The retail landscape has seen a phenomenal transformation digitally over the past few decades. From visiting retail stores to purchasing products online, digital e-commerce has come a long way in modernizing the face of the retail industry. Following the enormous upheaval faced post-covid the retail industry is in a stage of intense contemplation. The worldwide pandemic opened doors to embracing innovative technologies that helped solve complex customer behavior changes and act on customer data through greater business analytics by implementing these digital technologies into retail strategy. Therefore, digital transformation in retail is in full swing with a goal to adopt streamlined customer experience and power data by providing cutting-edge solutions to revolutionize the retail industry and pave its way forward.
In this article, we will look at the importance of retail digital transformation and how is it shaping the global retail landscape. We have outlined the following characteristics with potential benefits that highlight greater competitiveness, improved efficiency and strengthen customer experience.
The retail industry, like most other customer-facing industries, adopted digital transformation practices at an increasing rate. When covid-19 crisis hit, unsurprisingly companies saw a sharp growth in the consumer shopping experience. According to Gartner statistics, in the US alone, online sales grew by 44% and more than 76% of customers started using digital platforms to purchase products online. However, digitalization in retail is not just about moving the shopping cart and purchasing online. It is also about meeting on-demand goals on retail activities and refining purchase conversion using omnichannel data, automation, and AI/ML-driven technologies.
According to PwC Customer Experience Research, 85% of retailers face an urgent need to overhaul their technology architecture and operating models to keep pace with the accelerating digital transformation landscape.
Following are the key digital transformation of retail industry show trends that we see dominating the new-age technological capabilities:
Retail is an ultra-competitive industry today right from changing consumer shift from offline to majorly online, hyper-personalization and supply chain complexities have heaped pressure on the retail business. Thus, digital transformation in the retail industry has led to driving new business adoption, and increased performance, productivity, and growth to accelerate sales and customer experience.
Here are the top 5 benefits of digital transformation in retail that will help retailers generate real-time customer data through business intelligence and advanced digital technologies.
Upselling remains to be one of the easiest ways to bootstrap sales and revenue. With the help of intuitive and smart digital platforms like AI/ML technologies, chatbot systems, big data, IoT and automation systems retailers can analyze massive data to anticipate product demands, optimize price bandwidth, implement product development, and mainly recommend personalization for enhancing business efficiency and revenue. For Instance, on Amazon whenever a customer has an item in their cart, you can display “recommended products” that are complementary to the delivered product which increases customer experience and enhances sales.
Therefore, a one-stop or multi-store functionality offering intricated product categories is not the only way to increase sales rather choosing another way to offer value-added services such as providing discount offers, deals, premium membership and loyalty programs will also personalize their shopping experience and accelerate the conversion rate.
McKinsey data shows, Cross-selling and Upselling Opportunities can increase revenue by 10% – 30%
Forecasting data analytics acts as a key to potentially changing the entire retail industry. The more information retailers can retain, the better impact they can make to generate personalized experiences and attract customer experience. On this journey, AI-driven technologies provide retailers with approaches to understanding customer data, buying behavior with purchase history, and enhancing customer profiling using big data for gaining future insights using predictive digital transformation practices.
Therefore, with retail digital transformation, industries at large scale can apply a variety of solutions like recommender systems and predictive analytics to promote product engagement and enhance customer experience using personalization.
A successful digital transformation in retail allows retailers to collect data from all stages of production and identifies resource usage and bottlenecks from every actionable department right from product availability, and location to delivery estimation. On other hand, customers today aren’t just interested in just going to offline stores or choosing to only purchase online. They want a consistent and flexible path that allows them to interact in-store and online using digital transformation technologies and solutions. This can effectively happen by enabling cloud-based technologies in day-to-day retail activities and operations.
Thus, retailers adapting cloud solutions benefit from real-time upgrades using automation, faster rollouts, efficient managing inventory systems and using AI-powered chatbots for seamless customer service and leverage omnichannel experience that blends with the best of both worlds.
As more customers resort to e-commerce and digital solutions, retailers are adapting to the changing times and planning strategies to offer omnichannel enablement to a wide range of customers that allow retailers with data-driven insights, to get an overview of customer pain points, behavior, and preferences. This is to implement potential customer engagement with a framework that includes customer demographic insights, cross-channel web behaviors and personalized social interactions.
Therefore, Augmented reality is a vital digital tool that evolves conventional stores into a brand showroom that accelerates sales revenue and increases customer experience to deliver a smooth omnichannel experience. In such cases, omnipresence specializes in redesigning online social presence and generating product demonstrations to give a spectacular virtual walk-through experience.
Technology-enabled automation reduces human effort, operational costs, processing times, manual errors etc. that will empower data-driven business decisions, productivity, and efficiency. Digital transformation in the retail industry has made time-intensive processes like automating product categorization, simplifying supply chain management, payroll management and inventory management. Therefore, such management systems involve billing, price optimization and other operational activities that help support the growth of business and open door to the future of retail digital transformation.
According to the retail automation market, 75% of retailers observed automating day-to-day retail activities offered various benefits like low-cost speed, accuracy, and high-quality performance for customers.
Wrapping Up:
In 2023, digital transformation of retail has expected to generate a drastic yet potential impact that will help retailers with the right digital capabilities that deliver a personalized experience, pursue advanced omnichannel strategies and drive sustainable growth to improve smarter business decisions, boost sales and enhance the seamless customer experience both in online and offline stores. Thus, retail digital transformation solutions gain invaluable omnipresence and data-driven insights by leveraging the umbrella concept of customer 360 that nurtures hands-on digital services both online and in-store for redefining unified customer engagement and loyalty.
Are you interested to learn more about how AI solutions can shape your retail customer service landscape? Check out our blog that guides you through remarkable AI-driven strategies to enhance retail customer service.
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