The Retail Moments That Matter Most — ‘Optimize Me’
By Jeremy Witikko, Cisco
Retail is not what it used to be. With so many new, enriching and interesting things to do in this world, traditional shopping just doesn’t have the shine it used to. Consumer expectation and interest have shifted from browsing and pondering what they might be interested in, to making split-second decisions and moving onto the next thing. Shoppers are increasingly mobile, hopping channels frequently. All the data readily available empowers them to look for product availability, pricing, personalized recommendations, and ultimately what is the most frictionless way for a retailer to fulfill their need. As traditional shopping has changed with the rise of distribution methods and data availability, consumers are perpetrating this change by opening up more to retailers. Eager to share more data, insights and information like never before, in exchange for hyper convenience. Consumers want their life optimized.
Today, we’re seeing an exponential growth in home delivery services. Whether the delivery services are owned by the retailer or not, or owned by the quick serve restaurants or not, it seems everyone is getting in on home delivery as the next-best fulfillment option. With this new channel comes tremendous reward and tremendous risk. Do you compete on shipping costs? How quickly can you deliver the products, will the products “go bad” in transit, and will inventory support the delivery demands? Not everyone is doing it well, and it’s not the right answer for everything. However, it absolutely has a place in the new retail landscape. While it is the latest “big thing,” home delivery only remains a part of the overall interest from the consumers’ perspective.
This year at NRF, we introduced the concept of “optimize me” as a way of demonstrating the level of intelligence, anticipation and reaction that consumers are looking for from their most trusted retailers of choice. The concept is simply, know me, know what I have purchased in the past, what my tastes are, and recommend a way to get it perfectly right for me every time. Help me further my brand loyalty. Many consumers are inviting the retailer to sit at the dinner table with them and literally asking them to be an extension of their close personal friends and family. They’re doing this in exchange for convenience and improving their quality of life.
Consumers will gravitate towards services that are a net benefit in their life, not a drain or something perceived as time-consuming and prone to errors. An intuitive network is absolutely critical for retailers to sit with their customers, see them and then enable brand engagement by gathering insights from their interactions no matter where they have browsed, shopped, or purchased from in the past. And because everyone is looking for this now and expecting retailers to be smarter, the window of opportunity to respond is measured in seconds, not minutes, hours or days.
To compete in this new market, we have to connect all the dots, no matter what channel or method our shoppers have used to touch our brand.
This retail ecosystem calls for systems and applications to be connected like never before, enabling consumers to share data in real-time, and retailers to process information in real time at the edge, to make a recommendation and act in a matter of seconds. Wherever the data resides, in the cloud or on the edge, or even on a device right next to our customer, the power is in rapidly connecting the dots to optimize the shopper’s life experiences.
Jeremy Witikko is the Business Strategy and Development Lead in the Industry Office of the CTO at Cisco. He has extensive experience in Innovation, Leadership, IT Consulting as well as across multiple industries including Retail, Consumer Package Goods, Aerospace, Medical Device and Manufacturing. Witikko has had 20+ years of providing advisory services to executive management and helping define strategy, vision and pragmatic approaches to execution. Additionally, he has an impressive track record in partnering with C-Level Leadership to lead innovation engagements, identifying industry disruptive and game changing opportunities.