Here is the list of 2015’s top technology trends in Retail. Retailers are struggling to harness the power of Big data. Many big technology players are decorating their offerings using domain flavor layer on Big data, knowing the fact that retailers are sitting on peta-bytes of data. Retailers are challenged with technology, and technology vendors are unable to understand the gaps – where to start to how the outcome be result oriented. We are going to talk about how 2015 will look like and what kind of problems retailers would like technology vendors to resolve. Though many retailers have their own big data analytics team, they still rely on technology vendors for skills.
Personalization:
‘Personalization‘ is going to be the focus for retailers to increase their revenues. This will require dedicated investment in technologies to understand customer needs and preferences. This can be achieved using the right kind of Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics services. These technologies projects should be agile, short-timed, outcome-based and done in multiple phases to track ROI on your technology investments.
Omnichannel / Multi-Channel:
Many retailers, as of today, have adopted ecommerce/m commerce to reach out to customers as part of their Omnichannel strategy. But the stores customer data and information has still not integrated with online channel. Not just customer data, but also the inventory and demand forecasting data are in disparate systems. To bridge this gap, there should be a dedicated investment kept aside to enable Omnichannel strategy
Mobile commerce / Apps for multiple OS:
Black Friday and Cyber Monday data revealed that 50% of the traffic came from mobile and is an integral part of an Omnichannel strategy. To make it more effective and keep the customer more informed, many pure play ecommerce companies have invested heavily in apps for multiple operating systems. Technology investment is going to happen in developing and promoting apps to get repeat business from their existing customers. Customers have to be incentivized to download apps and be lured with promotions notifications through apps.
CMOs will be more closely aligned with technologies:
Typically, a CMO’s role is to work on promotions and marketing campaigns to increase conversion and revenues. Currently, there is no track of ROI and is difficult to understand why a particular campaign worked, while others failed. Another issue is with customers getting bombarded with so many generic messages that they don’t want to see the same on their devices / mails. To meet these challenges, CMOs will work closely with technology partners to articulate their requirement and build custom solutions for them to target their customers in better fashion.
