Industry Snapshot

It has become immensely challenging for retailers to keep pace with comparative pricing, assortments, placements, mark downs, etc as against the margin pressure, globalization drive, turnover growth, market share, footfalls, consumer demand shifts, etc.

Unlike in the past when competition was not very intense; a retailer of today does not have great margin for errors and has to concentrate its efforts on three most important parameters of their business – Inventory, Customer & People.

Inventory, Customer and People

It is highly imperative that today’s retailer starts the right kind of planning for its biggest and most important asset “The Inventory”; not only in terms historical sales data trends but also applying innovation in predicting fluctuating market dynamics and finding the right merchandise to capitalize on the demand.

“Knowing Your Customer” is no more an option but a necessity. Retailers should have a deeper customer understanding of what they buy, when they buy, why they buy and how much they can pay and hums much can we make. A retailer must take a greater interest to improve the odds of getting repeat sales. Attracting a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one.

Employee productivity can have tremendous effect on one’s business. Simple measure like sales training, customer service trainings can surprise the retailers to find noticeable jump in their turnovers due to increased productivity.

Trends that will lead

Customer experience (CX): CX is the key to today’s retail to create the differentiation in the challenging crowded market. It’s imperative for retailers to identify the right touchpoints for providing the required experience and digital forms a key essential element.

Personalization: With the customer experience of shopping in magical reality; the next in line is Personalization. It’s not about putting customers name in a subject line of an email or printing / stitching customers initials on the products, Personalization is about enabling consumers to build and customize products as per their taste, the products tell a story, fit into their lifestyle and become completely unique to make the shopping lot more exciting.

Get Brick & Click: Bricks and Clicks is an emerging trend will continue. Consumers will visit physical stores as long as there are new and interesting reasons to go to the stores. Retailers will require to remodel their stores by putting digital into physical.