Delivering the New Shopping Experience: Sustainable supply chain, intelligent store operations, and evolving ecosystems to transform customer journeys 

Shopping is changing faster than ever. With eCommerce surging to 30% of total retail sales in some countries, shopping patterns are transformed and call for a unified customer journey to match the expectations of technology-savvy and time-crunched consumers. The experience retailers deliver in the different stages of the shopping journey —from inspiration, discovery, purchase, fulfillment, and after sales services—their brand equity, data security, and sustainability credentials become increasingly important to generate customer loyalty and trust.

The growing complexity of the shopping journey puts further pressure on costs in an industry already operating on tight margins. Transforming operations is far from simple and ask for efficiency in the way the working parts of the retailer’s ecosystem—processes, assets, people, partners, and products—are leveraged to increase lifetime customer value. In this context, partner network, customer experience, and cost structure become the key business transformation priorities for European retailers over the next three years. 

Technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, Internet of things (IoT), cloud/edge-based foundations, that enables business use cases including 360º connected customer data management, predictive network inventory orchestration, and augmented knowledge worker, empowers retailers to re-think their business and better respond to customers expectations, increase efficiency and reduce the cost to serve.

During the IDC European Retail Executive Digital Summit 2021, we will look at the retailers’ ability to leverage technology to best use their resources and to enhance visibility and responsiveness across operations to reap the opportunities of this new retail phase.

We look forward to connecting with you soon!

Roberta and Filippo