Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions (TGCS) is Toshiba’s retail arm. What was initially primarily a supplier of checkout hardware and related services has now evolved into a service and solution provider, with major global customers such as Walmart and Carrefour, as well as many local retailers in various segments.
Like any business, TGCS is also facing a major transformation in the market. ‘The customer has new requirements and expectations and needs a completely different approach than say ten years ago. Young people have grown up with the internet and want to be able to shop online and offline 24/7,’ says Dries De Beul, General Manager of Solutions at TGCS Europe.
‘The consumer’s new expectations are leading to new solutions and services. Shopper engagement and personalised loyalty are becoming important. Shops have to adapt to the customer journey of their customers. And operationally, retailers want to offer efficiency and immediate value. Consider, for example, the implementation of self-checkout, scan & go and e-commerce scenarios such as click & collect, etc. This transformation requires us to integrate our products and services as much as possible into our customers’ existing legacy IT infrastructure, which is impossible to discard.’
For Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, the evolution above meant a necessary transition from product selling to solution selling. ‘Our salespeople have, as it were, become consultants,’ Dries De Beul continues. ‘And that requires knowledge, but also easily manageable information that our people can consult together with the customer just before or even during a customer visit.’ To obtain this information from employees who have direct contact with customers, TGCS relies on FLOWSPARKS.
‘We wanted a tool that is accessible and presents information attractively. At the same time, the tool had to be fun to use and interactive. And the information naturally had to be presented in a consistent, structured way. It was also important that we could use the tool on a tablet in the presence of our customers,’ Dries De Beul adds to the list of requirements.
Toshiba also wanted external partners to be able to add their content easily. Preferably, the solution was also to be affordable, and Toshiba had to be able to rely on easily accessible, good support. Finally, the new tool would be used in a multinational environment and multilingualism was an absolute requisite, allowing translations of existing content to be imported into the tool easily and quickly. ‘Europe is a multilingual environment. We speak 24 official languages. Language should not prevent us from conveying information compellingly,’ says Rene Zuleger, Engagement Manager at TGCS. ‘It is very easy to adapt languages in FLOWSPARKS.’
FLOWSPARKS is very intuitive and easy to use. After literally four calls and five emails with the FLOWSPARKS team, I was already familiar with it. After a month, I was ready to create my own content and introduce it to the team.
As Engagement Manager, Rene Zuleger’s job is to get people interested in Toshiba’s retail solutions via FLOWSPARKS. ‘It is difficult to motivate people to use a new tool, especially when it concerns complex matters. But FLOWSPARKS meets all our expectations and is exactly what we need,’ Rene Zuleger says. ‘FLOWSPARKS is very intuitive and easy to use. After literally four calls and five emails with the FLOWSPARKS team, I was already familiar with it. After a month, I was ready to create my own content and introduce it to the team. I was perfectly supported in this by the FLOWSPARKS team. But the help function within the platform itself is also excellent and complete. With a tablet and the right template for your learning objective, you’re soon up and running and moreover, you’re sure that your story will look good.’
Rene Zuleger always first asks himself what he wants to say and chooses a template depending on that. Then he generates content in FLOWSPARKS. ‘As a power user, you can really make beautiful things,’ Rene Zuleger says. ‘Animated graphics allow you to create truly beautiful things simply, so that you can display complex or even boring content very beautifully and attractively. Using FLOWSPARKS, I can enter into an interactive dialogue with our salespeople, which is much more fun than PowerPoint’s one-way traffic.’
‘Say I have to convey a message to my sales teams. Then I don’t want to concern myself with the tool itself, with the program. FLOWSPARKS lets us focus entirely on the content without having to spend too much time on the format or the infrastructure. And because it’s completely web-based, I actually only need a browser.’
FLOWSPARKS’ first major baptism of fire at Toshiba was in February at Euroshop2020, the world’s largest retail fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. ‘Each of the employees at our stand had a tablet. We displayed all the solutions we presented at our stand interactively in FLOWSPARKS on our tablets,’ Rene Zuleger explains. ‘Using a map, you could click through to the different solutions, where our salespeople found more information. FLOWSPARKS helps them convey information compellingly. FLOWSPARKS offers so many possibilities that we keep looking forward to what else we can do with it.’
