The ability to deliver seamless, personalized and differentiated customer experiences across the shopping journey is now possible. A new way of working and collaborating is now possible. New capabilities to transform your business and product offerings are now possible.

With mixed reality and AI technology, the future of retail is here. Let’s explore what retailers and brands can do with these technology innovations.

Transforming retail through AI technology

When someone mentions artificial intelligence, our first thought might still be of robots and science fiction. But AI now goes far beyond that. In today’s world, AI is both a very real field of study and a collection of different technology. It’s modeled after the human brain—which senses, processes, and acts on information—learning and adapting over time, largely through the identification of patterns in data.

The power of AI in retail comes in the ability to use this intelligent technology throughout the customer’s shopping journey and your organization, helping tap into even greater potential and transform what’s possible.

As we look at the types of customer experiences shoppers want, innovations like chatbots, cognitive and machine learning, advanced analytics, and blockchain—combined with connected devices like beacons, machines and headsets—can infuse data and insights wherever they’re needed. The result? Digital engagements that are personal, contextual and relevant based on purchase history, demographic information, location, time of day, and other data sources.

As your customers’ lives change on a weekly, hourly or even minute-by-minute basis, AI technology has the means to not just respond to, but predict and anticipate, their needs, to deliver just the right experience, and even that “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that” experience.

See for yourself the power of these innovations working together throughout a connected shopping journey.

AI technology: Learning from the leaders

One retailer tapping into the power of AI to deliver personalized shopping experiences across channels is UK-based Dixons Carphone. A major European electronics and telecommunication retailer and service provider, it’s using the capabilities of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services to build AI into its customer interactions, boosting engagement and empowering its employees. I talk more about their success story here.

JJ Food Service is another great example, using advanced technologies like machine learning and predictive ordering, combined with sensors and mobile apps, to improve operational efficiencies and make it as easy as possible for its foodservice customers and suppliers to work with them. Pier I Imports is also using the benefits of machine learning to empower its employees with actionable reports and visualizations for more effective marketing campaigns and stronger customer relationships.

Transforming retail through mixed reality

As we look ahead at the future of shopping, mixed reality is another technology innovation I’m incredibly excited about for retailers and consumer brands.

By mixed reality, we mean providing devices with the ability to perceive the world—breaking down the barriers between virtual and physical reality. Imagine wearing a virtual reality device and seeing your physical hands as you manipulate an object, working on the scanned 3D image of a real object, or bringing in a holographic representation of another person into your virtual world so you can collaborate.

For retailers and brands, its transformative capabilities are endless. Mixed reality has the power to bring an image, product label or even shop windows to life. Customers can see brands and their stock in a new way and engage with them on a completely new level.

Imagine if consumers could see, hear, and feel the presence of the experiences and goods you are selling—without leaving the comfort of their couch. Or, in a brick-and-mortar environment, shoppers can go beyond the physical inventory, sampling different product features from virtual catalogs, or designing their new kitchen as it comes to life around them.

With mixed reality technologies, employees can also experience and work with digital content in relation to the real world, unlocking new insights, capabilities and levels of customer service.

Retail marketers can visualize data in a 3D world to help adjust promotions based on customer demand. New hires can practice performing job duties in real-world situations. Retail planners and merchandisers can visualize designs, share plans with others, and walk through their floorplans together before they build, whether they’re physically there or not.

See for yourself how mixed reality can bring together a virtual team to plan a product unveil at a brand’s flagship store.

Mixed reality: Learning from the leaders

The interest in mixed reality is high, and there are notable examples of retailers, brands and technology companies tapping into its potential.

Volvo Cars is using HoloLens, Microsoft’s mixed reality technology, to reimagine how people experience car buying. Lowe’s is also using mixed reality and cognitive AI to reinvent kitchen visualization and design.

Trimble Dimensions is pioneering new, immersive mixed reality design processes. And Adobe is developing new, more powerful methods for marketing data visualization. See for yourself.

Enabling a new retail reality

Microsoft’s mission is to help every person and organization on this planet achieve more. Mixed reality and AI technology are helping make this possible. Which is why we are also focused on democratizing AI—making it more accessible to everyone—and infusing its capabilities across Microsoft’s portfolio of products.

For retailers and brands, these goals and outcomes translate to a unique combination of AI and a proven enterprise platform, helping you derive and use intelligence from a wide range of relevant data in more powerful ways to reinvent the customer journey and drive better business outcomes. We look forward to helping you take advantage of mixed reality and AI technology and transforming the future of retail with you!

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post The Future of Retail with Mixed Reality and AI Technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The push to go digital is amplifying the need for humans and machines to do more together. By bringing together the best of art and science, retailers can more effectively cater to shoppers and consistently deliver differentiated experiences across the customer journey. Retailers are employing artificial intelligence and machine learning in countless ways—from anticipating customers’ requests and desires, and tailoring offers and interactions to each specific customer, to ensuring the right products are stocked and ready when their customers want them.

AI technology is also helping retailers tackle abandoned shopping carts. What if employees in brick-and-mortar stores knew what items shoppers left in their online carts? According to the TimeTrade survey, 70 percent of shoppers would like it if store associates used this information to help answer their questions. If stores found a way to provide personalized shopping experiences like this, abandoned carts would not always mean lost sales.

One retailer tapping into the power of AI to deliver personalized shopping experiences across channels is UK-based Dixons Carphone. A major European electronics and telecommunication retailer and service provider, Dixons Carphone discovered that approximately 90 percent of its customers started their shopping journey online, and 65 percent use their mobile phones to assist them while shopping in-store.

Wanting to provide a consistent, world-class experience across channels, the retailer teamed with Microsoft Services to help their 48,000 employees successfully adapt and respond to changing consumer buying patterns.

“Through the research, we determined that artificial intelligence could be the key to offering our customers the differentiated and personalized service and cohesive customer journey we are aiming for,” says Antonia Colin-Jones, strategic partnership program manager for Dixons Carphone.

Using the capabilities of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services to build AI into its customer interactions, the retailer recently introduced its first interactive AI bot, named Cami, accessible through the company’s Currys brand website and Facebook Messenger.

Described as “mildly geeky and quite confident,” Cami helps customers and store employees research, find, and save products and check stock. The bot will help Dixons Carphone strengthen its relationships with customers by supporting consistent online and in-store experiences while also enabling store employees to be more effective and efficient with new tools and expanded data access.

In the past customers who researched products online before coming to a store had to start from scratch when seeking assistance from a store associate. Cami can help bridge that gap by enabling employees to see what the customer was looking for online, and then direct them to that product or to other ones they might like equally or even more. The retailer also expects the new bot to help them better understand their customers by seeing the type of questions they are asking, and then use that insight to refine future services and communications.

I am excited to see how Dixons Carphone is transforming its business with AI technology and machine learning. With Cami on the job 24/7, they are better integrating the customer journey, boosting engagement, and empowering their employees. You can learn more by reading their new case study.

I’ll also be talking more about this at Retail Week’s Tech conference on September 14. As we explore the future of digital retailing at this year’s event, I’ll discuss how disruptive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence will change the face of shopping and look at more examples of digital transformation. Join us in London, and I’ll share highlights of my keynote in my next blog.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post AI Technology Unites Customer Journey at Dixons Carphone appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As I talked about in my first article, cloud computing’s current capabilities are powerful and far-reaching, with the potential to transform every aspect of a retail or consumer goods organization.

As more of our industry looks to what the cloud can offer, I wanted to share 8 benefits of Microsoft’s Cloud for retailers and brands. I highlighted eight capabilities in my last post here and will continue below.

1. Get IT flexibility with a truly consistent hybrid cloud
2. Protect your business with the most trusted cloud
3. Easily implement ready-to-use IoT
4. Power decisions and apps with unmatched intelligence
5. Expand globally with more regions than any other cloud provider
6. Build and extend on the leading cloud platform
7. Power your business apps with Azure
8. Move to the cloud with confidence

5. Expand globally with more regions than any other cloud provider

Microsoft has 40 announced Azure regions across the globe, more than any major cloud provider. Our priority on geographic expansion means you can choose the datacenter and region that’s right for you and your customers, with the performance and support you need, where you need it.

For example, our Azure datacenter expansions in India and Korea are enabling company’s like Flipkart, India’s leading marketplace, to continue its growth and to scale quickly and stay resilient, especially during peak seasons—all helping provide 100 million customers with the best online shopping experience.

In Korea, Samsung Electronics is using the global scale of the Microsoft Cloud to power an IoT solution for remote energy reduction, and LG Electronics is sending real-time data and using the scalability of virtual machines to gain insights and better serve thousands of customers. Here’s what Callaway Golf has to say about its move to the Microsoft Cloud and local datacenters in Asia, where it completely eliminated performance lags.

“By using Microsoft global datacenters, we’re able to move infrastructure for key applications and websites closer to the people who use them. It would have been extremely difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to set up this infrastructure on the other side of the world using Callaway-owned servers.” — Dan Cowles, Manager of Solution Development, Callaway Golf

6. Build and extend on the leading cloud platform

Microsoft is the only cloud provider recognized in the industry as having leading solutions in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Businesses can get even more value out of their investment in Azure by using one of our industry-leading SaaS services including Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security.

Azure shares many foundational capabilities with these services such as identity management through Azure Active Directory I mentioned in my last post, and mobile device management through Intune—both incredibly valuable for retailers and brands as they increase productivity through mobility and strike the right balance between access for all and security.

These Microsoft Cloud services also offer retailers and brands additional compliance benefits including accessibility, for example in Office 365 and Windows. And StaffHub, an app that makes it easy for retailers to manage shift schedules and share information with their deskless workers, helps manage complex scheduling laws that are on the rise. The Azure PaaS platform services can also help you be more productive and increase your ROI according to this Forrester Total Economic Impact study.

Here’s perspective from The Hershey Company who uses a combination of Azure solutions.

“Digital transformation is not an end, it’s a means for continual improvement. We use Azure cloud analytics to gather operational and customer insights, and we use Office 365 to share that information to drive business value. The future for Hershey is very exciting—with Microsoft cloud solutions, we are in control of our digital journey, connecting everyone to work better together and share the goodness.” — Carlos Amesquita, Chief Information Officer, The Hershey Company

7. Power your business apps with Azure

We also understand that retailers and brands have many existing mission-critical business applications helping drive their business, and the Microsoft Cloud can support them.

Azure is not just about Microsoft software. It is an open and flexible cloud that supports multiple operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, tools, databases, and devices—it’s about your business needs. We continuously work with industry-leading software vendors to certify their applications on Azure and to give you peace of mind. We have unique relationships with SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat so that you get a first-class support experience. In addition, Azure Marketplace provides more than 3,400 certified applications that are ready to be deployed.

Read why The Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of concentrated phosphate and potash crop nutrients, choose Azure to support its SAP system and mission of helping the world grow the food it needs.

“Our plan to move SAP to Azure has allowed us to be more cost competitive while at the same time has improved our ability to be more responsive to new business requirements.” — Doug Mills: Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Mosaic

8. Move to the cloud with confidence

With Azure, you can move to the cloud with confidence. Azure is built on the same technologies that you (and millions of others) already trust: Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory, Hyper-V, and more. This means a consistent, familiar and stable environment. We provide flexible and powerful tools that help ensure a successful workload migration and validation of all cloud applications and dependencies. And you can move your virtual machines between on-premises and the cloud as often as your business needs dictate—no conversion needed.

We are also committed to giving you the best pricing and flexible options. For many apps, you can bring your existing licenses to Azure or enjoy a pay-as-you go model. You can also take advantage of various pricing plans that fit your unique needs. To learn more about how to get started, go here.

You can also watch this video of our technologies in action delivering a seamless and connected customer journey. We look forward to helping retailers and consumer brands take advantage of all that the Microsoft Cloud can offer, and helping you rewrite the business of retail and reinvent the shopping experience.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post 8 benefits of the Microsoft Cloud for retailers and brands appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As retailers and consumer brands move forward to drive transformation within their organizations, technology innovation in the cloud holds the key to success.

Combined with the latest advancements in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing’s current capabilities are powerful and far-reaching. It has the potential to rewrite the business of retail and transform every aspect of a retail or consumer goods organization—from the customer experiences they provide, to how their employees work, to their business processes and operations, to the very products and services they offer.

It’s truly an exciting time to be in the industry.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Building the intelligent cloud platform is one way we are helping do that.

For my worldwide retail and consumer goods team that translates into making sure retailers and brands get the most value out of Microsoft technology—to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new opportunities at the intersection of business performance improvement, differentiated experiences and technology integration. It’s at the core of every interaction we have.

Today, more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft’s cloud services, and I am thrilled by the number of retailers and brands already using Azure to fuel business growth and reinvent themselves.

With more of our industry looking to what the cloud can offer, I wanted to highlight eight benefits of the Microsoft Cloud for retailers and brands.

1. Get IT flexibility with a truly consistent hybrid cloud

A consistent hybrid approach to the cloud is something retailers and consumer brands want but haven’t always been able to find with a cloud provider. We want to give our customers the choice and flexibility that works best for their business.

With Azure, retailers and brands can get the best of both worlds—the ability to deploy in the cloud or on-premises and extend on-premises data and apps—with hybrid consistency everywhere: in application development, management and security, identity management, and across the data platform. Azure’s flexibility in how you build your apps also helps accelerate innovation, rapidly building simple to complex projects using your choice of tools and open source technologies.

For retailers with large store or on-premises technology investments, a hybrid approach offers a compelling path to the cloud and a way to optimize their existing investments, keep costs down, and enable a truly connected enterprise—one that will open doors to delivering greater consistency and personalization in the shopping experience, and the speed and agility to meet customer demands.

2. Protect your business with the most trusted cloud

While data security and privacy is vital to any business, retailers and brands face enormous pressures and challenges with targeted cybercrime, complex supply chains, increasing compliance obligations, and constant staff turnover. That’s why the cloud provider and technology they choose is so important.

Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance, and regulatory compliance. Our broad suite of cloud products and services are all built from the ground up to address the most rigorous security and privacy demands of our customers. We offer 50 compliance offerings, more certifications than any other cloud service provider, and the Microsoft Cloud helps retailers and brands accelerate compliance, for example, with Europe’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law.

We also help manage and control identity and user access to your environments, data and applications.  Azure Active Directory federates user identities and enables multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in for all your retail employees. Retailers and brands can also use Azure Active Directory B2C to serve their applications to customers with fully customizable experiences, while protecting their identities at the same time. Plus, the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program offers Azure customers comprehensive protection for their cloud-based innovations and investments against intellectual property lawsuits and risks.

3. Easily implement ready-to-use IoT

As we continue to see, retailers and consumer goods brands want practical uses for the Internet of Things (IoT.) The Microsoft Cloud offers plenty of effortless ways to drive better operational efficiencies and drive down costs. With our Azure IoT Suite, retailers and brands benefit from preconfigured solutions for the most common IoT scenarios such as remote monitoring and predictive maintenance and can help increase margins per store by understanding things like in-store traffic patterns, shelf stock levels and energy usage, and tracking grocery refrigeration units to prevent food waste and spoilage.

Azure IoT Suite is also open and customizable by design, and 46 percent of Azure Certified for IoT devices run on Linux, Android, or other open source technologies. Here’s what MARS DRINKS has to say about their IoT deployment to improve operational efficiency for its partners in the field.

“The analytics platform based on Azure helps us to deliver a better service to our customers. We achieve this by using the information the platform provides to identify the optimum time to stock and service MARS DRINKS machines. We give this information to our operators as simple, actionable data that can be acted upon straightaway, helping them to add efficiency to their business and identify areas where improvements can be made.” — Jamie Head, Chief Information Officer at MARS DRINKS

4. Power decisions and apps with unmatched intelligence

Advanced analytics and AI are at the core of helping retailers and brands turn all their data into insights to drive real transformation across their business.

Azure is also the only public cloud that provides Cognitive APIs, Bots, Machine Learning, and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) capabilities for developers and data scientists. They can build intelligent solutions at scale by pairing these capabilities with powerful GPU-based compute to accelerate deep learning, enable HPC simulations, and conduct real-time data analytics using Azure N-Series Virtual Machines.

With Cognitive Services and the Bot Framework, brands can create the kind of app interactions that feel natural and delight users. Using predictive analytics services such as Machine Learning, retailers can make smarter decisions, and uncover new possibilities from their structured and unstructured data—including ERP and CRM systems, web, IoT devices, and big data—and integrate apps with the tools their employees use every day such as Power BI and Microsoft Excel. Blockchain can dramatically enhance transparency in a product’s journey along the supply chain. And all the deep learning and real-time analytics have the potential to drive billions of dollars in savings in two of the industry’s biggest profit losses: food fraud and theft.

In my next blog, I’ll share more advantages of the Microsoft Cloud for retailers and brands and how to move to the cloud with confidence.

To learn more in the meantime, go here. You can also watch this video of our technologies in action delivering a seamless and connected customer journey. We look forward to helping retailers and consumer brands take advantage of all that the Microsoft Cloud can offer, and helping you rewrite the business of retail and reinvent the shopping experience.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post Rewrite the business of retail with the power of the cloud appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Those experiencing the most growth is a new crop of online fast-fashion retailers, according to Fung Global Retail & Technology—proving highly adept at rapidly responding to consumers’ increasing demands for immediacy and constant newness.

One such leader is UK-based, online fashion retailer ASOS.

So how does ASOS, marketing to consumers in their twenties, achieve more than 25 percent revenue growth year after year, win multiple awards, and expand worldwide?

While the easy answer is to offer great products and services, that’s only part of the story. To become a leading digital fashion destination with more than 13.4 million customers and a devoted following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you need to be more than a top-notch retailer. You also need to provide young, tech-savvy consumers with innovative apps and fresh content day after day.

To keep up with global growth and deliver the best possible online experience, ASOS transformed its e-commerce platform to run in the cloud on Microsoft Azure.

With its new agility and fast performance, they doubled sales and handled up to 33 orders per second during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and are now delivering a more personalized, experience.

“In a world where we have 85,000 products on the site and 4,500 products going live each week, we need to make sure that the right subset of those products is in front of our consumers,” says Bob Strudwick, Chief Technology Officer at ASOS. “Now, the products and content will be more relevant to you as a shopper.”

The rapidly growing company has also accelerated development of innovative mobile apps and features to quickly target new markets and stay on top of consumer and technology trends. Providing those relevant new features is easier and faster with microservices in a cloud environment. Future plans also include using support for conversational commerce and deeper integration of the company’s e-commerce platform with social media.

I am thrilled for ASOS and its success in using Microsoft technology to enhance its customer experience and adapt and grow in the fast-changing fashion industry. You can learn more about their digital transformation story in this new case study, and hear from ASOS below.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post How online retailer ASOS provides a stellar customer experience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Programs like Target’s Techstars and Best Buy’s Ignite align retailers with nascent startups while tapping into their collective brain trust for new ideas.

Meanwhile, innovation labs like @WalmartLabs and The Hershey Lab are reimagining the retail experience—brewing mobile and online innovations, omnichannel shopping solutions including virtual ones, grooming digitally-savvy retail talent, among other things.

Retailers and brands are also taking advantage of similar offerings from the technology industry, like our Microsoft Innovation Centers, Microsoft Ventures, and the NRF Startup Showcase where a group of retail technology startups present to our customers while in New York for the event.

Others are heavily investing in innovation through acquisitions, like Walmart’s purchases of mobile shopping app Stylr and e-commerce start-up Jet.com.

Both consumer goods and retail credit these innovation initiatives for launching new technology solutions and concept stores.

The Kohl’s mobile app, for example, was developed in the department store’s Silicon Valley tech lab, and is now a centerpiece of its personalization strategy. Hershey’s lab set about envisioning a reinvented shopping experience, and came up with a fictitious grocery chain and a series of concept stores named Medley.

“What we see in the future is there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all category,” says Brian Kavanagh, Senior Director, Retail Evolution at The Hershey Company. “So Medley is called Medley because we realized that there had to be a portfolio reaching different kinds of shoppers.”

For many, the outcomes have been tangible. Walmart’s strides to expand and improve its ecommerce platform have brought big gains, reporting a 63 percent growth in online sales last quarter.

These examples showcase a consistent theme among retailers and brands: the ability to meet shoppers on their own terms, delivering just the right experience on any given day.

Much of their technology efforts point to transforming and tweaking where most of the retail magic still happens: In store, where 91% of retail sales are still generated.

Stores are rolling out location-aware mobile platforms that double as interactive, personal shopping assistants, catering to consumers’ idiosyncratic wants and needs in contextually relevant ways.

For traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, this includes blending their physical and digital assets in new ways to make the shopping experience more seamless, convenient and relevant. Walmart’s mobile app offers in-store shoppers easier and faster ways to check in and out. And with its new shipping program, customers can now place orders online but pick up in-store, and receive discounts on certain items as a result.

Online retailers, like ASOS and FreshDirect, are also focused on delivering a seamless experience, and emphasizing mobile-first strategies. FreshDirect, for example, is rolling out a more scalable long-term strategy to deliver the same high quality in its mobile apps as in its products and service, looking and behaving the way customers expect.

“Our customers are shopping on both web and mobile platforms, and they need to be able to seamlessly go back and forth,” says Jon Malat, Vice President of Consumer Marketing Technology and App Development for Fresh Direct. “Our job is to make sure that that shopping experience is the same regardless of the platform.”

There’s good reason why all these brands and others, from J.C. Penney and Macy’s to Target, which calls mobile the new “front door to the store,” are making mobile platforms a critical component of their growth strategies.

In the U.S., 74% of Internet usage now comes from smartphones, and the path to purchase, including those made in store, increasingly begins on one. comScore’s Local Search Study, for example, found nearly 80 percent of local searches on mobile devices turned into purchases, with nearly 90 percent of those purchases being in a physical store (73 percent) or on the phone (16 percent); and roughly three-fourths (76 percent) of them happening the same day and most within a few hours.

The extent to which mobile phones have become consumers’ command centers cannot be underestimated. Consumers increasingly use their smartphones as a minute-to-minute, never-leave-home-without-it lifestyle tool to get them through the day.

They’ve become everything from a portable concierge, travel agent and phone book to library, tour guide and shopping mall, catering to shoppers on demand at their precise moment of need.

The Harvard Business Review calls these “micro moments,” whereby consumers turn to their mobile devices with four imperatives: “I want to know: specific information on an infinite variety of topics and products; I want to go: where to head, and when for an activity or to find a particular product; I want to buy: purchases, opinions, facts, deals and comparative information on products and services, even when standing in a store; and I want to do: how-to-information on any variety of tasks and activities, from a home repair to a new yoga pose.” And retailers have taken note.

To read more articles in my digital disruption series, you can find them here on the Microsoft Retail Enterprise Blog and below.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

Additional Reading:

• Article 1: Optimizing the Customer Journey with Personalized Engagement
• Article 2: Smarter Commerce in the Expectation Economy
• Article 3: A Shock to the System: Transforming from Within
• Article 4: Collaborative Commerce and the Democratization of Retail

The post Incubating retail innovation in the digital age appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

I recently participated in our Microsoft Business Forward conference where we talked about digital disruption across a range of industries and highlighted the latest capabilities our teams have been working on to help companies of all sizes transform. Businesses within retail and consumer goods joined us, many sharing their stories of digital transformation and what’s next.

It’s clear that while no business or industry is immune to technology’s impact on how we all live, work and think, retailers and consumer goods brands have been profoundly affected. And while we debate the future of retail—Is the industry in demise? What does success look like? Are brick-and-mortar stores really dead? —we can all acknowledge that change in this and any industry must be a constant.

As consumers demand more from our products and shopping experiences, retailers and brands must embrace new digital technologies and business models to create differentiated forms of value. Indeed, digital disruption is forcing retail to once again enter an era of fundamental transformation.

As we discussed in our retail sessions, being agile and nimble, constantly able to reinvent your offering, are traits that will keep you alive and enable you to thrive. Using technology innovations to do that is the key ingredient to adapting to customers’ changing expectations and tastes, and delivering experiences that will differentiate.

But we also realize that this might be easier to agree with than act on, and what retailers and consumer goods brands do in the here and now is critical too. As we make the shift digitally, we still have to keep the lights on and delight customers to win the chance to take them on the transformation journey with us.

So where to get started? As Paula Rosenblum at Retail Systems Research recently said, “The retail industry has under-invested in technology for as long as I can remember.”

I go back to a comment that Spanx CEO & Founder Sara Blakely made onstage, how a small change in thinking can completely disrupt an industry. That in itself is such an exciting possibility. And now, applying software and technology innovation to that idea is making it easier to do that—transforming customer experiences, improving operations and creating new opportunities.

What also makes this even more exciting is that even a small and inexpensive technology implementation, like IoT-enabled sensors, can have a dramatic impact for a retailer or brand, no matter how large or small, in ways only previously imagined.

There are many paths to digital transformation and no journey is the same. We want to help you on your personal journey that will drive success for your business. It’s core to Microsoft’s mission and even our business model. As our CEO Satya Nadella said in his keynote, “Our success is our customers’ success in their digital transformation.”

If you missed Microsoft Business Forward, I encourage you to listen to our on-demand keynotes to learn more about digital transformation and how Microsoft is making it easier to get started. Featured case studies from industry leaders like Spanx and Land O’Lakes are particularly inspiring. As Judson Althoff, Microsoft EVP of Worldwide Commercial Business, said about the innovation taking place at the $13 billion dairy business, “If we can digitally transform butter, we can digitally transform your business.”

Beyond the event assets, you can also access a new Microsoft resource on transforming retail for the digital age. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for the retail industry to grow, adapt and evolve to address the changing needs of customers and capture new business potential.

We look forward to helping you start your own digital transformation journey to move your retail and consumer goods businesses forward.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post Moving retail forward in today’s digital world appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Those brands that succeed will be the ones that can truly put customers first and at the center. And by that, I mean in every aspect of their business—from their products and services, to how their inventory is managed and delivered, to the service their employees provide, even to their sustainability practices and what their customers care about.

To meet customer expectations and build loyalty in today’s digital age, it’s about having your entire brand working together in ways that will provide an experience that is seamless, personal and differentiated.

That may certainly sound like a tall order, but the advancements and speed of technology innovation are catapulting us forward into an exciting new future, one where this enhanced shopping experience is attainable.

As we look ahead, these new experiences will be able to adjust and adapt to a customer’s unique and changing wants and needs, whether they’re shopping on a lazy Sunday afternoon, rushing to a soccer game, or throwing an impromptu dinner party.

The future of food retailing will also seamlessly blend the physical and digital, the offline and the online. Maybe one day that means an amazing sensory experience in the store, combining inspiring cooking demonstrations with digital ingredient lists. Or maybe it’s the speed and convenience of a ready-made, grab-and-go item with mobile check-out. Or maybe it’s a virtual experience with groceries that arrive at your door. All these experiences can co-exist, and retailers can support them all.

As our lives change on a weekly, hourly or even minute-by-minute basis, technology will have the means to help anticipate and deliver just the right experience, and even that “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that” experience.

Using technology innovations as the undercurrent—things like advanced analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and mixed reality—these seamless, personalized and differentiated experiences are now possible. The future is here.

Building it will also involve a community of retail, consumer goods, and technology thought leaders coming together to create these new experiences. That’s why I’m honored to be a part of a New Retail in a Shopper’s World report from The Hershey Company.

As a long-standing consumer goods leader and innovator, and a trusted partner to the retail industry for nearly 125 years, Hershey’s inaugural retail report shares the company’s wealth of expertise as a consultant to food retailers. It explores some of these possibilities, and will inspire you to take action in your own business and get excited for what’s to come. You can access it here.

We look forward to experiencing the future of retail with you!

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post A look at the new retail in a shopper’s world appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

What’s changed the retail/brand/shopper paradigm is that every conceivable product and service can be found on a smartphone. Seemingly all of a sudden, consumers hold the keys to the stock room of every retailer, unlocked by the mini computers in their pocket. And the sea of sameness is numbing.

If we had to pinpoint the tech innovations that helped plant the seeds of personalization and collaborative commerce, Amazon’s customer recommendation engine and product review features would be it.

The e-tailer pioneered the “if you bought that, you might like this,” feature, suggesting complementary products to shoppers based on their buying behavior, defining a standard of personalized interactions that shoppers have come to expect from both online and brick-and-mortar stores.

Meanwhile, the etailer’s customer review feature granted shoppers a voice like never before, signaling the rise of the empowered, collaborative consumer.

The upshot is that now consumers are often more savvy about merchandise than store’s sales staff, as a hefty seven in ten U.S. shoppers research products online, before entering a store—so you better offer them something more.

Today, collaborative commerce means knowing the wants and needs of individual shoppers and making them feel seen.

The shift has set the stage for the emergence of crowdsourced fashion from ModCloth.com, whereby shoppers vote on what designs get produced; 3D-printed, personalized products at Converse and Lowe’s; and apps like L’Oreal Genius, which recognizes one’s facial characteristics for a virtual makeup try-on session.

It all amounts to mass customization emerging on a continuum, as retailers collect data points from shoppers’ physical and digital footprints along the way.

And it extends to how retailers are heightening shopper engagement in-store with digital technology designed to create newly immersive and customized brick-and-mortar moments.

Offering a “customer-first” service experience these days means delivering personalization at scale, according to PSFK.

Quick Study: The Lowe’s Hologram Experience

Retailers are increasingly experimenting with virtual reality to do just that, as well as offer in-person services and experiences that can’t be duplicated online.

Lowe’s, for one, is testing Microsoft’s HoloLens in a handful of stores, a mixed-reality headset that allows consumers to see virtual objects as if they were part of the real world.

It gives the home-improvement chain’s shoppers the ability to visualize a mock kitchen prior to making a final selection, sans swatches or samples. They can view a full-sized holographic kitchen that they can then customize—from changing cabinet styles, sizes and colors to tweaking the scale of an island—before making a final decision.

The technology utilizes Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence Suite to analyze customers’ Pinterest boards and make design recommendations, and deliver real-time feedback back to Lowe’s.

It’s a partnership that reflects digital technology enhancing the in-store experience, while enabling shopper personalization via analytics.

“Foot traffic continues to fall, and stores need to find a way to make the in-store shopping experience better,” said Yoram Wurmser, an analyst with digital research firm eMarketer. “Personalization of the shopping experience is a big theme and crucial for brick and mortar retailers to compete with online.”

And while retailers are working to personalize the shopper experience via things like clienteling apps for store associates, “Lowe’s’ HoloLens test takes this to the next level,” he said. “Its bigger significance lies in how it brings augmented or enhanced reality to another level,” which heightens engagement.

You can see for yourself in the below video.

In my next article on digital transformation within the industry, I’ll talk about incubating innovation and the rise of retail innovation labs among other things in the spirit of digital disruption. In the meantime, you can also access our new Microsoft resource on transforming retail for the digital age.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post Collaborative Commerce and the Democratization of Retail appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As a CPG manufacturer, we too have the same goal. And as a technology provider we are focused on helping businesses take advantage of today’s technology innovations to transform their customer experiences.

As we all look at ways to deliver experiences that are personal, relevant and engaging, I wanted to highlight some recent Microsoft partnerships and initiatives that will help make it easier for retail and consumer goods marketing teams to do that.

Easier integration and more effective use of customer data.

At Adobe Summit, Microsoft and Adobe announced a built-in integration to allow Dynamics 365 and Adobe Marketing Cloud to work together seamlessly to help transform customer experiences.

This is great news for retailers as this integration makes it possible to share and access all the marketing history of each individual customer from within the CRM system—gaining an unprecedented visibility into the customer journey across brick-and-mortar, online and mobile, and the ability to personalize content and offers. You can learn more here.

Together, we’re also working on developing a new data model for understanding and driving real-time customer engagement. It involves a new approach that will standardize how data is structured and expedite your ability to gain insights from massive amounts of data. We’ll be sharing a progress update in May at Microsoft Build 2017.

Cognitive marketing intelligence.

In a different partnership with Publicis, one of the world’s largest creative agencies, it will be combining its robust marketing and data capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Cortana Intelligence Suite.

This is bringing together a powerful combination of technology innovations—from predictive analytics, deep learning, natural user interfaces, and the cloud—to create a new class of AI capabilities. When applied to the retail industry, and rich data from things like store sensors and behavior, it can help learn, reason and predict the customer journey, and opens the door to exciting new levels of personalization potential. This Wall Street Journal article shares a scenario for a cosmetics company. You can also read the announcement and watch this video to learn more.

Increased sales & marketing effectiveness.

In a third collaboration, Microsoft is working with Versium, a leading predictive analytics company, to integrate automated predictive targeting into Microsoft Dynamics 365. With this capability, you can generate a list of brand new customers with the highest propensity to buy your product, by comparing them to the profile of your historically high-return existing customers.

This is an incredibly exciting new innovation that is now available and changes the game for how brand marketers think about personalization, customer acquisition and how they use data to target customers—not only based on their online behavior but also offline behavior, social behavior, purchase interests, and financial data. This has tremendous potential for cost-savings and campaign effectiveness. You can learn more in this how-to guide.

Separately, we have another new helpful how-to-guide for retailers, offering guidance on how to apply machine learning analytics to predict customer churn rates, available here.

New, more powerful methods for marketing data visualization.

From a visualization perspective, part of the Microsoft Adobe partnership will offer enhanced ways to see and understand the impact of your marketing campaigns through the combination of Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI. Retailers can more quickly and easily understand which customer touchpoints are most effective, and how to turn this insight into a successful outcome.

Also at the Adobe Summit event, Adobe unveiled how Microsoft HoloLens can be used to change the way retail data is visualized. Because of its spatial mapping capabilities, HoloLens can allow retailers to visualize and layer data from Adobe Marketing Cloud over real-world objects in a store environment, helping adjust promotions based on customer demand. Exciting stuff! You can see for yourself in the below video.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

The post Making personalized customer experiences easier for retailers and brands appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.