level solution that can support hundreds of thousands of content pages.

With this solution, you don’t need to hire teams of HTML designers and developers to produce content for your apps. By leveraging AEM Mobile content authoring, you can empower non-technical, business managers and content producers to create and publish mobile content and leverage creative and software development resources for more valuable tasks.

As new content is created in AEM and published to the AEM Mobile app, mobile app users are automatically notified of updates and have instant access to the new content without having to download the app again. Published app content is then available to the user both online and offline.

Adobe: What is Mirum’s approach to mobile when it comes to digital marketing and communications?

Vallone: There are just so many different touch points where mobile can make an organization more efficient. What we try to do is we look at strategy. We leverage our ability to have creative design and technology integration to really look at the entire architecture of mobility. That’s where AEM Mobile as a platform is extremely helpful for us.

We really want clients to understand that mobility is not just about having a single app. And it’s certainly not about having a proliferation of apps out there. It really is about management of mobile experiences, personalization of those experiences, and ensuring effective distribution of the content throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about targeting internal employees or stakeholders or external customers, consistency of the message really needs to be part of the overall experience. The ability for a client to fully harness mobile as a platform across its entire enterprise is what we’re looking for and what we’re able to do with AEM Mobile. Read more about using content from AEM in AEM Mobile apps.

Learn more about Mirum here

Watch this on demand webinar to learn more about bridging digital and in-store experiences with mobile merchandising

Read this solutions brief to learn more about AEM Mobile for retail.