As the retail industry tackles dramatic shifts in shopper behavior, broad changes in product assortments, and huge growth in digital orders, innovative merchants are responding to these market shifts with laser-focused, technology-driven customer experience initiatives. We wholeheartedly applaud these efforts.
As customers demand more engaging interactions with store associates, retailers must equip customer-facing employees with mobile tools to enhance interactions, like conveying information or transacting sales. Store associates need to personalize the discussion, understand all inventory status in real time at the store and throughout the chain, and seamlessly complete a transaction when and where the customer wants.
Streamline Retail
Yes, retailers gain key insights from POS analytics, but an awareness of other in-store customer behaviors can improve store operations. With computer vision technologies like AWS Panorama that apply AI/ML to video cameras positioned throughout store, retailers can access shopper traffic, customer movements, shelf and product interactions, checkout queues, associate interactions, and loss prevention activities and patterns. The AWS Panorama appliance only delivers detected behaviors or patterns to your cloud-based analytics data framework.
The US convenience retailer QuikTrip is working with AWS partner Ayla Networks to deploy a comprehensive IoT management framework. They are using AWS services to provide real-time visibility for many different in-store devices. This insight is helping the company reduce equipment downtime and improve store operations.
With the advent of consumerization and the growing number of online shoppers and e-commerce outlets, it is increasingly difficult for retailers to satisfy their customers time and again. Competitive pricing no longer cuts it; savvy retailers today do all they can to stand out from the competition through service differentiation. The best way to do this is to streamline the retail fulfillment process.
Eliminating manual processes from your retail fulfillment workflows is a great way to improve accuracy and efficiency. From inventory management and order processing to picking/packing processes and last-mile shipment, there are automation tools, solutions and mechanisms that eliminate or reduce manual intervention to the bare minimum.
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) work alongside human warehouse associates in your retail fulfillment center. They lead associates through their work zones to reduce walking, direct associates to the next pick location and guide associates through each task until the work is complete. AMRs are relatively easy to implement, require low initial set-up costs and significantly boost customer satisfaction rates by improving picking accuracy and accelerating fulfillment times.
With the rise of consumerization making for more informed shoppers, retailers can no longer compete based on product pricing alone. To grow their customer base and maintain/increase profit margins, retailers are looking to stand out through service differentiation. Streamlining the retail fulfillment process is a great way to do so and the above strategies can help retailers raise customer satisfaction levels and deliver desirable business outcomes time and time again.
A common customer complaint is being required to wait to ask a simple question during busy times when staff are otherwise occupied. So it makes sense that 63 percent of customers prefer to use digital information kiosks to find simple answers to questions without having to involve a retail assistant. As such, the addition of interactive customer information kiosks strategically placed throughout a store can improve their customer experience offering, while also saving employee time for other essential functions.
As a busy retailer, you know that you can always use more time, and the tips above will help you streamline tedious tasks into an efficient system. It involves everything from hiring good staff and delegating responsibilities to automation and creating processes that eliminate extra work. In turn, this leaves you more time to work on growing your business.
The distribution of consumer electronics is a complex business, with this particular client being responsible for a significant part of the supply chain distributing televisions to some of the largest retailers in the United States. However, they faced an issue with the returns process which was significantly impacting their financials, customer satisfaction, and overall supply chain logistics.
To meet the needs of each retailer, the returns process had evolved into a custom process that varied for each retailer. The result was a manually intensive process that required significant dedicated manpower and was still time-consuming and prone to errors resulting in above-average financial loss from inventory mismanagement. None of the involved parties ranging from consumer, retailer, or distributor were satisfied with the experience or the results.
The resulting application was extremely successful in addressing all identified business and operational issues. The HTML5 based self-service portal allowed any consumer or retailer to access a standardized returns process with real-time status updates that not only transformed the user experience, but it eliminated the errors and mistakes of a manual process.
Following a time when the grocery sector confronted more transformation than it had throughout the entire decade prior, retail trading partners are confronting a whole new set of challenges in the realm of assortment and merchandising strategy.
While assortment is getting harder, your competitors are looking for every edge. Stay ahead with proactive strategy and solutions to simplify the complexity of the changing retail and manufacturing landscape.
A bellwether for economic and societal trends, the retail industry continues to be on the front line of adaptive innovation. And rather than trying to predict the future, retailers are working to achieve greater business agility necessary to thrive in it. This means that, like Majid Al Futtaim Retail, they automate tedious processes so employees can focus on higher-value tasks. Like Grupo Bimbo, they unify disparate data points in real time so that employees can access a central source of truth when and where they need it. And, like CCC Group, they stay laser-focused on delivering differentiated customer experiences to build loyal fans. Across each of these organizations, data is seen as an accelerant for growth, powering more personalized customer experiences, cost-efficient supply chains, and proactive responses to market trends.
Microsoft also met with customers at our NRF booth to discuss strategies for making sense of all their data. For example, these two demos highlight how tight integrations between data, analytics, and AI can help make resilient retail a reality.
As Eric Boyd mentioned in his blog, we announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of our ongoing partnership with OpenAI. Azure OpenAI Service provides a commercialization platform for businesses to leverage advanced AI models like GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL*E to create innovative applications. Customers of all sizes across industries are using Azure OpenAI Service to do more with less, improve experiences for end users, and streamline operational efficiencies.
Support for JSON documents in Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise tiers, delivered via the RedisJSON module, has been made generally available as of November 2022. This turns Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise into a high-performance NoSQL document store and drives efficiency for developers to modernize their applications. The new RedisJSON module update is well suited to retail customers looking to store, search, and index product catalogs and shopper data via a single atomic operation.
In December, Microsoft was named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, which evaluates the capabilities of various vendors in the market for providing enterprise-scale search for app development. Organizations benefit, no matter the industry, but Cognitive Search is an exceptionally powerful tool for retailers, helping them to quickly find and analyze data related to customer behavior, sales, and inventory. It can also be used to personalize the shopping experience for individual customers based on their past interactions and preferences.
As the retail industry tackles dramatic shifts in shopper behaviour, broad changes in product assortments, and huge growth in digital orders, innovative merchants are responding to these market shifts with laser-focused, technology-driven customer experience initiatives.
This problem is apparent, especially in the grocery segment as customers shifted to online orders during the pandemic. Grocers need to equip store associates with mobile AI/ML-based predictive fulfillment tools to quickly and efficiently prepare orders for pickup or delivery. As part of its digital commerce strategy, Co-op, a UK-based grocery and convenience retailer, is using technology solutions from Naveo Commerce and Bringg to reduce the time necessary to find and pick items for digital orders and manage the orchestration of getting the right online orders to the right customers or delivery drivers for fulfillment.
Equip retail associates to engage effectively with customersAs customers demand more engaging interactions with store associates, retailers must equip customer-facing employees with mobile tools to enhance interactions, like conveying information or transacting sales. Store associates need to personalise the discussion, understand all inventory status in real-time at the store and throughout the chain, and seamlessly complete a transaction when and where the customer wants.
Use intelligence to improve retail stock availabilityRetailers must always strive to improve product availability and eliminate out-of-stocks. With real-time shelf sensors, video intelligence, and mobile robotics, retailers can quickly identify stock-outs and replenish items. 2ff7e9595c
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