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.
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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.
