When the pandemic hit two years ago, the phrase ‘new-normal’ wasn’t far from anyone’s lips. For a while it just seemed like the latest fashionable trend, and no one fully knew what it meant. But with time, the picture has started to become clearer and clearer. A shock to world order as big as a pandemic is always going to result in permanent change, and for the retail industry that change is widespread digitalisation. E-commerce channels are no longer just a nice to have, they’re a must have. The result: a wave of digital transformation across the industry as brick-and-mortar stores became obsolete and online retail took over.
As the months ticked by, it became ever clearer this wasn’t just a phase, this was here to stay. However, wherever there’s threat, there’s also opportunity. Today the fight isn’t about getting consumers into shops, it’s about providing them with the best experience online. As new technologies continue to revolutionise the consumer experience, it offers a great opportunity for market capture and profit creation. To get ahead, retailers must win the race to deliver better services than their competitors. Easy to say, but how do you actually go about accomplishing it?
Consumers are fickle, they’ll only keep interacting with a company that provides them with an experience that meets their requirements, otherwise they’ll go somewhere that will. If these requirements were a fixed target, it might be easier, instead it’s a revolving treadmill where they dictate the pace, not you. So, you can only be as good as the information you have to hand. But having all the data in front of you isn’t good enough if it isn’t going to help tell you when the next change in tempo is going happen. To succeed, retailers need to analyse the data in front of them, derive the insights it has to offer and put that wisdom to use faster, more comprehensively and more expansively than anyone else.
If insights are the key, the management of your data has to be imperative. It all starts with consolidation of your data into a centralised system of action. The way to achieve this is to move from an on-premise to a cloud native solution like ServiceNow. It offers the ability to centralise your data whilst providing you with the agility, flexibility and speed needed to keep up. As consumer expectations increase, the cloud provides you with the flexibility to scale services as the demand for automation, machine learning and AI continue to rise.
Today’s consumers are omni-channel consumers, they don’t want a few options, they want all of them at their fingertips be it on a laptop, mobile phone, or in-person; essentially anything with an internet connection. As consumers, we’re a demanding bunch, we want a single point of contact for accessing knowledge articles, initiating service requests or checking order statuses, to name a few. And it better be consistent across devices.
ServiceNow have built a dedicated environment to wholly handle these operational challenges. Disparate tools can be consolidated into a single cloud-native environment consolidating your data into a single source of truth. Where data issues hindered visibility, it now provides opportunity. Predictive analytics and machine learning help retailers extract insights across multiple sources faster than ever before, informing decision making and creating a personalised customer experience.
For today’s consumers, experience matters. For most, it’s top of the list and if yours doesn’t meet their expectations, they’ll go somewhere that does. If customer experience is a core priority for you and your organisation, please get in touch and we will happily sit down with you to discuss your unique set of requirements to build a lasting solution that delivers long term value.
You can get in touch with Crossfuze at letstalk@crossfuze.com or you can get in touch with me personally at oliver.nowak@crossfuze.com.
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