HORIZONS 17
TARGETING BARRIERS TO CONVERGENCE
NCR Retail Transaction Services breaks down the legacy walls for a consumer driven experience
Giovanni Bandi G
iovanni Bandi, vice president of sales for retail and hospitality at NCR Europe, discusses the emergence of the converged retailing model in 2011 and the launch of NCR Retail Transaction Services with Retail Technology.
Q. What trends are you seeing in multichannel retailing today? A. Bandi: Retailers are experiencing an unprecedented rate of market change, driven by time-starved and digitally empowered consumers, who are continuing to search for the very best value products and want an easy, enjoyable shopping experience. Today’s consumers are dictating to retailers when, where and how they want to be served. These consumers are now expecting personalised,
interactive dialogues with retailers using a combination of channels, based on their preferences and presence at a given moment in time. In light of this we are starting to see a move from multichannel retailing to converged retailing or ‘c-tailing’. With the advent of mobile and social commerce
sites, as well as click-and-collect or order in-store services, retailers’ businesses are becoming more ever more complicated. But with change comes opportunity. A massive 70% of retailers surveyed by the Aberdeen Group considered multichannel customers to be more valuable and profi table, as they tend to spend more if they are shopping across different channels.
Q. What are NCR’s c-tailing solutions? A. Bandi: NCR c-tailing solutions are a set of software and services that enable retailers to offer consumers greater personalisation and consistency across channels, such as the internet, mobile devices, social media and in the store. These converged retailing solutions enable retailers to differentiate themselves, lower operating costs and attract today’s empowered and elusive consumer. Shoppers may be out-of-store on the internet at their home or offi ce, near a store with a mobile and GPS or in-store at any touchpoint from a kiosk to a self-checkout or a regular till. They want to be able to
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
review information on products and prices, receive discount offers, complete purchases, receive deliveries and process returns using a combination of channels that are most convenient to them. Convergence helps deliver structure to those interactions and break down the silos within retailers’ businesses. A driver of NCR’s c-tailing – NCR Retail Transaction
Services (RTS) – will be launched at EuroShop in Germany and the Retail Business Technology Expo in the UK in 2011.
Q. How does NCR RTS help retailers? A. Bandi: NCR Retail Transaction Services is a suite of services replicating functions traditionally found embedded within a legacy point-of-sale (PoS) application. When deployed in a service-oriented architecture (SOA), a wide range of third-party applications or devices, either owned by the retailer or the consumer, can use NCR RTS to provide a consistent experience across the store. For example, when a consumer queries the price of a product – whether at the PoS, a self-service kiosk, on a self-scan handheld or mobile phone – the relevant application will use the NCR RTS item lookup service to access data and provide results back to the user. By extending NCR RTS to the enterprise, the retailer can use the same services to process ecommerce transactions resulting in a standard transaction format that can again be easily and transparently shared, updated or viewed at any customer touchpoint.
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