Digital Transformation in the retail industry means improving processes, service and value propositions using technology to enhance the customer experience. As the customer journey evolves, retailers must adapt to match this demand.
As a result, we’ve seen the shift towards personalised shopping, mobile apps, location-based services and much more, which has brought a big change to the retail landscape.
In addition, the impact of COVID-19 has changed customer buying patterns and opened the door to e-commerce growth and delivery service demand. With this change, however, comes higher expectations from consumers.
For companies to keep their customers, they need to implement tailored digital transformation solutions to keep ahead. Otherwise, they’ll lose their customers to companies that can give them the convenience they desire.
To win in the retail industry, companies must be agile and receptive to customer demands and create personalised customer experiences to build trust and brand loyalty.
The retail industry has been through much disruption over the past few years, but there are still advantages to be made. Stores with agile and digital plans are fastly sweeping up the market share, thanks to digital technology opening up the doors for streamlined, personal customer service online and in-store.
Put simply, Digital Transformation in retail can improve customer satisfaction and retention by offering services and products that they need and want, when they want or need it!
Let’s explore some more top benefits of digital transformation in retail.
Improve internal operations
Cloud Technology has revolutionised how companies now operate. Moving from paper-based or on-prem solutions to Cloud tech gives businesses more options and fewer overheads to meet their growing demands.
Considerations such as data storage, application management and resource scalability enable employees to respond quickly to customers, helping improve both the employee and customer experience by taking away some of the frustrations that preceded the Cloud era!
More capable integrated solutions, AI and ML also allow for rapid transfer, analysis, and prediction of data. The move away from batch to real-time data puts the power back in the hands of businesses to be able to truly analyse, to a very deep level, factors that impact their business, their employees, and customers, and ultimately their bottom line.
Discover more about Data Analysis for your business.
Better marketing opportunities
With digital technology comes data. Collecting buyer data can help map out patterns, demand and values; which in turn can help you deliver marketing campaigns around your customers.
By understanding your audience better, you can serve them better.
Convenience
As technology advances, customers’ expectations and demands evolve significantly to make the retail experience more convenient for them. This has been escalated during COVID-19, retailers who had not invested in their online presence suffered more than those who had already embraced and invested in their e-commerce and omnichannel offerings.
With Tesco now following Amazon’s example of a checkout-free store, the focus is on how to speed up footfall and make the experience more fluid and customer-focused.
That said, as with all implementations of new technology comes teething problems, as was experienced by a The Times journalist. Who took three hours to go through their new checkout-free shopping!
Enabling customers to shop how they want, whether it be online, self-service, checkout-free or in-person check-out puts the power in the hands of the customer. This flexibility is where a lot of retail focus is coupled with the age-old question of “How do I do something different to my competitor?”.
When tailored correctly to your business and customers, digital transformation can provide high-quality service and ensure a pleasant buying experience.
Automate processes
As technology pushes retailers, hospitality providers and global supply chains to a more data-oriented model, paper-based processes become slow, reactive, and prone to errors.
The automation and integration of processes free up employees’ vital time to work on more innovative and streamlined operations. If employee focus is on value-add rather than manual, mundane data processing, you get to empower people to revolutionise how your business operates.
Many processes can be successfully automated such as integrated ordering, supply chain fulfilment and live chatbots for online customer enquiries to name a few.
Whilst not the silver bullet for all business scenarios, the principles which accompany a DevOps mindset (Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Automation, Fail -fast, feedback loops etc.) give power to businesses to be nimble, adventurous and market-leading. The challenge though, is always embracing that mindset.
Build a successful digital transformation strategy with Tratech
Crucially, digital transformation is not always about adding new technology. It’s a bigger picture of encompassing your business, understanding your problems and using technology to best solve these issues and provide value to the end-user.
Our main focus with digital transformation is delivering value to the end-user; which could be either the customer, employees or both! We have seen first-hand how this approach brings out the best within digital transformation plans.
So, if you’re looking for a seamless digital transformation solution for your business within the retail, hospitality, manufacturing or supply chain industries; get in touch with a member of our team today!
