Making the most of Digital Transformation in Retail
These are challenging times for UK retailers. It doesn’t matter if you’re online or omnichannel; if you’re a regional, national or global brand. If you’re a retailer, you’re facing the ever-evolving challenge of keeping up with customer expectations – not just selling them the products that they ask for, but providing them with experiences that keep them delighted and engaged; building relationships that turn customers into your advocates. The challenge often comes from the fact that your biggest systems weren’t built to keep up with this rapid shift in customer behaviour. That shiny new PoS system that you rolled out in 2011 and spent half your IT budget on? It’s starting to look and feel a bit, well, long in the tooth. That scalable e-Commerce platform that can manage millions of transactions per minute? Still doesn’t help you provide that one-to-one personalised experience that customers increasingly demand.
When building those relationships between your brand and your customers it helps to have a modern unified retail software solution that can connect all parts of your business from the back end to front end and every step in-between – and beyond. A solution like Dynamics 365. Built on a common data model, Dynamics 365 can connect every part of your retail organisation to help build those customer experiences. For example, retailers can sift through high volumes of social media data to analyse customer demand and streamline merchandise planning. In-store associates can connect with call centre reps to answer a customer’s fulfilment questions in real time. When you use an integrated and complete retail solution such as Dynamics 365, it’s much easier to provide a complete shopping experience for your customers that is personal, seamless, and differentiated.
But success requires more than software. In order to see significant return on investment, ensuring your people adopt and use your new technology to its full extent is fundamental, so a sophisticated change management approach is key. While Dynamics 365 provides a powerful retail solution right out of the box (or, more accurately, right in the cloud), retailers that wish to get the most of their investment can turn to Microsoft Services to help them manage their transformation. Our retail experts work with Dynamics 365 customers, assessing their technology and business processes to understand their business drivers and goals, before optimising the technology for their business. We help those customers develop and implement a tailored plan, including adoption and change management best practices, to reach those goals quicker. Whether you’re looking to attract and retain customers, deliver next-gen customer experiences or differentiate your brand, our Microsoft Services team will work with you plan and execute a program that helps you achieve your vision.
Are you ready to find out more about what’s possible with Dynamics 365 and how Microsoft Services can help you make the most of your investment? It starts with our new webinar Appreciating the Role of Change Management in Dynamics 365. Here we’ll give you insights into how you can ensure employee adoption of the new ways of working and embed continuous improvement into business as usual. If you want to learn more about what’s new in Dynamics 365, come to our First Look in London.
Watch on-demand: The role of Change Management in Dynamics 365
See what happened at Innovation Nation the Dynamics 365 first look event
