As rising costs, supply chain issues, changing consumer behavior, and other challenges continue to mount, retailers need more intelligent cloud solutions and technology to build resilience and achieve more. To build this new level of agility and adaptability, it’s imperative to find new ways to make data-driven decisions through cloud, AI, and mixed reality solutions. This integration of physical and virtual assets to make data-driven decisions is one of the key capabilities of the industrial metaverse.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Reimagine retail and deliver seamless experiences across the end-to-end shopper journey.

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Harnessing technology to meet customers where they are

Consumer behavior has shifted considerably over the last few years, with new patterns of work emerging that put people, communications, and heightened efficiency at the core of what is expected in the retail environment. Seeing and meeting these new opportunities, Microsoft has made significant investments in improving existing technologies, and pioneering new technologies to help our retail organizations better meet the evolving needs of their customers. Retail organizations that are already on this digital transformation journey can protect and extend their investments as they move toward their goals.

One way we are addressing these changing needs is through investments in emerging technologies, such as the industrial and commercial metaverse. In fact, we believe that in the not-so-distant future, the metaverse will play a key role in providing new ways of connecting, working, and delivering services for businesses and retail consumers alike. Our Work Trend Index¹ data shows that 50 percent of Gen Z and Millennials envision doing some of their work in the metaverse in the next two years.

As a platform-based company, our approach is to ensure that the software experiences we deliver can benefit users on all their favorite devices. This is especially true for our customers and partners in the retail industry, where we are making great strides to help them update and even revolutionize the way they train their teams, and how they interact with their customers.

By harnessing new and innovative technologies, like those we discussed at Microsoft Ignite 2022, retail organizations can leverage new approaches to drive results to meet customer expectations and achieve long-term success.

Microsoft and the metaverse 

In Judson Althoff’s keynote at Microsoft Ignite 2022, he highlights many of the ways that companies can leverage these emerging technologies to gain a competitive advantage in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Indeed, while metaverse for consumer, commercial, and industrial applications are still in their early stages of development and applicability, we are already seeing considerable promise for their deployment on a broad scale.    

One area that shows significant promise is the potential to use metaverse to train employees by creating engaging environments for them to learn, practice, and retain the skills they need. Moreover, with the robust tools, resources, and technology that Microsoft offers, paired with the inherent possibilities of the metaverse, retail organizations can create plans and deployments that push broad organizational learning.

As is the case with all new technologies, the metaverse is not without potential risks, and companies must learn how to manage and operate in a metaverse environment safely. One way to do that is by experimenting internally with your own teams before you create a customer-facing metaverse experience.  

One example of an organization that has created an employee-focused metaverse is Accenture. Called the Nth Floor, Accenture’s enterprise metaverse empowers its geographically distributed workforce to meet, collaborate, and learn in immersive environments. These virtual environments are familiar to employees as they are brought to life via digital twins of its physical offices. Within the Nth Floor, Accenture created a virtual campus called One Accenture Park to help new employees personally connect with the culture and build professional relationships.

In 2022, 150,000 new hires are working from the metaverse on their first day at Accenture. Of course, the metaverse is still in its early days. In fact, according to a Gartner®² report, it will be 10 years before its mainstream adoption. Aside from the need for organizations to learn how to operate and manage, two other things are clear—the requirements in terms of security and computing power will be significant—making the cloud the perfect technology to power metaverse usage. 

A bold new future

Microsoft is working with many retailers on their metaverse future—building accelerators and helping them to plan to maximize return on investment. As we step boldly into this new future, Microsoft is committed to providing our customers and partners the tools and resources they need to take advantage of the many amazing opportunities the metaverse holds.

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft and the metaverse:

• Explore Microsoft’s pioneering technology, Microsoft Mesh, which enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere—on any device—through mixed-reality applications.
• Microsoft and Meta partner to deliver immersive experiences for the future of work and play—the Official Microsoft Blog.

Every year, Microsoft Ignite is our opportunity to showcase the new and exciting innovations that we’ve developed to better equip our customers and partners to succeed. With the speed of tech and cloud innovation, Microsoft Ignite is the ideal platform to learn about how we are helping organizations unleash value quickly, build for the future, and exceed expectations. 

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we highlighted new and beneficial ways that Microsoft technology is revolutionizing the retail landscape and embracing the power and potential of the metaverse.

Join Alysa Taylor, CVP, Industry, Apps and Data Marketing, and Corey Sanders, CVP, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion Team, for a panel discussion: Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Industry Clouds.

And be sure to watch these relevant Microsoft Ignite sessions: 

• Optimize your customer shopping experience with Microsoft Cloud for retail
• Meetings in the metaverse: Overcoming challenges and defining leading edge practices
• Field Workers of Tomorrow: The opportunity in the Metaverse
• Jumpstart your physical operations transformation with technologies built for the industrial metaverse

Follow Microsoft Retail on Twitter and visit our Microsoft Cloud for Retail website to get the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers deliver a seamless experience across the entire shopper journey.

¹Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong? Work Trend Index Special Report.

²Gartner: Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies, 2022, Melissa Davis, Gary Olliffe, July 2022.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Advancing industry and retail through innovation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Connect your customers, your people, and your data.

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The hunt begins

According to eMarketer Insider Intelligence trends, forecasts and statistics, “the search for the best possible price is lengthening the shopping season. Nearly one-quarter (22 percent) of adults have already begun their holiday shopping (October) to avoid future price hikes.” 

Most shoppers start their gift pursuit online, across a myriad of channels, and are continuing to add new shopping methods acquired during the COVID-19, such as buy online with pick up in-store or at curbside. They want to get their shopping done earlier to beat the crowds and avoid shipping delays. They want to be able to shop with their mobile phone and social retail, while some still enjoy the chase, lying in wait to be the first in-store to beat out rival shoppers for the most sought-after gifts.  

Marketers are exhausted trying to keep up and have limited resources to work across an array of tools to meet these demands. And it doesn’t stop there: don’t forget the aftermath of post-holiday returns. Marketers, retail associates, and customer care agents are under pressure to ensure returns are exchanged for exactly what the recipient was hoping for and ensure the original purchase revenue is retained as well as the recipient’s loyalty, who may not even be a current customer. The holiday shopping cycle is complex it not only requires knowing the customer but also the recipient of the customer’s gift, their interests, and brand affinities as well as understanding their own customer journey with the retailer.

Our approach to innovate CX

We know these challenges firsthand. After all, we are also a well-known business-to-consumer retailer. Have you ever seen the lines of shoppers outside of a big box retailer on Black Friday hoping to score the latest Xbox console? We have, and we learned how to capture insights from shopper behavior, turn it into action to personalize customer experiences, and, during the process, transform consumers into super fans. As an example, we leveraged customer insights to pick up a social signal where a shopper who was camping out in a line on Black Friday in front of a big box retailer posted, “I wish Microsoft Xbox delivered pizza,” and based on our understanding of the customer, we were able to orchestrate a promo for a pizza and have it delivered to him on the spot. We earned a heart and a fan who drove significant likes on our social channels. What’s more, this kind of customer experience created memorable positive impressions of our brand beyond the product launch.   

We learned early on that customer experience (CX) is a game changer and built the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform founded on our own needs. As consumer behaviors and expectations continue to evolve, we continue to invest in this space and innovate with every release to bring new capabilities to retailers that enable them to surprise and delight their customers in moments that matter, be it the holiday season or every day of the year.

The gift that keeps on giving

CX knows no boundaries. It goes beyond the holiday season. It continues to grow and expand across organizations. It is not the responsibility of one line of business; it is everyone’s role within the organization, whether customer-facing or behind the scenes. Transform CX with our latest innovations and give shoppers a gift they will remember all year long: the gift of exceeding their expectations and an experience like no other. Here are some pointers on how to use the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to reduce holiday CX casualties and transform CX every day:

1. Maximizing the value of your data

The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and specificities of each customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights capability helps you realize the true value of your data by unifying disparate sources across the complete view of a shopper’s journey to discover insights that enable better experiences. Combining those data points into a unified customer profile improves your customer understanding, allowing you to engage them as individuals targeting their personal needs, all powered by AI.

Once you know your customer you can continue to unlock omnichannel insights with shopper and operations analytics. Using Customer Insights with Azure Synapse Analytics helps you combine business operations data such as supply chain and pricing with customer insights, including demand by demographics, geography, and brand affinities, to conduct advanced analytics to predict and manage product availability, to optimize price and recommend the next best product to ensure customer expectations are met. Read how Edible Arrangements is doing this today.

2. Elevate the shopping experience

The holidays put additional pressure on retail consumers. They demand an experience that is tailored to their tastes and respects their time and energy. Brands must not only meet expectations but also elevate the experience to the next level. This requires real-time personalization throughout the customer’s journey. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform capabilities with Dynamics 365 Marketing utilize the insights about the customer and activate them in real time to identify segments and preferred channels, trigger flawless journeys, create self-service content, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences not just based on who the customer is, but also in real-time based on what they are doing. For example, Leatherman, an American brand of multitools and knives, is using our solution to better understand customer brand and interest affinities, customer lifetime value, and use this insight to orchestrate highly personalized cross-channel journeys at scale: from welcome journeys to post-purchase communications to checking in when customers haven’t made a purchase in a while. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform helps tailor the experience differently for new customers versus those who are on their way to becoming brand ambassadors. Read the full Leatherman story.

3. Real-time communications and collaboration

Be it the retail store associate, customer care agent, or—in the case of Campari—a Camparista, frontline workers are one of your organization’s most valuable assets. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides the means to utilize data across the customer’s journey and transform it into insights that can be seamlessly activated in customer care systems and in the hands of retail associates, be it on a mobile device, text message, email or through a dashboard in Microsoft Teams. The converged intelligence across sales, service, and marketing ensures frontline workers have real-time insights into customer interactions across the enterprise and are provided with recommendations for the next best action, products based on inventory, store availability, and customer affinities as well as understanding the customer’s last interaction with customer care. Store collaboration and communication fueled by insights empower store associates to maximize sales and customer care agents to be as effective as possible and deliver smart assistance in moments that matter.  

Microsoft’s solutions empower the retail industry to connect your customers, your people, and your data. Connected, these applications unlock unique opportunities to create individualized experiences that meet customers’ expectations whether it be the holiday season or all year round.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail and how you can use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to meet your customers’ expectations and bring your customers into focus with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

You can also download a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. And for the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers elevate the customer experience, download the ebook Reimagine Retail in the Digital Age. 

The post ’Tis the season for exceptional customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

To face these adversities head-on and capitalize on the explosion of e-commerce growth, retailers are injecting agility into their business by embracing e-commerce in the cloud. The cloud provides a robust infrastructure to enable seamless unified commerce operations, personalized experiences across channels, and thriving supply chains. To better understand how companies adopt the cloud to drive business transformation, we surveyed 50 global retail and consumer goods companies. The output of this survey is a list of 30 use cases mapped by the business impact, maturity stage, and future cloud investment intensity. These high-impact use cases span areas such as customer profiling, personalization, online returns management, real-time inventory visibility, virtual products, and many others. Furthermore, this study clarifies the business and customer value of e-commerce on the cloud beyond the parameters of speed and scale.

4 critical challenges retailers are facing

Before realizing the benefits of the high-impact use cases, the journey toward e-commerce cloud adoption starts with acknowledging the critical challenge facing retailers today. Our analysis sheds light on the following four challenges:

1. Depreciating e-commerce platform performance during peak traffic seasons. Occasions like “Black Friday” and “Singles Day” are the most important retail events for any e-commerce business. Sales skyrocket as customers pursue attractive deals and seize potential buying opportunities. To prepare for these spikes in consumer demand, retailers traditionally plan early, often locking their digital experiences down by going into code freeze in early fall. Although these occasions will remain significant to retailers’ bottom lines, holiday spending will continue to be more spread out as retailers offer holiday deals as early as October. This matters for retailers because it’s no longer just about managing a spike or two in consumer demand, but rather being able to support sustained spikes over longer periods of time. Some of them planned, others unplanned.
2. Data silos across multiple channels curbing customer acquisitions and loyalty. One of the reasons why retailers are offering holiday deals earlier is to minimize the impact of supply chain disruptions. Even though many retailers went in this direction in 2021, this past holiday season was plagued by six billion out-of-stock messages due to supply chain shortages. The drive for customer centricity spans optimizing supply chains to provide convenient at-home deliveries as well as personalized experiences that drive loyalty. This requires enterprises to unlock data in silos to establish a holistic view across their supply chain, while also enabling customers to track their deliveries in real-time.
3. Inability to integrate new engagement models for e-commerce. The newfound convenience economy sees many retailers embracing the store-less paradigm by taking their direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms up a notch. However, the criteria for providing an entertaining shopping experience for customers are noticeably missing. This further drives e-commerce towards social media platforms, giving rise to new business models such as live commerce, social commerce, and gamification. This requires faster integration of such engagement models without compromising on data security, customer privacy, check-out speed, and overall platform performance.
4. Lack of new-age technology integration to deploy e-commerce use cases at pace. As retailers continuously experiment with technology to streamline their products and services to cater to their customers’ preferences, one thing becomes clear: the need for technology-enabled capabilities to streamline e-commerce operations so that retailers can deliver new-age experiences. Cloud enables and seamlessly integrates new-age, resource-intensive technologies such as AI, mixed reality (MR), Internet of Things (IoT), metaverse, and blockchain to deploy e-commerce use cases at pace.

The future of e-commerce is in the cloud

Although each of these challenges creates headwinds for retailers, the juice is worth the squeeze. Retailers can realize the following benefits by enabling e-commerce in the cloud:

• On-demand scalability to meet peak traffic and demand.
• 360-degree, real-time data visibility across supply chains, customer engagement touchpoints, and operations.
• Flexibility in customizing digital platforms to deliver unified commerce experiences.
• Secured online transactions and data privacy.
• Faster online searches and personalized recommendations.
• Ability to enable new-age engagement models at scale.

More retailers are shifting their e-commerce workloads to the cloud. Currently, more than 60 percent of the total e-commerce workloads function on private and public cloud platforms. By 2023, this number is expected to grow to ~85 percent, with more than half of these workloads being hosted on public cloud platforms.

Retailers are making bets on e-commerce in the cloud to provide the agility required to meet the demanding pressures of today and the uncertainties of tomorrow. Cloud-enabled retailers say bring on the uncertainty. Do you?

Learn more

Read more about how 50 of the world’s largest retailers are adopting e-commerce in the cloud to drive business innovation through clear, actionable, high-impact use cases in the white paper, “Steering Through E-commerce Disruption with Cloud.”

Follow Microsoft Retail on Twitter and visit our Microsoft Cloud for Retail website to get the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers deliver a seamless experience across the entire shopper journey.

¹Supply Chain Pain: What’s Causing Backups At America’s Ports, YouTube.

²Global Ecommerce Forecast 2022, Insider Intelligence.

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