The retail industry is one sector in which companies have a short window of time to impress or frustrate customers. Many customers tend to switch off fast if they don’t get the right experience from brand the first time.
It is believed that retailers have experienced more change in just the past couple of years than in the past 100 years combined. For retailers to adapt to changing customer expectations, they must become comfortable with allowing customers to be in the driver’s seat.
For retail successful, the focus must now be on one single aspect: Customer Experience.
Thanks to technology, there has been seamless integration between the front-end and back-end of a retail organization. This has been the mantra for success within many retail organizations.
Retailers are now being forced to rethink their business processes, systems, and models. But change is challenging and some of these challenges are holding retailers back from being flexible, scalable, and more appealing to consumers.
Let’s look at 3 of these challenges:
#1 A major challenge that retailers face is with existing legacy systems. Retailers have approximately 6 to 12 on-premise systems that are so customized to the point of being a big ball of confusion. Such systems have made it difficult for IT to innovate.
#2 There is a lot of data lying in a scattered and unstructured format, causing a lot of inconsistency. This inconsistency in data causes a major roadblock in managing decision-making.
#3 Since employees are not empowered with the right tools, they no longer are able to deliver stellar experiences to customers in the right way and at the right time.
There are various tools available to engage with customers and deliver engaging experiences that keep customers coming back for more. However, before tools can be used, it is critical that best practices and processes are defined and customer-focused platforms are established.
If you want to know more about what building a unified customer experience platform looks like, click the link below for more information.
