I was speaking with one of our customers recently about the technology they use in store. Like many others, this retailer was keen to explore how new technologies could improve the in-store shopping experience. With the unstoppable rise of online shopping, they could see they needed to respond with a similarly slick and seamless experience in their bricks-and-mortar stores.

But they had one comment that stood out to me: The technology had to be invisible to the end customer.

That makes perfect sense. Nobody wants technology to add unnecessary friction to their shopping experience. And retailers don’t want tech to detract from the products they’re selling. Technology should be like a swan on water. Elegance and grace on top, while underneath the legs are kicking because the backend systems are connected, working together in perfect harmony.

That’s really the goal of connected commerce. To enable that swan-on-water capability for retailers. One where the backend is so well connected that it allows employees and processes to solve customer needs whenever and wherever they arise.

Here I want to talk about the unique opportunity that a connected commerce platform presents to UK retailers right now. I also want to share what they can do to start tapping into a more connected offering for consumers.

An industry responding to changing consumer behaviour

Retail is at an interesting moment in the UK. We’ve hit penetration levels of eCommerce that were first forecasted for 10 years from now. That’s all down to the number of retailers scrambling to establish an online presence to keep their businesses alive.

Online sales grew by a staggering 19 percent globally in 2020. Across Europe, four in ten consumers indicated that they’d purchased something online which they would’ve previously purchased in store.

But the part that’s really interesting is that whilst over 70 percent of purchase journeys start online, people are still going in-store for latter parts of that journey. They might be making the final purchase in-store. Or they want to go and check the quality or the customisation or a product. Sometimes they just want to speak to a person. There’s an experiential, even ceremonial role that is emerging for the in-person retail space. Consumers still desire this.

It highlights that the shift to online shopping hasn’t been absolute. The online and offline spaces have blurred together into an omnichannel experience. Within that new hybrid space, having a 360-degree view of your customer as they move between channels has become super important.

That’s especially true given the shift we’ve seen in consumer loyalty over the past 18 months. Consumers are more inclined to shop with new brands, potentially because the online world makes it easier to shop around. Therefore, the purchase journey needs to be smooth, seamless, consistent and compelling at every point. Especially if you want to hold onto your customer from their first interaction to the final purchase.

The omnichannel customer journey

All of this points to a clear fact: The consumer journey is no longer linear. Consumers engage with retailers through social media channels, websites, apps, YouTube, online events, or by going in-store and engaging in person. The customer can jump between these different channels as they want. But within this context, it’s important to make sure that the customer’s experience is consistent.

If the customer journey is broken at any point, they start to look at other brands and retailers.

This poses a lot of challenges for those retailers whose systems are disparate and siloed. If a customer is unable to get insights into an order they placed, make an amendment, or return a product because they ordered it through a different channel, it really damages that customer’s experience, and the retailer’s reputation.

It is vitally important to be able to link those systems and build a connected commerce platform. By empowering employees across all the different touchpoints of a customer journey with relevant – and accurate – information, they can uphold the brand’s reputation and mission. As a result, they will be able to deliver that strong customer experience.

Customer service agents need to be able to see the lifetime value of customers they interact with. To know if they’re a member of a loyalty scheme, what they’ve purchased in the past, if they’ve had challenges with previous products. Then they need to be able to get insight into the supply chain and operations side of the business, to see what’s happening with specific orders.

That agent could be in-store, online, on the phone or answering a message on a social media channel. But wherever they are, retailers need to make sure that they have consistent access to the profiles of customers, and insights into the operational performance of the retailer. Thus, they can make sure the customer journey is consistent and seamless at every point.

How to approach the shifting mechanisms of commerce

Commerce for me is any business operation that will engage with the customer across any part of the shopping experience. It’s not just the purchase, it’s not just visiting the store or the online website.

Getting a 360-degree view of your consumers means being able to answer questions that touch all parts of your organisation. From the first point on the supply chain through the whole journey of that product arriving with a consumer. And finally, to the consumer’s habits after purchase.

Connected commerce is about trying to unify those processes and insights on a common connected data platform. One that spans the physical and digital, providing insights into operations, business performance, and a customer-specific level of reporting.

To achieve that, we need a unified, end-to-end platform to help digitise the retail journey. Gone are the days of distinguishing between ‘front office’ operations relating to things like sales, marketing and customer service, and ‘back office’ operations like supply chain, finance and HR. These things are all blurring together, they’re all connected. They’re all part of the same puzzle.

My message to retailers is to be imaginative about what the future of retail looks like for your organisation. Prioritise your brand before the tech. How do you want your brand message to be upheld as you adapt your in-store experience and your online presence? What does the customer journey look like when upholding that ethos? What is the culture you want to build around the strength of your brand?

Define the business issues you want to solve. Then, make the technology work to that. Don’t go in with a siloed, disparate view of the system that you need. Instead, go in with a checklist of wishes that you want to achieve for your organisation. Then figure out the building blocks that you need in place to make it a reality.

That’s the beauty of the Microsoft Cloud for Retail. All the solutions are underpinned by those building blocks. If you’re utilising the commerce platform, you’re getting all the benefits of the wider Microsoft platform; Microsoft Azure, our security, our compliance and more. That can help you build your roadmap for the future. A future that’s connected, consistent and on-brand, across every touchpoint, built with the customer at the centre.

Find out more

Discover connected commerce

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

About the author

Adam works for Microsoft UK in the Dynamics 365 Business Group. He is the business lead for the Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations portfolio of products. This group of solutions has three core use cases to support organisations. They help optimise financial and operating models; they help organisations to build a resilient supply chain and they enable organisations to create a connect commerce platform. 

Adam’s responsibility is to be the captain of the ship for the UK business. Taking a left to right view across business performance, long term strategy, market and competitor insights, partner ecosystem, and ultimately owning the plan to meet our customer’s needs. 

The post How to bridge physical and digital retail with a connected commerce platform appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

But despite being so vital to a brand’s success, frontline employees are often the last to be reached by the technology that retailers invests in. Typically, we see C-Suite and head office getting all the latest tech, while it takes time to trickle down to the shop floor. This has two major impacts.

Firstly, the majority of frontline workers feel underappreciated by their employers. According to a recent Retail Trust survey, The Health of Retail report 2021, many feel insecure, undervalued and uncertain in relation to their careers. In fact, 84 percent say their mental health has deteriorated since early 2020. And while this is undoubtedly connected to the impact of the last few years on the high street, there is work to be done to bridge the gap between the different levels of retail organisations, from C-Suite to the shop floor.

The other major impact is on the customer experience. Without the right tools in place, the in-store experience can feel impersonal and disconnected. Especially when comparing it to the increasingly personalised online shopping space. Here, consumers have become accustomed to being served highly personalised recommendations.

For me, empowering employees means giving them the right tools to do their best work. And in retail, that means the people on the shop floor having the right technology at their fingertips to allow them to access every type of information that customers need and expect.

Here I want to talk about some of the ways that retailers can start to empower their employees with technology. And as a result, create better customer experiences and a happier, more productive workforce.

Meeting customer expectations in-store

Like every industry, retail is still navigating the new ways of the world. Within that context, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what the future of the industry looks like and where we all fit in that jigsaw puzzle.

But one thing that has been shown clearly is that consumers are itching to get back into shops. The question is: what do those shops now look like?

Up until now, in-person retail has retained quite a consistent format. You go into the shop, you pick the product you want, you go to the checkout, and you leave. And that’s been okay until the last few years, when suddenly consumers started wanting more personal experiences.

That’s the impact of online shopping. Consumers go to the website of their retailer of choice. They get recommendations based on the data the company collects over time. Or they’ll get it personally by email. The challenge is to match this kind of personalisation in-store. And there are great benefits for retailers who manage achieve it.

Research suggests that customers will purchase more from a retailer if they shop both on their digital and in-store spaces. It underscores the importance of omni-channel retail. It also outlines a clear agenda for retailers moving forward: Striving to achieve intelligent retail. One where you connect to customers, your employees, and then your data as well, so that you can have that personalised experience in the store.

We’re already seeing many established retailers making their high street stores more like experience centres. So if you wanted to buy a Surface, for example, there’s the Microsoft Experience Centre in London. Here, you can come in and see the different devices, learn how you can interact with them, and try out accessories in-person. You may not buy the device there; you’re actually more likely to go home and order it online. But we’re definitely starting to see a blend of those online and physical channels.

It’s going to take time for everyone to catch up, especially if you’re a retailer with hundreds of stores nationwide. But devices are a great place to start with the transformation to a more blended, omni-channel shopping experience.

The importance of devices to omni-channel retail

As a society, we’ve become more used to having things instantly available at the tips of our fingers. Whether that’s a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop, devices are what have driven the expectation. This is now being translated into retail.

With this rising expectation, retailers who don’t empower their employees to respond quicky and accurately to customers in-store are going to suffer.

Frontline retail employees need to be able to do on-the-spot inventory checks, so they don’t have to go and rummage around in the store room or warehouse, looking physically on the shelves to try and find something that could have been checked in seconds on a handheld device on the shop floor. Without those devices, they often find themselves less well-informed than the customers coming into their stores.

Devices have benefits for retail employees beyond their interactions with customers too. Retail spaces are often large. Having a designated device for communication between team members who could be scattered across the building space, or even on different sites, will make the operation more integrated and seamless from an operational point of view too. They will enhance the connection between the different levels of an organisation, helping to bridge the gap between the C-Suite and shopfloor.

This will empower employees to feel more integral to the business. At the same time, leadership teams can make better decisions based on a more accurate understanding of stores, because they’re able to get feedback from them directly.

And then of course there are the sustainability benefits of devices. M&S is a great example of a UK retailer that has embraced devices, allowing it to achieve its goal of going paperless. This is just one of many benefits the company is now reaping from its push to integrate new technologies across its operations.

Devices designed for the hybrid retail space

The ultimate role of devices in the retail space is to help create a great experience for customers. Whether that’s ordering something in for a customer online, checking inventory levels, or even checking what shifts people on a team are working so managers can make sure that the shop floor is filled with the right people at the right time. All of it comes back to enhancing the in-store experience.

But there’s an increasing understanding that within every retail space, there are different types of workers, and they have different needs. Frontline workers don’t want to walk around the shop floor with a laptop, because it’s heavy and there’s a security risk in putting it down in a busy retail space. Similarly, an information worker in the back office isn’t going to want to use a foldable in-your-palm device.  

At Microsoft, we’ve packaged this understanding into a cohesive offering for retailers. We’ve got lightweight, on-the-go devices like the Surface Go that are designed specifically for frontline workers who don’t want to be tethered to a PC. We’ve got other Surface devices designed for information processing, as well as Surface Hubs that can help improve in-office and hybrid collaboration – meaning everyone feels included.

And because our devices are specifically made to complement the Microsoft software stack, it means that retailers get the best experience from things like Microsoft Teams and Power BI when using them on their Surface. It helps to keep our employees connected with each other, and empowers them serve customers quickly and efficiently.

I am confident that this empowerment will translate into the evolution of the role of frontline workers, who can be there to genuinely support people with disabilities or accessibility needs, becoming much more of a helping hand to customers in-store. There always will be a need for that kind of support, as we adapt to the new world we find ourselves in.

Find out more

Learn how to harness digital for the future of retail

Personalise your organisation’s customer experience strategy

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Device Decisions – The future is hybrid – considerations for IT leaders in the changing workplace

Technology can help unlock a new future for frontline workers

About the author

Joseph runs the Product and Marketing Strategy of our Surface Devices and Accessories for our Small Medium & Corporate (SMC) customers in Microsoft UK.

The post Empowering retail employees: How to transform the frontline appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope in which companies can reach customers in new ways. 

Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer delight and long-term loyalty? Let’s examine this now.

1.    Understand your customers

The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this isn’t always achievable due to time and budget constraints.

Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system, to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas. 

Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas can allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively in order to better align customer treatment strategies. 

2.    Embrace omnichannel experiences

The ways that customers engage with your business continues to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.

Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to a business’ personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. Additionally, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.

3.    Make the most of innovation to personalise

AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.

Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.

The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity. 

4.    Personalise – but don’t overdo it

It can be a fine line to tread between providing a customer with bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy.

Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.

At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.

5.    Don’t lose the human touch

The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to develop the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles and offering bespoke offers and interactions.

However, businesses should not over rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customer that are personal and valued.

Personalise your customer’s experiences

The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.

At Microsoft, we work with customers across industries to implement modular solutions that fit in to existing customer service ecosystems to unlock new personalisation capabilities.

Find out more

Download our e-guide: Create outstanding experiences in moments that matter

Watch our webinar: Envisioning the future of customer experience with guest speaker and Senior Forrester Analyst Vasupradha Srinivasan

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post The top five ways to personalise your customer service appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Because that’s the thing about sustainability: it means different things to different people.

For me, sustainability is about looking at the world from the outside in. That means looking at all of our impacts and trying to reconcile them as individuals. Whether that’s how much plastic, or water, or something else we’re wasting, what’s important is that we know we could do something better with it. Then it’s about looking at the impacts of our actions on others. Where do the products we buy come from? Where is our waste going? We need to understand the social implications of the actions we take.

Has the world woken up to sustainability? I’m not so sure. There’s still a lot of greenwashing from businesses across all industries, retail included, and people are getting wise to that. When I was at COP26 recently, many people were asking businesses like Microsoft: “Well, what do you actually do?” That type of finger pointing is good, because it can spark more rigor. Every retail business now needs to be able to say: “This is what we do” and to say it with confidence.

Here I want to unpack some of the big sustainability pieces I see for retailers now and going forward. I hope it will help UK retailers to take steps towards delivery of tangible, lasting impacts.

The importance of visibility, transparency and honesty in sustainability

The most important steps to sustainability are transparency and visibility. Retailers have to be able to put their hands on their hearts and say that they know where the products they stock have come from. And not just on a surface level; they need to know right down to the raw materials.

Data visibility is becoming more and more achievable. Take cotton, for example. People are now doing DNA tracking for cotton to learn whether it’s been ethically sourced or recycled. But there’s still a way to go, and the grey areas get greyer the further you go down the supply chain. Retailers need to be transparent about that. If you’ve got some grey areas, just acknowledge them. It’s much better to be honest and say you don’t know rather than pretending that you do.

The flip side is making sure that information is given correctly to consumers. As a result, people will understand what they’re buying and the impact of that product. This translates to consumer behaviour too. One thing our friends at a global consumer packaged goods organisation are doing is looking at how they can change people’s behaviours about showering. Why? Because one of the biggest problems for water waste is not the amount of water that they use to make a bottle of shampoo. It’s the amount of time that all of us spend standing in a shower wasting water to wash our hair. It’s a great example of a company that’s gently nudging consumers to use its products in a more sustainable way.

Measuring sustainability across the supply chain

In order to have a meaningful conversation about sustainability, you need to be able to measure your impact. So one of the first things retailers need to do is establish their base levels. Where are you today? You can start very simply by looking at the totals of all your invoices from your utility bills. That gives you a starting point.

The supply chain is also a good tool to measure against. Move from one end of the chain to the other and analyse the impact of each stage. From there you can start to identify areas that you can improve.

Of course, supply chains are complex, and having full visibility end-to-end is challenging, especially for bigger retailers where the supply chain is huge. How do you get the assurance that the bottle of shampoo you stock is actually being sourced correctly, right the way down to the people in a palm oil field in Indonesia?

It’s a concern we’ve got ourselves at Microsoft. We’ve got our responsible sourcing team. But how do we actually know that Microsoft products like Surface have been responsibly sourced, right the way back down to a guy digging away at a mine to get some cobalt to go into the battery on one of our devices?

That’s where technology has a huge role to play, going right along the upstream supply chain. And it’s where the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can support. We can start to track and report against different aspects of the supply chain, so we can mitigate the negative social impacts you might encounter at different points. That goes beyond just environmental waste and covers broader societal issues related to recruitment, fair pay, working conditions, all sorts of areas.

Joining the dots for a more sustainable future in retail

A lot of the trends that I see emerging in retail are about joining the dots. Whether that’s joining data points across the supply chain, or making new partnership connections between retailers, coming together seems to be a trend that’s snowballing.

There are sustainability benefits of that trend, but we need to tap into them more. Why aren’t larger retailers bringing together start-ups and creative technologists to offer more just-in-time manufacturing services in-store? We can shorten supply chains in this way, while transforming in-store shopping into the experience that consumers expect.

But perhaps the greatest opportunity to join the dots in retail and transform the supply chain into a more sustainable model lies in the emerging circular economy. And again, the larger retailers need to take a lead here. Why aren’t the big food retailers sponsoring start-ups to create a vertical farming system that could help them bring more circularity to their supply chain? The technology is there to make it possible, and it would have a huge benefit for those retailers and the environment. But the missing ingredient is the desire and support to make it happen.

That, ultimately, is what needs to change: retailers need to commit. To bring the disparate parts of their supply chain together. To use data to talk meaningfully about the products they sell. And finally, to work with start-ups and other partners to build more sustainable ways of working.

That’s the transformation we need to see in retail. It’s the transformation tomorrow’s consumers expect.

Find out more

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Get the Sustainability Executive Playbook

Create the new intelligent supply chain

Drive operational resiliency with connected people and systems

Ensuring products are made in a sustainable way has never been more important

About the author

Andrew is part of Microsoft’s Global Sustainability industry team, focusing on architecting digital transformations along with guiding growth and compete strategies across all industries sectors but with a focus on manufacturing, retail and supply chains. He supports organisations with new technology led capabilities, strategies and insights that will fundamentally reinvent their products, services and business models.

Andrew is passionate about helping business drive sustained growth, agile innovation and operational excellence. 

He has worked across many industry sectors during his 25+ years, including high tech discrete manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, financial services, education and local/regional government as well directly engaging with the broad ecosystems of partners, ISV and non-for-profit organisations. His further area of speciality includes social, environmental and economic sustainability where he has led several global initiatives to tackle economic and skilling gaps across manufacturing and agriculture. 

Andrew’s wide breadth of experience has enabled him to directly engage across Microsoft’s product engineering research and development as well into their responsible sourcing supply chain team. 

The post Joining the dots: What does sustainability mean for retailers? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In today’s environment, to meet customer expectations, organisations should equip themselves to deliver an ‘always-on’ service. Yet, the traditional service hours (9-to-5) are still common practice across industry. No longer do they need to be. With advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI-powered chatbots are empowering organisations to provide 24/7 support and are fast becoming an integral part of the entire customer service ecosystem. 

Today, AI and automation is a broad ideal that includes a range of customer service applications:

• AI-powered virtual assistants across the web and SMS that facilitate customer self-service.
• Conversational interactive voice response (IVR) over the phone, matching customer intent with the best available live agent.
• Process automation, e.g. automatic case creation, triaging and next best suggestions. 
• Live agent augmentation with AI-guided scripts and knowledge base.

The ability to ingest and analyse an organisation’s historic and live data has opened new customer service strategies that integrate the best of AI and live-agent experiences. However, AI is not a silver bullet.

Let’s review how AI can benefit your business, and how it can improve your customer experiences.

Knowing when to automate

It’s important to carefully consider the areas that make sense to automate. Repetitive tasks and simple queries for customer service agents are an obvious first choice. For messaging, stick with questions that are frequent and simple to answer. The more complex a question is, the more generic a reply will be given by the AI, and the less personalised the customer experience. 

The importance of contextual data in AI

Data on its own is not enough. Shaping an agile customer experience depends on developing an understanding of how a customer’s entire data footprint relates to a given situation. It means taking inputs like date of last purchase, status of last customer service call, recent attitude towards your company and placing them into a larger picture. Contextual data is at the heart of the omnichannel experience. As a result, it helps organisations get a more up to date, broadened view of the needs of every customer.

Empathetic engagement with AI and automation

Automating simple, repetitive tasks enables customer service agents to concentrate on the more complex cases that require live assistance. Therefore, AI and automation can work in tandem. It can equip agents with the tools and knowledge they need to address issues quickly and empathetically. Contextual information about a customer service case will already have been gathered throughout the customer journey up to this point. For example, if the customer is high value, what their current sentiment is, how many historical complaints they have submitted. This leaves AI to suggest personalised routes that drive faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

The importance of ongoing customer sentiment

Your customers are the best source of data for identifying the benefits and shortfalls of your AI integration across your customer service. Using sentiment analysis combined with customer intent and speech analytics, organisations can gain an ongoing understanding of the parts of the customer journey that are working or falling short, without customers having to fill out any kind of feedback form. This is hugely beneficial for an organisation’s long-term customer service strategy. By delivering sentiment in real-time, insights can help leaders to understand blockers in their processes.

Finding the right balance between AI and automation empowers organisations to maintain the human touch across customer service, whilst optimising cost efficiency. It’s crucial that your workforce has the ongoing job satisfaction brought about by handling the more engaging and challenging tasks. With AI as a complementary tool, your agents have the skills and knowledge at their fingertips to deliver first time resolution. As a result, case handling times are reduced and customer satisfaction increased. The key is identifying when automation is appropriate. Getting this right can generate huge value for an organisation. However, getting it wrong can damage your reputation through poor customer satisfaction.

At Microsoft, we work with customers across industries to implement modular AI solutions that fit in to existing customer service ecosystem. This helps to unlock new value from data, create new efficiencies and drive improved customer lifetime value.

Find out more

Download our e-guide: Create outstanding experiences in moments that matter

Discover Power Virtual Agents: A quick-start introduction to creating powerful chatbots 

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post How far should AI lead your customer service journey? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The industry is resetting. That was definitely the vibe I got from Retail Week 2021, which was recently held over two days in London. It was the first time many of these retailers had got together for more than 18 months.

I always turn up at these events a bit like a detective, curious to learn what the new tribes are up to in retail. Who’s creating the new groups, where they’re coming from, and how that’s all weaving together to create the future of retail.

There were some big, important themes that came through this year around sustainability and the circular economy, accessibility, inclusion and diversity. And there was also some cool stuff on the metaverse and the emerging role of gaming and eSports as drivers of growth in retail. Here, I’m going to share some of my thoughts on these and other things that caught my eye at Retail Week.

A new way of looking at consumers

A theme that really stood out for me this year was communities. The keynote on the first day of the event was from the Co-op’s CEO and the big takeaway for me was looking at the future of retail as consisting of communities.

It’s a theme that you can see in the changing way we view consumers. Traditional segmentation has revolved around personas. So a beauty provider might aim an anti-wrinkle cream at women aged 34-45, and they would create a whole persona for these women. That was fine in the old days. But in today’s market, that persona isn’t going to work. The anti-wrinkle cream buyer might be a 15-year-old guy who wants to take preventative measures. And so the personas that got brands where they are now, aren’t going to get them where they want to go.

We need to start collapsing stereotypes. When we think about being digitally native, for example, everyone immediately thinks of millennials. But that’s not always true. You’ve got lots of ‘silver surfers’ that are more digital than kids. So our whole concept of how we think about segmentation in general, whether that’s segmentation from a marketing perspective or from a behaviour and patterns perspective, is now moving into tribes and communities.

The question is: how do retailers tap into that intelligence now that cookies are becoming a thing of the past? The only way they can do that is by being able to process all the signals we as consumers are leaving out there in our communities.

The rising importance of gaming for retail

One of the communities represented for the first time at this year’s Retail Week was gaming. There are 2.6 billion gamers across the world. That’s a huge group of people with tribes within that are built around particular mobile platforms, consoles and games. These are the consumer tribes of tomorrow.

When you ask any parent how their child consumes content these days, 99 percent will say via YouTube or digital channels. That consumption of digital data, digital information and entertainment means that the shopper of tomorrow is going to be digitally-minded in a way that’ll make most of us now look pre-historic.

When you look at Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Gucci and other luxury fashion brands, you can see them responding to this. They understand that to stay relevant, they need to shift and come to where the shoppers of tomorrow are today. Last year, Balenciaga did a gaming version of one of their collection releases. And Louis Vuitton did the virtual clothing for the game League of Legends. So there’s already this blurring between the metaverse and established ways of doing things in retail.

Retail Week acknowledged this change by having Twitch lead a session on gaming activations and there were other metaverse-related talks too. There was only an hour or two allocated to the topic, but it was significant. It was a first, and it spoke of things to come, of that crossover between retail and gaming.

Again, it links back to the idea of these communities that are being built out there – and gaming is just one example – which offer huge potential if retailers can tap into them.

Technology as a driver of meaningful change

The other topic everyone was talking about was sustainability. There was a great talk from Carly Thomas, Head of Sustainability at Superdry about everything they are doing across their supply chain to make a real impact and do so much more than just greenwashing.

We had a brief chat after and I asked her: “Is technology important in sustainability?” I was genuinely curious about how important it is. And her response was that she saw sustainability as becoming an audit-esque function within the business, where they’re literally asking themselves: ‘Are we compliant to this? Are we compliant to that?’

And the key to answering these questions is data. Data is at the heart of sustainability, because you can’t claim to have any impact at all without the data to support the claim. You need to be able to say how many bottles you’ve saved from going to landfill by creating a new plastic recycled jacket.

What we’ll also begin to see, I believe, is product information leading down to the carbon footprint of individual items, so we can see transparently what the carbon numbers are for a jumper or jacket. It’ll be an expectation from consumers and it’ll all be powered by data.

Aside from the big names, there were two startups there that focused on taking secondhand items, cleaning them, listing them and sending them to you. So there’s a whole circular economy movement that’s just in its infancy and we’re going to see more and more of that as people become more comfortable with the concept. Because we’re a nation of charity shoppers, and now you can get those items presented really beautifully, really well maintained and cleaned.

The key to success for tomorrow’s retailers

The startups brought a lot of excitement to Retail Week and it was really lovely to see a few them that have built their technology on Microsoft’s technology stack. There were several companies who had built on Azure, using our AI for this and our cognitive vision services for that. That was really nice to see.

It was also encouraging to see some of the discussion leaning towards themes we’ve been promoting for a while now. I definitely felt that people now understand that if they’re going to be a successful retailer, they need to think about the business from a platform perspective and that data is going to drive all of that.

You can’t be successful if you don’t have a true single view of your customer, or move where your customer is on their customer journey or shopping mission. And that’s where our Cloud for Retail comes in. We understand that there’s a shopping mission and a customer journey. We understand that there are data points and signals throughout that shopping mission and journey. And we provide the platform and intelligence and technology for you to extract value from that.

That’s the big challenge retailers face now. They’ve spent a lifetime on point solutions, a lifetime on trying to solve one thing at a time. But the world has shifted a little bit. And to stay relevant, retailers need to shift a little bit too.

Find out more

Accelerate growth with solutions tailored to retailers

Build a business powered by data

Accelerate your journey to net zero

Ensuring products are made in a sustainable way has never been more important

About the author

Ali is a highly successful industry and business leader, with a successful career spanning 25 years working in the retail and technology sectors including Executive Director of Retail at Verizon. He collaborates with Microsoft’s retail customers and partners as the UK Retail Industry Executive creating visionary, business and technology outcomes. 

Outside of Microsoft Ali is currently finishing his book, The Future of Retail, Now and hosts The Retail Podcast, Ali is also an advocate for Andy’s Man Club a leading movement against male suicide. 

The post Communities, sustainability, metaverse and the future of retail appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Traditionally, cost and service have been the most important factors in deciding whether a supply chain was operating ‘optimally.’ If profits and margins were high and customers were satisfied, a supply chain was considered successful. However, in the current economic, political and social climate, this has changed.

Sustainability is a new driving force to judge a retailers ultimate performance.  

Sustainable manufacturing

Sustainable manufacturing is emerging as the operating model of choice. It has become the driving force for innovative products, processes, and systems for next-generation manufacturing and the supply chains that support them.

Sustainability focusses on a balance between business survivability and minimising the environmental and social impacts of operating.

Today’s increasingly complex, interdependent, and volatile markets demand agile and resilient supply chains. Retailers need to understand the current and emerging challenges facing supply chains. They need to pivot and embrace new technologies and processes such as AI and automation. Then, they can optimise the value chain for better stakeholder outcomes and business continuity. By taking this approach, retailers will also reduce costs and materials consumption, make more efficient use of resources, and increase their adaptability in times of crisis or rapid market shifts.

Our recent report, Creating a Blueprint for UK Competitiveness, found that a combination of talent, technology, future readiness and the ecosystem represent the key ingredients in any organisation’s future success. Essential to accelerating innovation and competitiveness is a collaborative approach focussed on business and industry impacting goals.

Resiliency and sustainable supply chains

Retailers must evolve their foundational supply chain practices quickly, with sustainability as a strategic priority. The current forces driving a resilient supply chain amplify seven key considerations for retailers. Business leaders must address immediate challenges and plan for future needs on supply chain sustainability:

Why is now the time to act?

In the 2018 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, extreme weather events, natural disasters, and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation topped the list of risks with the highest likelihood and impact supply chains. These are long-term trends that will continue.

There is an increasing urgency to modernise practises while these forces drive a need for organisations to rethink the supply chain. As a result, business leaders are taking immediate steps to build resilience into every aspect of planning and execution in the supply chain.

A new approach to sustainable supply chains

In the past, supply chains were linear, push-based, focussed on ad-hoc production and stocking. Systems that were not fully integrated across the value chain sometimes were reactive in nature. They are not the most sustainable option.

The circular supply chain model – as an extension of the circular economy – encourages businesses to loop their supply chains. This achieves cost efficiencies, facilitates innovation, reduces waste and excess inventory, and minimises environmental impact.

Businesses with a consistent, connected technology platform can now predict and pivot to address customer changes immediately. This also allows the ability to link people, processes and technology together much more tightly across partnerships. This allows for real-time intelligence sharing across the value chain.

The role of digital technology in sustainable supply chains

One of the key enablers of supply chain evolution is technology. The digital supply chain enables visibility, orchestrated processes, insights, and resilience. It enables you to make faster and better decisions with data and AI. It allows you to reduce your costs while potentially creating new and innovative business models and products.

The ability to gain real-time and predictive insights across supply chains based on external factors such as weather, consumer spending, and trends together with your internal data offers the ability to make faster decisions, serve customers better, and manage warehouses. AI can help identify areas of operational efficiency, predict and prevent disruptions, reduce waste and promote sustainable practices.

Sustainable supply chains are driven by empowered employees. To be more resilient, leaders need to drive a diverse and inclusive workforce, increase digital skills and encourage employees to be active stakeholders in business innovation. Only 48 percent of employees said their organisation offered some type of training in new skills[1]. Successful firms with sustainable supply chains have encouraged staff to re- or up-skill to match new technology.

Where does the journey start?

Retailers have struggled to balance competition and economic fluctuations with the complexities of environmental and societal challenges from their suppliers and customers.

But now smart software solutions, connected on a shared platform, can aid in breaking down silos to transform the global supply chain into a key aspect to deliver a corporate sustainability strategy.

The journey starts now. Not only is there a financial and a moral case, but technology enables us to deliver a strong balance sheet and sustainability improvements now and in the future.

Find out more

Get the eBook: The New Intelligent Supply Chain.

Get the playbook: Sustainability. Good for Business.

Download the Retail Trends Playbook: Driving operational resiliency with connected people and systems

Download the report: Creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness

Ensuring products are made in a sustainable way has never been more important

About the author

Ali is a highly successful award-winning industry-business leader, with a successful career spanning 22 years working in the retail and technology sectors including Executive Director of Retail at Verizon. He works as the Microsoft UK Retail Industry Executive creating visionary, business, and technology outcomes for customers and partners in this area.

Outside of Microsoft Ali, hosts and runs The Retail Podcast. He is also an advocate for (CALM) a leading movement against suicide. Every week 125 people in the UK take their own lives. And 75 percent of all UK suicides are male.

The post Closing the loop on sustainable supply chains in retail appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The challenge for retailers during these busy times as online transactions grow in volume is to manage fraud. They also need to protect their customers. So how can you manage security and risk while ensuring a great personalised experience for your customers in a solely digital environment?

We knew from our own experiences the challenges retailers face. We also wanted to deliver the best customer experience while reducing fraud. With our fraud protection system, we reduced fraud-related costs by $76 million. We also boosted revenue by hundreds of millions more over a two-year period. This system turned into Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

The fraud landscape

Online fraud normally conjures up the stereotypical ‘masked hoody in front of a computer’ who has stolen card or payment details from victims. After all, quite a few of us have experienced that dreaded phone call from the bank asking if we just purchased train tickets in Italy, when we’re unfortunately at home doing the washing up.

But the challenge is much broader to manage. It goes beyond transactions and can include account fraud, merchandise fraud and cyberattacks. All of these can occur and be detected across the shopper experience. All the way from the first visit to account logins, at point of payment and post-purchase. And we can’t forget cyberattacks. These are becoming more common, especially online. These risks rise during the holiday and new year season. Last year, the National Cyber Security Centre found that victims of online shopping fraud in England and Wales lost an average of £775 each.

Therefore, it’s important to ensure you take protections across your whole customer journey to not only protect your revenue, but to protect your customers.

Protect against friendly fraud

On top of typical criminal activities, there’s ‘friendly fraud’ such as improper discounts or returns. This is from customers who have made a legitimate purchase then raised a chargeback through their bank to gain a refund. Sometimes with genuine reasons, such as a shared family card where the bill payer isn’t aware of the purchase. But sometimes this can occur when the transaction on the bill doesn’t have sufficient information to remember the purchase being made – a particular problem during the holiday season.

On the other hand, it can also be intentional. Sometimes people who have received their products chance getting their money back via return fraud. The impact of managing this will go beyond the end of the year as chargebacks typically have a 30 – 60 day delay.

A platform that uses AI to deliver insights and detect fraud and purchase patterns helps you gain insights to reduce this. It also empowers store managers and investigators to reduce anomalies in merchandise discounts and returns.

A friction-free customer journey

For retailers, it’s a balance to ensure you have the right fraud protection and a friction-free customer journey. Once you recognise fraud can happen at any part of the customer journey, you can build in protections across the different stages. You will turn your risk management from reactive to proactive and improve customers’ experiences.

Wipro uses Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to reduce fraud rates by applying AI algorithms to almost 10,000 transactions in real time, streamline bank authorisation, generate fraud analytics across date, time, and location—and scale as needed during busy times.

“We expect to reduce fraud by at least 80 percent,” says Venkata Guru Prasad Kandarpi, Client Partner. “What’s more, we can use it to store and manage all our customer data in one place, which helps us meet compliance and security standards.”

Because customers find it easier – and safer – to buy, you can benefit from increased revenue and increased engagement. You will also boost efficiency and lower costs with operational efficiencies and actionable insights. These efficiencies will also benefit the customer. Your employees will have more time to focus on innovating or personalising the end-customer experience.

Combine strategy and tools for successful protection

It’s important for retailers to have a criminal and friendly fraud strategy combined with tools that protect your business. This includes regulatory and risk protections.

“Integration with the fraud protection system for all payments allows Xbox to focus our efforts on providing the most compelling entertainment and gaming platform.”

Erik Yeager, Director of Xbox Live Store.

By using AI and machine learning to manage processes, detect patterns, and adapt to new challenges in real-time, you can free time up for employees. They can then use this time to deliver new innovations or provide personalised customer experiences. It’s also important to re- and up-skill your employees to ensure they can use these new tools with confidence.

Find out more

Reimagine risk and security

4 ways to build trust and agility

Create amazing customer experiences with fraud protection

Fight the three biggest threats in e-commerce

About the author

Liz Leigh-Bowler joined Microsoft in 2019 as the Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain management. Before coming to Microsoft, she started her career as an assistant language teacher in Japan before making a complete change and jumping to finance at Barclaycard. Since then, she has specialised in proposition and product marketing where she can ensure customer needs are put at the heart of business decisions and Go-To-Market strategies. Following her time at Barclaycard, Liz implemented the global payments and banking strategy across Sage Accounting solutions and took up the position as Director for Product and Marketing at Sage Pay with extensive experience in payments, ecommerce and fraud.

The post How retailers can manage financial risk and reduce fraud appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Early on, I heard someone say: “Change shopping or customer service for six weeks, and it’s changed for life.” This has never been more true and has been accelerated through COVID-19.

Let’s not forget these changes have been coming down the line for a while. It’s just their adoption has been sped up. For customers, it’s the move into more digital channels or the demand for omni-channel experiences. For retailers, it’s the need to leverage technology to provide better support for customers and employees alike.

So how do we ensure the future of retail and the success in the new world of work? By being smarter, more resilient, and even more customer-focussed than ever before.

1.      Implement the right infrastructure and processes

When you get down to it, commerce is based on conversations between employees or from employee to customer. People are the heart of business. That’s why it’s so important to have the tools that facilitate effective communication and collaboration.

During the first half of 2020, we saw a rise in digital communication platforms like Teams. This allows for everyone – frontline staff, warehouse staff, head office staff, to access a single source of information at the same time and work together seamlessly and securely from anywhere.

As we look to the future of retail, see where you can remove other silos in your organisation – such as integrating your data and analytics. By bringing together communications, commerce, and customer profiles, you can give employees the ability to access real-time insights that can help them deliver better customer experiences in-store and online.

We’ve had a partnership with Marks and Spencer for a while, helping them integrate data and analytics across every endpoint to drive better customer experiences and build resilience. So, when they moved to more remote ways of working, they were able to leverage the tools they already have.

“Colleagues have enjoyed being much more multitasked and multiskilled and enabling lots of digital technologies to really support them and deliver optimised customer experiences,” says Helen Milford, Stores Director at Marks and Spencer.

2.      Harness the power of productivity tools in the new world of work

When you break down organisational siloes and create a 360-degree holistic view of the organisation, it becomes much easier to make data-driven decisions that drive sustainable growth. It’s also easier to use AI and machine learning to optimise customer data, so your employees can focus on delivering personalised experiences.

Think about using tools and devices that empower your employees to work in their best way, securely, from anywhere. Tools such as Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Power BI, help you connect all your data together, so your employees have it when they need it. And because they work across a range of devices, your employees can securely access information wherever they are.

By bringing all your data together, you can drive real insights and make real-time and predictive decisions, making you more resilient and agile. Using IoT in stores and warehouses, for example, can not only create safer spaces with traffic and stock management, but employees are empowered to tailor each store to their direct customers, using real-time insights to optimise stores, predictively order stock, and deliver personalised customer experiences.

3.      Drive innovation and new customer experiences with apps

The retailers that are successfully using technology to be more productive are also driving innovation with new applications to aid business. This also involves taking advantage of your employee’s ideas to drive better customer experiences.

How can a retailer do this productively? With no/low-code platforms such as Power Apps and Power Platforms. These help you quickly scale out new apps securely to your employees, or even out to your customers. Marks and Spencer are well-known for their popular bra fitting and child shoe sizing services. However, currently social distancing means these services are hard to offer. By quickly creating apps that offer this, they can still provide their customers with the services they know to expect, while gathering data on products and customer behaviour to drive better experiences in the future.

How to succeed in the future of retail

The retailers that will be successful now and in the future are the ones who have leveraged this opportunity. They use data and analytics to free up employee’s time. They can then focus on driving better customer experiences and increased value for the business.

“People are at the start of a digital journey, and they need to constantly review and reflect on what they’re doing,” says Simon Bennett, CTO EMEA, Rackspace Technology. “I think there’s a constant innovation that will happen and we’re at the start of an interesting journey.”

It’s not just about merchandise, marketing, or technology. It’s about retailers coming together in the service of their employees and their customers.

By breaking down those organisational siloes, you can bring your people together. This will help create a culture that focusses on innovation and inclusiveness to build sustainable growth.

As a result, retailers can build better businesses that make faster decisions. Ultimately, that will help them become more resilient and innovative in the new world of work.

Find out more

Watch the webinar

4 ways to use data and analytics on your innovation journey

4 ways to nurture success in the new world of work

Creating a blueprint for UK effectiveness

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

Ali is a highly successful award-winning industry-business leader, with a successful career spanning 22 years working in the retail and technology sectors including Executive Director of Retail at Verizon. He works as the Microsoft UK Retail Industry Executive creating visionary, business, and technology outcomes for customers and partners in this area.

Outside of Microsoft Ali, hosts and runs The Retail Podcast. He is also an advocate for (CALM) a leading movement against suicide. Every week 125 people in the UK take their own lives. And 75 percent of all UK suicides are male.

The post 3 ways to work smarter and prepare for the future of retail appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.