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Oracle’s Antony Welfare explains why customer experience offers retailers the biggest competitive advantage.
Your customers have unprecedented power, information and choice at their fingertips. As a result, their expectations are higher than ever.
These modern customers – many of them millennials with a mobile phone moulded to their hand – expect the same retail experience, regardless of where their interaction takes place. Whether it’s online, in store, on your mobile app or socially.
Fall short in any one of these expectations, and your customers will potentially jump to a number of better options. And in the fast-paced, hypercompetitive retail environment, that’s not a risk you can afford to take.
Working to your advantages
Right now, customer experience is potentially your greatest competitive advantage.
To drive that seamless customer experience, you need to make digital platforms and applications central to everything you do.
By thinking, acting and being a digital retail organisation, you can revolutionise the customer experience, impressing customers with dynamic pricing, on-the-spot offers, value-added services and much more.
And you need to do it now: 80% of Fortune 100 organisations already have digital transformation teams in place.
So how can retailers like you get closer to customers, give them the rich and relevant experiences they need no matter where they are and what they’re doing, and remain essential to their needs?
“By thinking, acting and being a digital retail organisation, you can revolutionise the customer experience, impressing customers with dynamic pricing, on-the-spot offers, value-added services and much more”
Harnessing new technologies is a great starting point. Innovations such as artificial intelligence, chatbots and machine learning enable customers to gain more detail on products, help you track customer decisions and offer a more intimate experience.
Walmart, for example, has an idea for a floating warehouse that could make deliveries via drones.
Meanwhile, data-driven insights can be used to guide customers, add value to purchases, convert browsing into sales and make tailored recommendations or offers.
These analytics can also help you understand a customer’s digital footprint, reducing basket abandonment, enticing browsers back and encouraging repeat purchases.
And an agile, digital supply chain can adapt to forecast demand and reduce the time needed to bring products on to the shelves.
“Innovations such as artificial intelligence, chatbots and machine learning enable customers to gain more detail on products, help you track customer decisions and offer a more intimate experience”
It doesn’t stop there.
Your people are the essence of your customer experience, so you need to attract, recruit and retain the right digital skills and engage with a scattered retail workforce.
A digital-first HR strategy provides mobile, collaborative and intuitive systems to become more insight driven, strategic, efficient, talent centric and responsive.
To successfully adjust to a new retail landscape and effectively serve the modern, connected consumer, the research report Next Generation Customer Experience – Digital Decisions for Retail provides facts, figures and insights to support your decision-making process.
Antony Welfare is retail sales development director at Oracle
