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Are you thinking about retail customer experience all wrong?

Kevin Sterneckert, CMO, Symphony RetailAI, explains how retailers, with a commitment to establishing an agile and intelligent operational performance, supported by AI capabilities, can ensure they are running a truly excellent business.

Are you thinking about retail customer experience all wrong?Photo by istock.com


| by Kevin Sterneckert — CMO, Symphony RetailAI

It's not hyperbole to say that modern retail lives and dies by one overwhelmingly powerful metric: the customer experience. But knowing how to actually provide it, to a given retailer's unique collection of customers, is what has escaped so many of the retailers we once thought were too big to fail.

As the industry becomes more conceptually innovative and tech-driven, there isn't a single obvious path that guarantees the ability to deliver on that promise. Customer demands pop up too quickly, and retailers are running out of fingers to plug the dike. It's time to find a more sustainable approach.

That's why I believe retailers need to focus on operational experience as much as they do customer experience — and find the delicate balance. To be clear, exceptional customer experience remains the ultimate goal, but focusing too narrowly on customer satisfaction can muddy the waters of efficiency. Ultimately, it can even be the reason retailers end up no longer able to serve their customers effectively. It's too easy to get stuck in a reactive mindset, catering to today's demands rather than creating the conditions for long-term success.

AI helps decision makers get ahead of key shifts

Instead, by prioritizing better decision making internally, retailers can establish an operational environment in which category, supply chain, marketing and store managers can create the efficiencies required to walk in lockstep with all future customer expectations. Rather than reacting to what customers want today, they'll be able to predict and deliver exactly what they want in the short- and long-term future.

To create this flexible, scalable and intelligent enterprise, retailers can no longer deny the impact of layering AI capabilities into their existing infrastructure. Why? Because there's no better way to create a retail experience that customers enjoy than to know what they want even before they do.  

AI capabilities can be integrated into any existing business process and help to both evaluate  historical data and predict future outcomes. By massively accelerating the time it takes to come to an understanding of consumer and market behavior trends, business leaders can make more informed decisions. By anticipating external shifts, they can make the internal changes required to address them.

Add in natural language processing that helps those decision makers access those insights even more intuitively and retailers can free themselves from the limitations of making plans based on incomplete understanding of the subtle shifts in the ecosystem.  

Operational experience as a catalyst for customer experience

This creates a business environment in which every decision maker has the insights they need to innovate with purpose and affect change faster internally. Therefore, they can more effectively and consistently deliver on the promise of a great customer experience. When every part of the business is able to do this in unison, there are far fewer ways to get caught off guard by changing expectations or have those changes result in negative consequences.

Once internal operations are streamlined, retailers can rest assured that their assortments not only provide exactly what customers want to buy today, but that they can respond instantly to every nuanced shift in demand. Promotions and marketing campaigns can be personalized to drive sales and revenues while protecting profit. Supply chains can move items into stores, to curbside pickup locations, and directly to customer's homes without straining margins. Stores can be laid out and regularly reimagined in a way that is intuitive to the shopper's needs and ensures their experience continues to evolve alongside their expectations.

With a commitment to establishing an agile and intelligent operational performance, supported by AI capabilities throughout the enterprise, retailers can ensure that they are running a truly excellent business. Customers will realize that through a greater customer experience and reward them with their business.

History has proven that no retailer is too big to fail, but I'm willing to bet that we'll soon see a variety of retailers we all believe are too smart to fail. You should be one of them.


Kevin Sterneckert

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