Q&A: Girish Somayaji, CEO, DGPay
Girish has a strong background in developing technology-based solutions designed to maximise business efficiency and reduce operational costs, as well as hands-on experience in developing cutting edge customer-facing applications for retail businesses like Sainsbury’s, Specsavers and Virgin Money.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
StoreGeni is DGPay’s flagship product. It’s born out of frustration while shopping on a London high street, over a weekend. It’s by experiencing long queues at the check-out, or being unable to find any shop staff to help locate an item somewhere in the store, or to answer questions about a product that the idea of StoreGeni was born.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
Storegeni is a ‘Personal Shopper 2.0’. It’s a mobile app and a plug & play retail platform designed to combine all the convenience of digital shopping with the irreplaceable physical shopping experience to offer customers a frictionless phygital in-store experience.
StoreGeni was first developed in the 2nd half of 2020 as a Scan, Pay and Go mobile app. Following some market research and discussions with multiple retailers, it became clear that retailers were looking for a solution that was more holistic and that could reduce frictions at different stages of the in-store customer journey. Storegeni evolved into a modular & holistic solution in 2021.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
There is no new hardware needed to benefit from StoreGeni. StoreGeni has been developed to integrate seamlessly with any retailer’s existing ERP, CRM, PoS, and reporting suites. StoreGeni has been developed using cloud computing architecture and offers plug & play API’s which minimise implementation, maintenance costs and can be live in any retailer’s store within a matter of few weeks.
StoreGeni has been developed to meet all retailer’s specific requirements and to reduce friction in their stores. Its modular design allows StoreGeni to remove any pressure points within any given in-store customer journey.
StoreGeni is easy to use, secure and offers strong data protection.
What advantage does StoreGeni add to a retail business?
- It offers much more than any existing scan & pay solutions – There is nothing like it on the market.
- StoreGeni can be installed in any store in less than 1 month. The integration model is unique allowing a swift integration with any existing ERP, CRM, PoS, and reporting suites.
- Because the implementation is simple, StoreGeni offers low integration and maintenance costs.
- Partnership with AWS & Stripe to offer greater usability, accessibility, security, and data protection. Open banking based payment options can also be considered.
- Unique modular approach to adapt to any retailer’s requirements.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
Implementation of StoreGeni is easy. The retailer simply needs to provide the following:
- A CSV based product catalogue (including Products, Variants, Stock details, Reviews and Promotional details) or provide access to the Inventory system.
- Import of the product catalogue or integrate to fetch the product catalogue details onto StoreGeni
- Set an account with preferred payment provider.
- Install relevant in-store communication to encourage customer to download StoreGeni and start accessing all the features offered by StoreGeni while strolling through the store.
Success is measured through customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and increased value of the shopping basket.
Are there other companies you partner with?
We can partner with payment providers, loyalty programmes and other SaaS propositions designed for retailers.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2022?
People have enjoyed shopping online while the stores were closed during the pandemic. As people ‘re-discover’ their favourite stores, retailers need to provide solutions to make shopping in-store as convenient as on-line shopping and possibly more rewarding to encourage repeat visits. StoreGeni has been especially designed to address the need for retailers to convince customers to come back to their store and reinforce that brick & mortar shopping isn’t obsolete.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
Becoming a tech partner of any retailer to help them maximise the potential of their stores, provide first-class customer experience and to offer a suitable alternative to digital shopping for digital savvy customers.
To find out how StoreGeni can help your retail operation, click here to visit the website or click here to Link with them.
