MyLearnings: Modernizing Retail

Retailers strive to maximize its business through revenue growth and increasing profit margin.

They are constantly facing challenges towards this:

More demanding & technology-aware customers
Globalizing competition from cheaper products from geographies with cheaper labor and resources advantage
Disruptive effects of technological advancements
New channels of Sales, Customer interaction and advertisements
Old models of disconnected enterprise

I will try to use “Motion Lite methodology” (Ref http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736727.aspx ) of Microsoft for building

Product Development

Customer Preference, Web Analytics, and Feedback – Involve the customers in the development of the products. Use their inputs for improving the product by adding customer demanded new features (packaging, flavors, small sizes etc) and remove bad features.
Pre-Launch ideas, Campaigns - Survey the new products among the customers by pre-launches to get the customer response, use the same for any improvements.
User generated Ideas – Launch contests and campaign for user generated ideas which involves customer participation and provide effective advertisements.

Agile Enterprise with Product Design Changes - React easily to events which requires changes in product design like customer’s negative feedback, government policy etc. The product change management should be agile to allow last minute changes to the product development based on the unplanned events.

Just in time or Optimize inventory to with real-time collaboration with suppliers: Extended Enterprise with real-time collaboration with suppliers and vendor applications and systems using their exposed Services. This collaboration is 2-way with effective automated alerts on the “Placing new Orders” as the order level goes down below optimum inventory or “Cancel Orders” as any order from customer is cancelled.
Better management of returns and rejects: Extended enterprise also automates the management of the returns and reject by intimating the Supplier and “Placing the Orders” for replacements.
Vendor Management with Vendor grading and other statistics: The frequent rejects of the vendors and customer can be an alert to grade the quality of the vendor for planning process and taking actions.

Generate Demand

Unified Communication over multiple channels: Gap between various retailing channels is reducing; customers want seamless experience over his choice of channels. He wants seamless experience of Ordering over phone, Reserving over Web and Picking up in person.
Proactive Customer Interaction: 'Improving customer loyalty' has been the traditional mantra of the call center. “Require innovative thinking and models that leverage proactive customer outreach programs that are cost-effective and efficient at mitigating customer service issues before they arise.” Ref: http://www.tmcnet.com/call-center/0204/0204crm1.htm

A rich customer database - with demographic, geographic and psychographic information
Data integration and recognition technology - provides the ability to link individual customer data from disparate databases, third-party sources and various proprietary databases containing customer information (e.g. CRM, ERP, sales, marketing, etc.), to provide a holistic, well- connected picture of customers.
Using sophisticated data correlation tools, it is possible to compare customer information using data such as house numbers, phone numbers, last names, products and accounts, and then link records together into households.
Multiple Channels Interaction

Plan & Manage

Clear and comprehensive Customer View: turns the information from “hindsight” into “insight” and “foresight” which will enable the business to employ smarter and more effective marketing strategies. Hindsight represents views provided by traditional analytics that examine what customers did in the past or, at best, what they just did.
Business Intelligence based Planning

Seamless connected enterprise with Localized stores synchronizing with Centralized policies and pricing changes

Deliver Product

Move from a traditional point-of-sale to a point-of-service system, which is more flexible and supports modern store technologies.

Monday, October 3, 2011