Making retail visions reality
Microsoft’s Tracy Issel highlights the innovations Microsoft will showcase at the National Retail Federation’s BIG Show
Tracy Issel, Microsoft’s general manager of Worldwide Retail, is looking forward to the day she can enter a fitting room in a retail store and find both the outfit she picked to try on, and additional accessories that a store associate has chosen based on her personal preferences, online search history and past purchases.
Although Issel does not expect this fully customized and connected shopping experience to be ubiquitous in 2017, she does foresee more retailers offering personalized services. “If I was a retailer, my top priority for 2017 would be to invest in technologies that provide customer insights so I could personalize interactions at every point of engagement,” she says.
Retailers can explore technologies that could make Issel’s vision a reality at the National Retail Federation’s BIG Show (NRF) in New York, US. Taking place 15-17 January 2017, the event will welcome 33,000 industry players from 94 countries, including 3,300 retailers, 510 exhibitors and 300 speakers.
“NRF is a microcosm of the global retail industry and attracts high caliber retail and technology executives,” comments Issel. “The event immediately follows the holiday season and is at the start of the retailers’ new financial year, making it the ideal time to showcase the innovations and trends that will transform the industry in the coming year.”
Building on NRF’s ‘Empowered Retail’ theme, Microsoft will highlight solutions that enable retailers to combine the best of digital and in-store to deliver personal, seamless and differentiated customer experiences. The company will have several pods surrounding an innovation zone with a device bar and a showcase area. In addition to featuring advanced analytics, employee empowerment, intelligent operations, Microsoft will exhibit Digital Customer Journey prototypes – one for specialty and apparel retailers, and another for grocery and CPGs.
“Most customers use digital channels during their shopping journey and our prototypes show how individual technologies can be combined to support the digital customer journey,” Issel says.
Issel expects employee empowerment and personalization to be high on the NRF agenda.
“Retailers are more powerful when customers feel like valued individuals so our partners will demonstrate how the internet of things, data analytics, mobile technologies, unified commerce, cognitive services and chat bots can make personalization a reality throughout the shopping journey,” she predicts. “We’ll display Plexure and Microsoft’s new jointly architected Retail Personalization solution. It analyses data from multiple sources to arm store employees with a single overview of each customer’s cross-channel history, enabling them to tailor offers. Retail Personalization is just one of multiple solutions Microsoft has created to make the shopping experience more profitable for retailers and more enjoyable for consumers.”
