April - July - 2022Retail Business Review8DIGITAL IN RETAIL: THE THREE STEPS TO MATURITYBefore embarking on a career in retail design and customer experience in the late 1990s, I was part of a tech 1.0 startup. Back then, our marketing activities involved showing our wares at trade shows and tech conventions along the lines of CES and Comdex. This month, nearly twenty years later, I found myself at The National Retail Federation's "Big Show" conference in New York, and the roster of participants looked eerily familiar.The big players at the show were the likes of Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Toshiba. The smaller booths were taken up by relatively newer brands such as Viniculum, Comqi and Sprinklr. It seemed that the whole conference--the biggest one of its kind for brick-and-mortar retailers--had become 100 percent digital. So many retailers are in the process of digital transformation that it has taken over the entire discussion in the industry.The traditional retail sector has reached a kind of early-maturity when it comes to digital. A few years ago, initial attempts at integrating digital into the brick-and-mortar retail experience focused on spectacle--immersive graphics pushing repurposed ad content. We also saw a several attempts at bringing an ecommerce website into the store, often leaving a flashing C-prompt on a blue screen when the web connection faltered. Thankfully, we've moved past these early approaches for the most part. Now, most of the big players in retail have realized that the true power of digital is to get retailers back to what they do best, which is to meet their customer in a way that is personal, relevant and meaningful. Benefits of this change will be improved sales and customer loyalty for the brand, and an effortless, curated and personalized shopping experience for the customer. And the backbone of all this is customer data.There are three big challenges that brands face as they become more mature as digital retailers­how to store and organize data, how to collect it, and how to use it. The promise of digital in retail won't be realized for a specific brand until all three of these challenges are solved.Let's start with the storage and organization of the data. The big issue here isn't capacity, but compatibility. For many retailers, creating a unified view of customer data is a difficult task, with legacy systems working out of sync with each other. We worked recently with a large retail brand, whose customer service staff would often need to access eight or nine different databases to respond to a single call, and this brand is not alone. Often, inventory data is held separately between different geos and the ecommerce team. Data from the aging POS system might not connect well with data from the CRM. Customer experience survey data might sit in its own silo, manually correlated with sales data but not as a regular practice. At some retailers, it feels like every Vice President has their own little data silo that they defend from the barbarians down the hall. And while it may be easy for people to get a small budget to work on sexy, customer-facing touchpoints, fixing the "plumbing" that allows the Paul ConderIn My OpinionPaul Conder, Principal, CallisonRTKLBy
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