PROMOTIONAL RESEARCH
Connectivity, cost-efficiencies and colleague and customer-centricity have been revealed as the winning strategies powering tech transformation at EE, Holland & Barrett and Nobody’s Child, in a recent Retail Week webinar
Retail sales volumes have crept up a further 1% in February but looming policy changes mean challenges persist for retailers.
Tech and IT leaders face mounting pressure to do more with less, as budgets tighten and operations become more streamlined in a bid to improve productivity and drive efficiencies.
Retail Week’s commercial content editor Rebecca Taylor interviewed EE’s head of operations Lucy Grimes, Holland & Barrett’s head of engineering Rosie Carr, Slack from Salesforce’s senior solution engineer Petra Barbieri, as well as chair and founder of Nobody’s Child and founder and chief executive of Fabacus Andrew Xeni, to explore how tech leaders are setting the agenda to drive greater innovation. Watch the full webinar interview here.
While each retailer faces its own unique set of challenges, the need for collaboration and a drive to improve productivity and efficiencies rings through, provided these changes don’t come at a cost to customer experience.
Xeni explains: “Something I’ve been advocating quite loudly over the last few months is that you can give 10 people the same tool and get 10 different outcomes.
“It’s not always about the tool, and it’s not always about the technology, it’s about the mindset and the culture in adopting that technology, how they’re applying it and how they’re using it.”
Ensuring customers and employees are brought along on retailers’ digital transformation journeys is critical to successful technology strategies. Holland & Barrett’s Carr adds: “Transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s about adoption and customers seeing benefits quickly, but internally getting buy in and shifting mindsets. People have worked in a certain way for such a long time and it’s comfortable, so change can be daunting.
“Like many others in retail, we’ve been asked to deliver within the constraints of our budgets. It’s not just about rolling out new tech, but ensuring it’s efficient, cost effective and delivering real business impact.”
Take a sneak peek at some of the virtual event insights in this short clip:
Watch Retail Week’s latest virtual event ‘Tomorrow’s Tech, Today: understanding the strategies of retails’ winners’ on demand, for free, to explore:
- What’s really moving the dial on customer experience and increasing basket spend, from digital product passports to in-store technologies
- From colleague apps to AI rollouts: how leading retailers are optimising their IT and tech strategies to meet growing operational demands with shrinking budgets
- How to measure the success of tech strategies: the data and metrics your stakeholders really want to explore
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