In the age of the consumer, every retailer must create the exceptional Amazon-like service experiences that consumers have come to expect or risk going out of business.
Intense competition and heightened consumer expectations aren’t unique challenges to the mid-market retailer. There’s one critical difference, mid-market retailers lack the resources that the biggest players do have to overcome those challenges. With already small margins, if you’re among this group, you may find yourself just scraping by. But the odds don’t have to be stacked against you.
Retailers today confront challenges that are unprecedented in other industries. In fact, there’s a case to be made that retailers have experienced more change in the past few years than in the previous 100 years combined. As a result, retailers must adapt to deliver on changing customer expectations. Those who succeed are able to differentiate themselves, while those that fail become irrelevant.
The trends this year retailers really need to focus on won’t be around the hottest new technologies or latest fads. Instead, companies that focus on delivering consistent, engaging customer experiences will set themselves up for long-term success. But in order to run your business successfully and provide the brand experiences shoppers expect, you must first have the right foundational systems in place.
Retailers must constantly meet and exceed ever-changing customer expectations. It’s what keeps shoppers coming back to your business. Delivering on customer expectations comes from the ability to complete the perfect order: Getting the right products delivered at the best price, when and where they want. For merchants, the perfect order means accomplishing this at the optimal cost and efficiency. By achieving the perfect order, merchants will delight customers with the ultimate, omnichannel experience of buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere and return anywhere and operate an efficient and profitable business. Unfortunately, too many retailers don’t possess these capabilities.
It’s a jungle out there and retailers are in a fight for survival of the fittest—just ask some of the casualties. This isn’t fear mongering. It is a retail reality being driven by table stakes set by the likes of Amazon.
In a world where retailers are losing $77 million in revenue per day due to eCommerce fraud globally, you better have the right fraud prevention strategy in place if you expect to survive. But should you use a third-party fraud management solution or build your own fraud team in-house?
Amazon has achieved massive growth through a simple yet strategic business concept: the flywheel. However, the problem with a flywheel is that when one part breaks down, the overall system can fail rapidly. At least one of the core pieces of Amazon’s flywheel—the customer experience—is already under pressure. While this may have profound consequences for Amazon, there are larger implications for the rest of the eCommerce ecosystem.
Delivering exceptional customer care in a world where most consumers expect to be able to pick up where they left off when they contact customer service isn’t easy. Consumers want a seamless experience when they need support, and they are quick to both reward and punish retailers based on their performance.
In trying to keep up with the modern consumer, many fashion retailers have implemented multiple departmental solutions piecemeal, without fully considering the consequences of how these disparate systems will interact with each other. The result is a hodgepodge of processes, which require significant resources to maintain. The inefficiencies and the demands they place on the organization leave retailers stuck in the past, inhibiting growth and innovation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|