Tag: Innovation

Fraud Detection and Security in Retail: Leveraging AI and ML for Protection

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

 

In the fast-paced world of retail, where transactions occur at lightning speed and customer data is constantly flowing, ensuring robust fraud detection and security measures has become imperative. With the rise of e-commerce and digital transactions, retailers face increasingly sophisticated threats from cybercriminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in their systems. In response to these challenges, many retailers are turning to cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) – also known as AI in Retail – and Machine Learning (ML) to strengthen their defenses and safeguard their businesses and customers.

What are ML and AI in Retail?

(Artificial Intelligence) AI for retailers involves using automation, data, and technologies like machine learning algorithms to provide consumers with personalized shopping experiences in both physical and digital stores. Whereas machine learning (ML) involves implementing self-learning computer algorithms that are intended to analyze large datasets, find pertinent metrics, patterns, anomalies, or cause-and-effect relationships between variables, and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics that shape this sector and the environments in which retailers operate. These advancements highlight the critical role of innovative retail software solutions in addressing the evolving security challenges faced by modern retailers.

Emergence of AI & ML as Powerful Tools

ML and AI in retail have emerged as powerful tools in the fight against fraud in the sector. By leveraging AI and ML algorithms, retailers can enhance their fraud detection capabilities and stay one step ahead of cybercriminals. Additionally, the implementation of AI and ML technologies within (Point-of-Sale) POS software systems further enhances retailers’ capabilities to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, ensuring secure transactions and protecting sensitive customer information

One of the key advantages of AI and ML in fraud detection is their ability to adapt and evolve over time. Traditional rule-based systems are limited by predefined criteria and may struggle to keep pace with rapidly changing fraud patterns. In contrast, AI and ML algorithms can continuously learn from new data, refine their models, and detect emerging threats more effectively. This adaptive approach enables retailers to detect and mitigate fraud more efficiently, reducing the risk of financial losses and reputational damage.

ML and AI in retail industry are also being used to enhance security measures across the retail ecosystem. From online payment gateways to point-of-sale systems, retailers are deploying AI-powered solutions to detect and prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security threats. Advanced authentication methods such as biometric recognition and behavioral analysis are becoming increasingly common, providing an extra layer of protection against fraudsters.

In addition to detecting fraud and enhancing security, AI and ML technologies can also help retailers improve the overall customer experience. By analyzing customer data and transaction histories, retailers can gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns. This data-driven approach enables retailers to personalize their marketing strategies, recommend relevant products, and offer targeted promotions, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Moreover, retailers may anticipate sales with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning by examining data on past sales, industry trends, and consumer behavior. This allows retailers to make well-informed business decisions and in planning their personnel and inventory levels.

Furthermore, AI and ML can play a crucial role in optimizing inventory management and supply chain operations, reducing the risk of fraud and theft within the retail environment. But how do you make your e-commerce business fraud-proof? This is where Ordazzle’s AI-powered Anomaly Detection function comes into play. Its proprietary Machine Learning algorithm helps you isolate the abnormal or deviant new orders to be later reviewed and released for execution or cancellation. This helps you avoid any outlier orders that might be fraudulent further improving your inventory for normal orders.

Want to know more about ETP’s anomaly detection functions?

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Potential Challenges of AI & ML in Retail

Despite the numerous benefits of AI and ML in fraud detection and security, retailers must also be mindful of potential challenges and ethical considerations. As these technologies become increasingly integrated into retail operations, concerns around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency have come to the forefront. Retailers must ensure that they adhere to strict data protection regulations, implement robust security measures, and conduct regular audits to maintain trust and credibility with their customers.

How can the Government support adoption of AI in retail?

While AI presents promising prospects for enhancing marketing and operational efficiency, it’s crucial to employ it ethically and transparently. This requires a supportive policy framework addressing data privacy, security, and ethical considerations while fostering innovation.

Governments can facilitate the adoption of AI for retailers by investing in vital infrastructure and digital connectivity, supporting research and development efforts, and fostering collaboration between industry and academia. Additionally, governments can offer incentives and offers to retailers for implementing AI, and promote AI education and training programs to upskill the workforce, enabling them to effectively collaborate with AI systems.

In conclusion, AI in retail industry and ML are revolutionizing fraud detection, empowering retailers to combat fraud, protect sensitive data, and enhance the overall customer experience. By leveraging the power of these advanced technologies, retailers can stay ahead of emerging threats, mitigate risks, and build a more secure and resilient business environment. Moreover, ETP’s retail solutions integrate seamlessly with AI and ML capabilities, providing retailers with comprehensive tools to streamline operations, enhance security, and optimize the customer journey in today’s rapidly evolving retail landscape. As the retail landscape continues to evolve, AI and ML will undoubtedly play an increasingly central role in shaping the future of fraud detection and security in the digital age.

If you are seeking a reliable retail software solution. ETP is undoubtedly the best choice for maximizing efficiency and ensuring success in your retail business ventures.

Deliver a true Omni-channel Customer Experience through the Retail Store of the Future

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

The retail industry has always been full of challenges. With the COVID-19 pandemic particularly highlighting these challenges, today’s market conditions combined with the fast-evolving customer expectations dictate that retailers should fast-track digital innovation and transform traditional business models.

Customer experience is the new competitive battleground, and those retailers who are able to harness the power of data and technology to enhance the customer experience are winning in this battle of growing customer loyalty and trust and gaining greater market share. Acting on customer insights and implementing changes in processes, technology, and mindset for the digitalization of customer journeys gives you the necessary momentum for long-term success in retail.

 

Transition to the low-touch digital store

In spite of the significant growth of the e-commerce channel, stores remain key touchpoints in the customer shopping journey and are still driving between 70% and 90% of total retail sales. In-store retention and engagement are critical to building loyalty and driving a higher volume of sales. However, your customers expect digital experiences that go beyond shopping, while always ensuring their safety.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software supports retailers in offering convenience services, such as mPOS-enabled queue management solutions and frictionless payments. These help ensure your customers have a pleasant, minimum-touch shopping experience, and ultimately spend more. Mobile POS solutions in your stores enable you to improve customer flow and ensure safety measures like social distancing are followed.

Coupled with user-friendly, innovative retail digital transformation solutions such as Endless Aisle (digital product catalogue), in-store advance orders, and targeted promotions, you can be certain of supporting in-store digital customer journeys and improving in-store customer engagement. From development and deployment to managing periodical updates to your retail software suite, ETP’s consulting, global deliveries, and support teams will take care of every step and provide promised results.

 

Offer superior omnichannel shopping experiences to your customers

Retailers’ growth drivers are now more strongly linked than ever before to their capacity to integrate the new journeys of digital customers. However, many retailers still manage their offline and online sales channels in silos.

Our expert business consultants leverage our integration capabilities to help you map customer journeys and unify all of your sales channels, order management, payment processing, loyalty programs, delivery options, and more, both in-store and out-of-store. This will enable you to deliver the true omnichannel experiences that your customers expect.

 

Empower your workforce to succeed in its new role

As the role of the store is reinvented, in-store employees will have a part to play as personal advisors to shoppers. With ETP Mobile Store, you can give your employees access to the tools and applications they need to succeed in these roles. These will be accessible from anywhere through secure mobile terminals and cover CRM, inventory management, order management and more.

There is an ongoing competition to recruit, retain and develop the best talent, particularly among millennials, who value a great employee experience. ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions can improve the collective knowledge and performance of your teams by facilitating better teamwork.

Additionally, retailers can avoid any skills gap resulting from high workforce turnover and give proper career perspective to their employees. The Orange Digital Academy and User Adoption Program offers flexible solutions that help you ensure your employees are trained and aware of new policies and processes, including the implications of new COVID-19 regulations.

 

Enhance your operations and drive growth with leading-edge technology

With consumers seeking the best of both worlds between physical and online shopping, retailers must prepare for a hybrid future. Adopting emerging technologies will help them transform their value propositions with respect to how they can improve their customer’s life, and make it easier and more fulfilling. A bold digital transformation strategy requires immense collaboration across technology ecosystems but it will help ensure success for the retail business in the long term.

Retailers typically operate a complex distributed network of business locations: offices, stores and distribution centres. At the stores, in addition to the POS, they put tablets, video, digital signs and other technologies to work simultaneously. These technologies are having a profound impact on the business performance and customer loyalty. It is crucial to ensure that the locations, channels, and devices are not operating in silos, and the data collected by each of them is not stored individually. Also, the new solutions should be able to access and understand the data stored in the legacy systems quite easily.

Balancing inventory assortments, managing orders and maintaining uniform pricing across channels requires you deploy retail technology that gives you one version of the truth about your inventory and your customers irrespective of the device or channel.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software helps you apply more granular levels of control for specific business processes along the end-to-end integration, security and build/deploy service delivery chain. With omni-channel orchestration, you can directly determine the most preferred method of order fulfilment for each customer, personalise promotions for them based on merchandise, location, time and/or customer hierarchies, and manage third-party integrations with ERP/legacy/such other systems. This ensures you can deliver the agility and responsiveness required to enhance the shopping experience at all your business locations.

Furthermore, ETP Connect allows you to bridge your online and offline channels, costs and IT estate while ensuring that all services work in harmony with the required governance level.

Leveraging Technology to Drive Innovation in Retail

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

Technology to drive innovation
Innovation in retail has long been driven by new technologies and the desire to see what they can do. From video rental shops to Amazon, retailers have fallen over themselves to adopt tech that gives them an edge over the competition—and a bigger piece of the pie. Today, brick-and-mortar stores face much stiffer competition than their online rivals. After all, how can you compete with the convenience of shopping from the comfort of your own home? You could argue that you can’t. But I’m here to tell you there are still plenty of ways for physical retailers to use tech to innovate and get ahead in this brave new world. Here’s a look at just some of them:

Remember the days when customers visiting a store were greeted with a salesperson following them from aisle to aisle, making product recommendations and steering them towards the cash counter? It’s not that long ago that such practices were commonplace in retail. But today’s customers are more demanding than ever before—they want to be able to shop whenever and wherever they want, without being followed by a salesperson or being pushed into buying more than they need.

As shoppers now seek a more convenient method of shopping, it is imperative for brick-and-mortar stores to reinvent themselves by offering an omni-channel experience and creating a seamless shopping experience for their customers. While the use of technology can serve as an effective tool in achieving these goals, retail companies need to take the initiative to stay relevant and useful to customers.

The importance of leveraging technology cannot be overstated when it comes to transforming information into actionable insights in order to personalize interactions with shoppers. By doing so, organizations can create a superior customer experience that sets them apart from competitors who lack these capabilities.

The first step toward delivering this enhanced shopping experience is through digital technology that, among other things, enables data gathering at multiple touch points. This gives retailers access to a goldmine of customer information that helps businesses to remain relevant and useful to their customers.

But how do you use this data? How do you know what kind of information you should be collecting? How much should be collected? And how can it all be used effectively in order to improve the overall customer experience?

Data is truly a gift from heaven for retail companies—and not just because they can use it as part of their analytics efforts; data collection also provides important insights into consumer behaviour and preferences. With this knowledge in hand, companies are able to create personalized experiences for each individual shopper based on their shopping history and preferences rather than relying simply on demographic information such as gender or age range alone (which may not always accurately represent them). It also allows retailers greater insights into where there might be demand for new products/services or locations within stores, where consumers prefer spending time during different parts of their day (e.g., morning vs afternoon shifts) and so on.

The next step involves leveraging technology tools available today to transform that information into actionable insights. These insights can be used to personalize interactions with shoppers based on their unique browsing and buying patterns and to proactively address their changing needs throughout their journey, from purchase to return.

This is the heart of a customer-centric approach that can make all the difference in your store’s ability to get things right for your customers. With it, you will:

  • Use retail CRM tools to better understand how shoppers interact with your brand, which products they prefer — or don’t — and what messages resonate most with them
  • Use data analytical tools to help you identify common pain points across customers as well as groups within your base; this could include identifying which product categories are underperforming or where there are gaps in inventory (e.g., if multiple customers have been looking at specific items online but not buying them)
  • Use retail management software solutions such as the ETP V5.5 Store software coupled with the ETP Connect – a secured web services middleware or ecommerce management solutions such as Ordazzle powered by ETP, integrated with ERP systems from Oracle, SAP, Infor, and more so that retailers gain visibility into where/when orders come in from customers vs. where/when can they be fulfilled from.
  • Leverage mobile POS (mPOS) technology for providing value-added services including providing product information and price comparisons across channels. The ETP Mobile Store mobile POS software converts your store staff into intelligent assistants that can also help in inventory management by identifying which products are selling faster than others.

Additionally, retailers should use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service. For example, a retailer could install cameras at the entrance of the stores to monitor the flow of customers during peak shopping hours. This data can then be used to determine where additional staffing may be needed or identify bottlenecks along the customer journey so that employees can address them immediately.

Data analysis can also be used by retailers who want to deliver superior customer service as well as track consumer trends across the supply chain, helping them optimize inventory management practices and streamline production schedules.

Retailers have access to a wealth of consumer data thanks in part to social media. By leveraging this information, companies will be better equipped to serve customers’ needs by providing the products and personalised promotions they want when they want them—even before they know what those desires are.

The ability for companies to quickly identify consumer trends allows them to not only plan, but also to identify cross-selling opportunities.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is no longer an option for retailers, but a business imperative. If you’re not leveraging technology to drive innovation, the process of change will still happen — your competitors and customers will be the ones who lead it.

Retail is all about the value and its perceptions

Posted on by admin

etp-blog-retail-value-and-perceptions

Customers are the king and queen in retail and they are valuable to the business. On the flip-side, customers are also seeking value in what is being offered to them. Retail brands across the globe are fiercely pegged against each other in this value game, and the one who offers the best value as perceived the customer will be the clear winner.

Let’s try to understand this better. In this day and age of technology driving the industry towards innovation and disruption, there is no ambiguity anymore in the current and future roadmap for retail businesses to survive and thrive. One thing is clear, the retail brands who standout on their customer experience expectations will taste success. However it is important to understand the customer experience paradigm.

Traditionally, retail was transactional and product focused, but that is no more the case. As the focus of the business pivots on the customer, the customer experience paradigm has undergone a significant shift since the early retail days. This shift has largely been the result of technology enabling customers equipping themselves with more information and decision making power, thus putting them in the driver’s seat who are now calling the shots. Fundamentally, the customer experience is all about the value the customer perceives in two ways – i) their interactions with the retail brands, and ii) the offerings they receive from those brands in terms of products/services. Thus, it all boils down to the value the customer receives from their relationship with the retail business.

For retail brands, the best part is that now they have multiple opportunities to provide perceivable value to their customers. As retail has moved from transaction focused to being more customer centric and other factors have influenced the sector big-time, the shopping journey has evolved. Here is where retail brands can seize their opportunities to establish their value offerings. For example, while the customer is researching, a retail company can provide the necessary information that the customer seeks, even though the customer is not seeking information with the intention of purchase. Another example is where a customer can be offered an additional discount while their product is replaced due to issues in the products they had initially purchased. These are some of the many instances of how retailers can offer value – either qualitative or quantitative. These valued offerings will cement the brand-customer relationships in the long-run and thus prove to be a mutual benefit for both the retail company and the customer.