Know your customer and make the sale in real-time
Easy order everywhere
Your retail operation – no matter how big or small it is, or how focused or dispersed – needs to be always open because consumers are always thinking about buying something… and they don’t want to wait for an opening time.
Your business needs to cope with this pressure and offer a unified brand across all channels – Enter Unified Commerce. It helps you to get to know your consumers in real-time – and close sales in double-quick time. Read the story below to find out more.
Richard Clarke, Executive Director, Global Retail Enterprise Business Group, links the easy flow of information across your operations to delivering more sales in his new blog.
Blog
The everywhere, anywhere store
Your customers are always thinking about buying something – anything. And they have the power to buy it whenever they want, wherever they are. That statement is already a cliché. But it’s worth repeating because retailers of all kinds are struggling to keep up with the rise of online shopping. It’s a fact. We should acknowledge it and do something about it. Now.
The transformation of the retail sector has only just begun. We are still in the early days of a fundamental shift. You might think online has matured already – it hasn’t. It’s only just begun. Research shows that online might account for 53% of all sales in just ten years’ time. Richard Lim, the CEO of Retail Economics said, “Successful retailers have always had to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. However, the pace of change will inevitably prove too fast for many. It definitely feels like the digital retail revolution is only just getting started.”
The only way to keep pace – and get ahead of the curve – is to enable your customers anywhere and everywhere. If half of the purchases will be online, then the other half will still be made in physical stores. That’s an opportunity as well as a threat. The point is to deploy the technologies needed to ensure that there are no barriers to the sale wherever the customer happens to be.
Richard Clarke
Executive Director, Global Retail
Enterprise Business Group
We need to understand the purchasing journey. It is not linear. It’s not a direct route. It has many highways and byways, twists and turns and sideroads, with a constant set of alternative routes. Celebrate that. Make it work for you. Make the customer feel in charge. We all enjoy the pursuit of the thing we want; we want choice and the certainty of successful fulfilment.
The retailer’s task is to make it work seamlessly. That’s why they work with our team at Fujitsu, and it’s why we focus on the customer and the ultimate sale - not the technology. The technology is a set of tools which enable multiple channels to work as one brand. Your brand.
It’s called Unified Commerce. It centralizes all data on prices, inventory, offers, orders, customers and product content into one management system. It means you can easily oversee and manage all your information in a uniform, consistent way across all sales channels. That’s the key to becoming an everywhere, anywhere store.
How does it generate sales and engage customers? Simply, by enabling them to buy what they want, when and where they want to. It’s not rocket science. It’s pure retail, just enabled by technology. In practice, it means giving your brand a unified presence across online and physical stores. It means being anywhere and everywhere on that unpredictable journey customers take from the urge to buy something to the final payment.
It doesn’t matter how the customer gets from one point to another, you just must be there, able to pick stock, arrange a delivery or a collection, or, simply, have the right stock on the shelves in store. It means empowering store associates to have real-time visibility of stock and enable them to share that information in proactive way – i.e. protect and make the sale.
Information has to move seamlessly across your organization – from one store to another, from depots to warehouses to delivery drivers – and ultimately to the customer. Enable them to pay any way they want to via any device or payment system and empower store associates to find the right product - either there and then or arrange for it to be delivered (quickly).
It’s a new reality. We must get ahead of it.
Outcome Story
Understand your customer and make the sale
When research showed that sales were being lost due to a lack of joined up systems across online and physical stores, management decided to get to the heart of the matter and find out why.
