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Future of Retail — Customer Engagement
issue 08
legacy bricks-and-mortar strategy to meet the demands of the new retail landscape requires a modern IT infrastructure. Too often, retailers deploy several different best-of- breed solutions and quickly find out that the ecommerce platform and the in-store system can’t communicate. The inconsistencies in the customer and inventory records leave store associates with tools that can’t provide customer order history and stock availability. In the fast-moving digital age, cumbersome
legacy IT systems are a millstone around the necks of retailers. Traditional implementation timescales were once measured in years, but that’s simply not viable in the current retail market. Today, organisations need to have the agility to test and deploy new products rapidly into the market and dynamically scale up or out to meet spikes in customer demand. That requires a modern technology platform
that can enable speed and innovation. And that’s why many retailers are turning to the cloud. A unified, cloud-based ecommerce system can seamlessly connect online and in-store to order management, inventory, merchandising, marketing, financials and customer service.
ADVANCED ORDER MANAGEMENT, GREATER VISIBILITY AND A 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW This centralised, cloud-based platform then gives retailers three key capabilities. The first is advanced order management. This allows retailers to pick the best fulfilment location to get the product to the customer as fast as possible, as well as optimising for delivery. Companies can assign a variety of criteria and rank those criteria when fulfilling orders. Examples include shipping from the closest location for fast delivery, or shipping an entire order from a single location that has all the items on the order, to minimise costs. With real-time inventory visibility across all warehouses, stores and third-party logistics, retailers can dynamically set up and apply business rules to support their fulfilment strategies to automate processes. Then there is visibility. Retailers need to have real-time visibility into orders across the
“A reliable 360-degree view of customer, order and inventory data is the foundation for outstanding customer service.”
supply chain. They also need to provide that for customers too. A survey of UK shoppers found that Gen Z shoppers – those aged 18- 24 – want real-time stock visibility, with 86% saying their biggest frustration is when an item is marked ‘in stock’ on a retailer’s website, but is not actually available when they go to find it in-store. Lack of visibility emanates from the old IT
world of disparate systems used to manage orders and inventory. For manufacturers, distributors and retailers, a centralised, cloud-
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