Retail Success: Winning customers for life in the digital era

In his now-famous 1997 letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defined his strategy for building the company with one fundamental statement: “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.”¹ Twenty years later, Bezos calls this approach “true customer obsession”² and advocates investing in delighting the customer.

With these new retail rules, traditional retailers can compete by choosing what kind of retailer they are going to be. They can create their own approach to delighting the customer by cultivating a unique customer relationship and personalized experience at every retail touchpoint — all underpinned by a single digital platform.

How do you accelerate the value of your customer relationship?

Imagine if you could create a business model that supports immersive retail experiences and innovative retailing while connecting with your customers around the world, extending your reach, building brand loyalty and increasing revenues.

Today, all retailers must build a strong value exchange with their customers in order to flourish and grow in the digital era. Successful retailers will use digital resources to delight their customers, engage deeply and turn every shopper into a loyal, repeat customer for life.

Can you transform your customer engagement?

Customers today are looking for more than simply completing a transaction. They expect retailers to know what they want, when they want it and how they want to purchase it. As a result, retailers must offer the right service at the right time, in the right channel. In reality, this is more difficult than it looks, and many retailers continue to struggle to implement the right technology to enable more personalized service.

To be successful, retailers need to get:

Where do you start?

There are five entry points where you could choose to start your digital customer engagement — customer experience, customer service, customer behavior, customer relationship and customer fulfillment. You get to choose your approach, your customer strategy and your digital platform.

Depending on the size and complexity of your retail business, it is important to choose a logical entry point that will give you the immediate differentiation you need for your retail business to stand out, show up where your customers are, and truly make a difference to how and where they shop. Depending on your departure point, your digital retail journey may not be linear. Where you start your journey depends on where you can create the most meaningful customer experience.

What can you do to win the hearts and dollars of your customers?

Focus on your customer experience. Deliver more than just stock on shelves by creating a positive, interactive experience both in-store and online.

• Learn from your customers’ behavior. Who are your customers? What do they think of your brand and your products? What are they buying, and what are they saying about you? Understand their behaviors and predict what they are likely to do next.
• Service your customers in smart ways. Personalize the shopping experience with unique offers based on preference and shopping history — know their buying habits and tendencies.
• Transform your customer relationships. Engage with your customers in real time at all times with special offers in-store or online. Customers are willing to provide information if they perceive they are receiving something in return. Offer more to loyal customers.
• Optimize customer fulfillment. Deliver the right products, at the right place, at the right time across all channels. Exceed customers’ expectations every time!

How do you choose your digital retail technologies?

Retailers are not alone in the journey to digital transformation, but it is an industry very much in the midst of major disruptive innovation. Digital transformation is redefining how business is done — bringing people, data and processes together to create value for your customers and maintain a competitive advantage in a digitalfirst world. A wide variety of technologies exist to enable digital retailers.

Now that you have considered your approach, how do you know what technologies are available to enable your chosen approach and how do you know where to start? While there are a wide variety of digital technologies, it is important to future-proof your solution and maximize your investment. That is why we recommend selecting a single digital platform such as Microsoft.

With Microsoft as a digital foundation, retailers can put in place a single platform that will provide the basis for ongoing transformation and growth — by building the framework and delivering modern applications that are the core to helping propel the business forward.

Microsoft will allow you to combine the best of digital and in-store capabilities to deliver personal, seamless and differentiated customer experiences. You can empower your people to deliver maximum business impact. You can optimize operations by using sensors, devices, machine learning and advanced analytics to understand, predict and better serve customers. You can transform your business and create new revenue streams and business models through an intelligent, modern platform that enables data streams to be captured to create relevant insights and competitive advantage.

Download the full paper to read more about digital experiences and services as they relate to our five points of digital customer engagement to determine how we can curate the best customer experience for your chosen approach.