DXC Eclipse | White Paper

Retail success: Winning customers for life in the digital eraChart your path to optimize your digital foundation while gaining brand advocates and growing your business.

DXC Eclipse | White Paper

DXC Eclipse | White Paper

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Retail success: Winning customers for life in the digital eraWith today’s new retail rules, can traditional retailers compete? In just over 20 years, Amazon has gone from being an online bookseller to writing the book on retail and the supply chain. Its investments in infrastructure and supply chain management have made Amazon by far the most valuable retailer in the United States.

In his now-famous 1997 letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defined his strategy for building the company with one fundamental statement: “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.”1 Twenty years later, Bezos calls this approach “true customer obsession”2 and advocates investing in delighting the customer.

With these new retail rules, traditional retailers can compete by choosing what kind of retailer they are going to be. They can create their own approach to delighting the customer by cultivating a unique customer relationship and personalized experience at every retail touchpoint — all underpinned by a single digital platform.

How do you accelerate the value of your customer relationship?

Imagine if you could create a business model that supports immersive retail experiences and innovative retailing while connecting with your customers around the world, extending your reach, building brand loyalty and increasing revenues.

Today, all retailers must build a strong value exchange with their customers in order to flourish and grow in the digital era. Successful retailers will use digital resources to delight their customers, engage deeply and turn every shopper into a loyal, repeat customer for life.

Table of contents

How do you accelerate the value of your customer relationship? 2

Can you transform your customer engagement? 3

Where do you start? 3

What can you do to win the hearts and dollars of your customers? 4

How do you choose your digital retail technologies? 4

Curating your digital experience and services 6

Where Microsoft Retail can take you 7

Why DXC Eclipse? 7

1 http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf

2 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders

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Can you transform your customer engagement?

Customers today are looking for more than simply completing a transaction. They expect retailers to know what they want, when they want it and how they want to purchase it. As a result, retailers must offer the right service at the right time, in the right channel. In reality, this is more difficult than it looks, and many retailers continue to struggle to implement the right technology to enable more personalized service.

To be successful, retailers need to get:

From

• We are not well enough engaged with our customers to be a valuable part of their daily lives.

• Our customers struggle with accessing our offers, our loyalty programs, our in-store returns and engaging with us on social media.

• We do not know enough about our customers to offer them personalized service across all channels, custom offers and meaningful engagements.

• In our stores, customers cannot find what they have seen online even when they want to buy, and they cannot access real-time loyalty information.

To

• Our connection to our customers around the world has extended our reach, engaged more customers in-store and increased revenue.

• We leverage data managed by many different parts of our retail organizations (both internally and externally) to better understand our customers, provide relevant target offers and experiences, and promote our products and our brand.

• We have compelling offers that provide value and are unique, delivering individual product and customer experiences, independent of channel, around the world.

Where do you start?

There are five entry points where you could choose to start your digital customer engagement — customer experience, customer service, customer behavior, customer relationship and customer fulfillment. You get to choose your approach, your customer strategy and your digital platform. Depending on the size and complexity of your retail business, it is important to choose a logical entry point that will give you the immediate differentiation you need for your retail business to stand out, show up where your customers are, and truly make a difference to how and where they shop.

Depending on your departure point, your digital retail journey may not be linear. Where you start your journey depends on where you can create the most meaningful customer experience (Figure 1).

Offer personalized unique experiences, services and products with a single digital platform.

Understand and own your retail journey.

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What can you do to win the hearts and dollars of your customers?

Focus on your customer experience. Deliver more than just stock on shelves by creating a positive, interactive experience both in-store and online.

• Learn from your customers’ behavior. Who are your customers? What do they think of your brand and your products? What are they buying, and what are they saying about you? Understand their behaviors and predict what they are likely to do next.

• Service your customers in smart ways. Personalize the shopping experience with unique offers based on preference and shopping history — know their buying habits and tendencies.

• Transform your customer relationships. Engage with your customers in real time at all times with special offers in-store or online. Customers are willing to provide information if they perceive they are receiving something in return. Offer more to loyal customers.

• Optimize customer fulfillment. Deliver the right products, at the right place, at the right time across all channels. Exceed customers’ expectations every time!

How do you choose your digital retail technologies?

Retailers are not alone in the journey to digital transformation, but it is an industry very much in the midst of major disruptive innovation. Digital transformation is redefining how business is done — bringing people, data and processes together to create value for your customers and maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. A wide variety of technologies exist to enable digital retailers.

Now that you have considered your approach, how do you know what technologies are available to enable your chosen approach and how do you know where to start? While there are a wide variety of digital technologies, it is important to future-proof your solution and maximize your investment. That is why we recommend selecting a single digital platform such as Microsoft.

Where will you start to win the hearts

and dollars of your customers?

Customer fulfillment

Customer relationship

Customer experience

Customer behavior

Customer service

Figure 1. Show up where your customers are and make a difference.

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With Microsoft as a digital foundation, retailers can put in place a single platform that will provide the basis for ongoing transformation and growth — by building the framework and delivering modern applications that are the core to helping propel the business forward.

Microsoft will allow you to combine the best of digital and in-store capabilities to deliver personal, seamless and differentiated customer experiences. You can empower your people to deliver maximum business impact. You can optimize operations by using sensors, devices, machine learning and advanced analytics to understand, predict and better serve customers. You can transform your business and create new revenue streams and business models through an intelligent, modern platform that enables data streams to be captured to create relevant insights and competitive advantage.

Here are digital experiences and services as they relate to our five points of digital customer engagement to determine how we can curate the best customer experience for your chosen approach.

Customer Service

Personal shopper/ advisor

Suggestive upsell/ cross sell

Mobility/mobile POS

Intelligent customer service/case management

Value-added services

Customer Fulfillment

Freight optimization

Distributed order management

Inventory visibility

Product traceability

Network optimization

Connected marketplaces

Customer Experience

In-store customer engagement

Virtual/augmented reality

Workforce management optimization

Employee empowerment

Predictive/connected field service

Price optimization

Next best offer

Customer Behavior

Customer sentiment and behavior

Customer churn

Social brand engagement

Inventory/demand/assortment optimization

Customer Relationship

Offer/promotion optimization

Customer personalization

In-store experience measurement

Customer segmentation

Marketing optimization

Figure 2. Curating your digital experience and services — the five points of digital customer engagement

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Curating your digital experience and services

1. Customer experience

Enhance the in-store experience to drive customer satisfaction and sales with compelling smartphone apps and interactive in-store devices. This gives your customers engaging and differentiated information wherever they are in-store while gathering valuable data about which products interest them.

Also ensure that your teams have the mobile devices and applications to respond to customer demand with personalized offers, loyalty information at their fingertips and access to stock information anywhere, anytime.

2. Customer behavior

Increase your sales pull-through with greater understanding of your customers’ behavior by monitoring customer sentiment, quickly responding to complaints, and engaging customers in marketing activities and ongoing conversations. Measuring customer behavior and experience in-store will also contribute to optimizing your merchandising strategies.

3. Customer service

Differentiate your business with customer service that is based on understanding who your customers are by listening to social comments, capturing preferences and delivering personal, seamless interactions — creating a differentiated customer experience every time you interact either in-store or online to build revenue and loyalty. Empower your teams to come out from behind the counter with mobile point-of-sale (POS), and your sellers will become trusted advisors.

4. Customer relationship

Build a relationship so you can reach customers when and where they shop — since today’s digital-savvy consumers expect multiple ways to order, purchase and receive merchandise. They also expect you to know what they like and to personalize your interactions with them. By integrating world-class, unified commerce capabilities with operational commerce technologies, you can gain real-time insights for a deep understanding of customer preferences and give them compelling offers to ensure that they feel valued and unique.

5. Customer fulfillment

Serve your customers what they want, where and when they want it. With analytics-driven insights you can predict shopping behavior, but first you need to have the right retail enterprise resource planning (ERP) in place. Turning the data you collect into actionable insight helps you improve inventory planning and product placement. Putting the right products in the right place at the right time delights your customers and wins the loyal customer for life.

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Where Microsoft Retail can take you

Increasingly, the success of a retail enterprise is tied to its ability to provide relevant, accurate product information in-store, online and via mobile to deliver the personalized experiences that will keep customers satisfied. By creating a customized and distinct digital strategy to address customer expectations, you can differentiate your brand from those of your competitors with an approach that is unique to your business.

Microsoft’s single digital platform offers Microsoft Dynamics 365, an end-to-end retail solution that combines channel management, marketing, procurement and financials, empowering your employees to spend more time providing customer care. With an optimized supply chain and inventory, you will drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.

The familiar Microsoft productivity, collaboration and social solutions will put customers first with technology that engages at a personal level. You collect and understand customer behaviors and respond with offers and experiences that are personal, engaging and relevant. By acting on these data insights and evolving your retail business practices, you can keep pace with rapid change and optimize your retail operations.

Moving to Microsoft Dynamics 365 requires careful planning to get maximum benefits with minimal risk. Businesses need to ensure that the move is seamless, successful and non-disruptive. In a challenging economic and competitive environment, organizations need the right infrastructure and technology in place to help them work smarter and pivot easily to meet customer demand. It is vital to futureproof businesses through digital transformation. Implementing the best technology with the right partner puts businesses in the ideal position to outperform and outmaneuver the competition.

DXC Eclipse is your trusted retail advisor. With a history of successful digital transformation projects for retailers across the globe, we have the retail industry knowledge, the Microsoft platform expertise and application expertise to advise and deliver your digital retail journey.

Why DXC Eclipse?

DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, helps enterprise and mid-market companies accelerate digital transformation, solve business challenges and deliver intelligent solutions that make a difference for clients, employees and partners. We believe in delivering expertise, project transparency and excellent customer service in every engagement.

With team members in North America, EMEA, Asia and Australia-New Zealand, we are uniquely positioned to deliver Microsoft Dynamics 365, ERP, CRM, business process, analytics and collaboration solutions to clients across the globe. The largest independent Microsoft Dynamics partner in the world, DXC Eclipse serves more than 4,000 clients across multiple industries. Our practice delivers services and solutions that positively impact our world today and into the future.

Learn more at www.dxc.technology/dxceclipse

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, serving nearly 6,000 private and public-sector clients from a diverse array of industries across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network deliver transformative digital offerings and solutions that help clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. ECL-048. July 2018

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