Retailers: Are You an Intelligent or a Responsive Retailer?
Retail is the largest B2C industry in the world, generating nearly USD25 trillion in revenue. With the onset of smartphones in 2010, the retail sector has seen an extensive transformation, with almost every business segment doing well, except a few. Mobile and e-commerce segments thrived while physical stores continue to dominate as usual
An Intelligent Retailer creates the best digital systems and processes to serve its customers the best and aspires to achieve competitive positioning in the marketplace. The intelligence of the Intelligent Retailer comes from its intelligence-gathering through data analytics. However, if such an intelligent retailer is not agile, it may take some time for the intelligent retailer to change to new normal. A Responsive Retailer responds to customer’s buying behaviour in real-time, thereby keeping a watchful eye on the shifting market trends and still strive to be an Intelligent Retailer. A responsive retailer is always agile, quick to change parallel to the evolving dynamics with consumer preferences or market vagaries or regulatory constraints.
What is an Intelligent Retailer?
According to Lexis-Nexis, an Intelligent Retailer is one who, through data, facilitates decision-making by considering customer needs in context. It is based on Intelligent Analysis, where cognitive technology uses analytics to create contextual understanding. This enables the retailer to understand consumer behaviour, purchase preferences and make offers that are relevant and attractive to the customers. It further helps the Retailer to make automatic product recommendations to the customers for her/his emerging lifestyle requirements.
What is a Responsive Retailer?
A Responsive Retailer is always responsive to the changing dynamics of the marketplace and is willing to change rapidly to match the changing needs of the consumers. The Responsive Retailer must take consumer preferences and market conditions and respond immediately to these changes. Further, the Responsive Retailer is ever ready to meet the new normal in a digital-first world. A Responsive Retailer operates with efficient digital systems, processes, and people to serve consumers the best they expect it to be served, all of them being very agile and self-configurable in minutes. The Responsive Retailer does not solely depend on consumer journey mapping but agile and dynamic enough for the strategy and execution around meeting all customer needs, including the unexpected.
The Difference Between Responsive and Intelligent
In a way, both Responsive and Intelligent retailers are independent of each other and can be used together. However, the problem lies in converting that capacity to serve the business with responsive or intelligent retail marketing and sales in their respective roles. However, they work in harmony and complement each other to create a genuinely empowered customer base who is willing to share their valuable market information with retailers to understand the brands better. In an intelligent retailing environment, retailers can deliver personalized, relevant, and dynamic offers to the customers to know their preferences, moods, needs, and demands. Responsive means that retailers are every ready to act upon customer needs through their agile process methods in the quickest possible time, almost instant to customer’s changing needs.
Retail ViVA, the Best of Both Worlds
By understanding the retailer’s needs and looking for the best of both worlds, we built a Retail ERP architecture that would deliver a unique experience on both eCommerce and brick & mortar in an omnichannel way combining intelligence and responsiveness. Our CodeSelfie NoCode platform-driven Retail ViVA provides the dynamic responsiveness wherein Retailers can make changes to their systems and process through self-configuration without needing to write a single line of code.
Conclusion
It is not about being an Intelligent or Responsive retailer. It is about adapting to change. Agility and responsiveness must be built into the system from the beginning of the journey. Just as a rubber band has an elastic property, a system also needs an elastic property to respond to changes. If an Intelligent Retailer’s systems cannot be changed dynamically for new emerging needs almost instantly, the intelligent retailers start losing their position only to see a responsive retailer has captured the market. Hence, Retailers must adopt a Retail ERP system that is not only intelligent enough but also equally responsive enough to win the new game of a successful 21st-century enterprise.
Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan