Building A Customer-Centric Model For Retail

By Richard Clarke, Vice President, Global Retail, Fujitsu

‘It’s shopping Jim, but not as we know it’

Customer, shop, merchandise, transaction – that’s all there is to it. Shopping, in simple terms has changed little in 2,000 years. However, on closer inspection, we know that for customers, retailers and their suppliers, the shopping ‘process’ is undergoing a fundamental transformation.

The pace of change, driven largely by rapidly evolving palm-held consumer-based technology is such that traditional business responses just don’t work anymore. How do you use traditional store data capture tools to map a customer transaction across several touch points? What ‘system’, for example, do you buy, install, test and run over a typical 12- month project period to control your brand perception on Facebook and Twitter? To influence shopper opinion in this environment calls for a completely different approach. The customer, not the retailer, is now increasingly in control, and it means retailers are rethinking how they run their businesses.

Fujitsu, with its 35-year heritage supporting some of the world’s major retailers, thinks a lot about the future of retailing. We believe new customer-centric operating models, underpinned by new IT architectures, data models and business processes, will evolve in the next few years in response to the changes society is experiencing today. Bolting on click ‘n’ collect services to a store model, manually sharing stock across physical and virtual stores, and responding to shopper behavior overnight rather than real time are no longer viable. A fundamentally new approach is required. This is the subject of this paper.

To read more, download this white paper below!