Customers may use various retail touch points to purchase products and to contact a company for service and support. Companies can get a complete view of their customers by aggregating data from such touch points to acquire a 360-degree view of the customer.
Technologies such as mobile devices, online communities, social media platforms, and more, has resulted in a boom in the number of touch points for customer interaction. Without the right tools, this can pose a serious challenge in aggregating the data from the many diverse interactions that the customers may have across channels.
Nowadays, retail businesses can employ an increasing assortment of tools to obtain a 360-degree customer view to gather customer information – social media listening tools to listen to what customers are saying on various social media sites, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next, customer relationship management suites to track the customers’ buying history and to reward them, and marketing automation software to offer a seamless, unified omni-channel shopping experience to the customers. Such software should have the ability and the interface to integrate with other applications to enable data sharing and attain a cohesive, up-to-date, accurate view of customers in the real-time.
The 360-degree view of customers also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data, or data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database, with unstructured data as it resides on social media platforms and so forth is becoming increasingly important.
The retail industry has come a long way – from being a simple barter system to the modern day retail that is all about ‘omni-channel’. This journey has helped retail to evolve and match the technology trends to meet the expectations of economic growth of regions, boost the revenue for businesses and ensure availability of products for consumers. But, the more one gets, even more is desired and thus for retail today, ‘more is less’.
Not only does every retail business want a share of the revenue pie, but it also wants to grab a bigger share each time. To do this, businesses are looking for modern ways to improve their operations and business models, to strategize effectively and increase the chances of boosting profits and margins. Further, they also want to expand and scale-up their businesses by venturing into diverse geographies or by sourcing and in some cases manufacturing new products for retail. In recent times, new channels of retail such as e-commerce have become the next big thing and retailers who were quick to jump onto the bandwagon, reaped its benefits. Many more are still following suit. But, even e-commerce has not been enough – mobile commerce (m-commerce) and social commerce are the latest retail touch-points. Taking timely advantage of these, can provide a fast paced growth for the retailers. It also provides for an opening for new entrants looking to foray into the retail business thus leading to more competition and this can just keep snowballing further.
Along with the modern trends in retail, there are a host of forward-looking technologies that can be infused in to the business in order to enhance it further. One significant example would be, the way POS technology has evolved from regular billing counters to being CRM integrated and even to Mobile POS (m-POS). Innovations in technology has enabled retail software solution companies to integrate even more advanced features to the POS such as augmented reality. With all certainty, there is still more to come in the future.
Big Data analytics is another such important and revolutionary technology. From simple capturing of data to offering analyzing capabilities, progressing into predictive and intuitive analytics, technology has paved the way not only for retail, but also for other businesses to plan their next steps for growth. Big Data allows retailers to capture and analyze large volumes of data – of their customers, employees and inventory – to be able to understand and predict market trends. Further advancements in technology will surely add more capabilities to POS, Big Data analytics and other retail solutions.
Just like technology, there are other aspects where ‘More is Less” influences the retail businesses. A growing global population means more consumers, more demand and eventually, more business opportunity. The need to fulfil the rising demand leads to creation of multiple product variants, versions and alternatives, and also varied pricing. Retailers can create separate brands to target the different customer segments. Offers and promotions also help to attract more customers. With a focus on customer centricity, retailers also need to provide more information about their offerings. For the consumers, all of this means more avenues or channels from where they can buy or research about the product options, more choices and more discounts on the products of their choice.
‘More is less’ is definitely the new retail mantra of today! If retail businesses can get more done, they can certainly achieve more. The opportunities to stand-out are galore if, after evaluating all factors and employing the right technologies, from planning to execution, they can get it right in retail.
