The Shifting Retail Landscape
It's no surprise that the retail industry is currently going through a period of rapid transformation. PricewaterhouseCoopers' Retailing 2015: New Frontiers, identifies shifting demographics, household downsizing, consumers who are more educated than ever before and new channel formats as some of the biggest factors in this shift — and ones that retailers must keep in mind in order to maintain focus on customer service to remain successful and profitable.
As we move into 2015, it's more important than ever for brands to make sure they're ready for this new environment. Keep on top of trends to ensure shopping is a positive, personalized and technology-driven experience.
Omnichannel Focus
Consumers expect technology to be integrated into every aspect of their everyday lives. Retailers that are doing the best job of staying competitive and progressive have a concerted focus on the omnichannel — a seamless experience across all channels to integrate their online and digital brand with campaign advertising, catalogs and brick-and-mortar stores.
Furthermore, in the age of social media, consumers have more channels available to them to help with purchasing decisions (e.g., crowdsourcing reviews, finding the best deals, etc.). Retailers that do not partner with the right technologies will risk falling behind and being perceived as less innovative when compared to their competitors.
Challenges to Innovation
It must be noted that staying competitive in a quickly evolving industry is not an easy feat by any means. Today, the biggest challenge to retail remains implementing new technologies and innovative tactics while keeping up with the industry's lightning-fast speed of innovation and creativity. While retailers are right to constantly take advantage of new opportunities in order to deliver great customer service and foster loyalty, it's not physically possible for them to stay on top of every single new application and opportunity available.
Retailers need to be prepared from a network infrastructure standpoint. Core strategies must be aligned with reliable enterprise architecture, which then requires monitoring through proper governance, which can be a challenge within itself. Understanding what technologies are available to accomplish these benchmarks is the first step.
Often retailers will find that working with a technology consultant who can help weed through options and advise them on a larger industry perspective will help them get a better sense of the technology using the correct governance strategies to keep a tab on progress. The people, process and technology are all critical to making this happen.
Ushering in a New Era of Retail
Spending on disruptive digital retail technology is growing at a faster rate than ever before. Disruptive retail technology is designed to deliver a unique customer experience, build customer loyalty and differentiate from competitors. It includes things like technology-centric dressing rooms that can help you decide on fit and look, 3-D kiosks, and 3-D imaging that scan for perfect fit and location services that send real-time discounts and deals right to your mobile phone. However, in order to prepare for this new era of disruptive personal retail, brands need to take these two critical steps: one, understand their market and consumer, and, two, understand their existing and emerging competition.
IT isn't a bottom-up endeavor. The value of a solid infrastructure should be sold to the company's C-suite, with the key point being that enhancing the customer experience — which ultimately increases sales — can only become reality with a reliable and trusted network infrastructure. Once the proper network infrastructure is implemented, everybody in the organization will be able to make quick, well-informed decisions about implementing new applications and keeping these reliable and secure across all channels.
Using Technology to Address Customer Service
Today's consumer is more informed, partly because of having more resources available to them and partly because smaller disposable incomes cause shoppers to be more discount and deal savvy. In order to use technology to bring customer experience to the next level, retailers should begin by clearly defining the experience you're hoping to give your customers.
Great customer experience shouldn't be an afterthought. Retailers need to invest the time and resources to strategically define how they want customers to experience their brand. In the age of personalization, this is absolutely critical to securing and maintaining customer loyalty. The technology portion will come after the main focus of the customer experience is decided upon, and will be used to strengthen the architecture to achieve the highest level possible of customer satisfaction.
All of the above points lead to one conclusion: the nature of retail is rapidly evolving. Consumers rightly expect a highly connected, personalized shopping experience which can only be achieved by having a reliable, scalable and personalized network infrastructure in place to help with the innovation process. Retailers that use the right technology solutions are more likely to successfully implement an omnichannel experience, identify their brand characteristics and how shoppers relate to it, and be ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing disruptive technologies. After all, retailers need their customers just as much — if not more — than their customers need them.
Dan Pickett is the CEO of nfrastructure, a provider of technology infrastructure solutions.