Creating the connections with the customer, understanding the needs of the customer, creating the right brand experience for everyone are the drivers of the change of the industry and of the need to have IT support its business strategy, he says. Retailers are the first to feel that because they are closer to customers and need to address their demands quickly. Historically speaking, retailers invested the least in IT systems. They are now faced with many changes in the industry and all their executives know they must get closer to their customers and react faster and on the other hand, their current IT systems are slowing them down, Bakey added.
Most retailers only spend money on maintaining the IT systems they have when they could actually invest in new solutions to help them cut costs and thus be able to allocate some of their financial resources to innovation, Pat Bakey told ZF.
Retail is one of the strategic industries for SAP, which generates some of the highest revenues along with telecommunications, banking and public sector. These industries are going through major changes now and need IT investments.
The retail sector is an important industry for developers and integrators of IT solutions in Romania, too, whose market stood at more than EUR100 million last year. The retailers operating in Romania are following the global trends of their industry, considering the market leaders are actually subsidiaries of international retailers. Therefore, retailers in Romania are placing a greater and greater emphasis on customer loyalty and personalization of their offers.
“One of the main retailer trends is the ‘one to one marketing’ or the personalization of the offers for every customer using (…) social media and mobile phones. Retailers need technologies both for ensuring customer loyalty and for implementing new innovative sales processes to boost conversion rate and average shopping basket,” Valentin Tomsa, general manager of the local SAP subsidiary told ZF a while ago.
Global trends in the retail industry show mobility is becoming a standard, which will turn the smartphone into a shopping buddy. Consumers will receive personalized offers on their phones, will shop using the mobile phone and will seek information and product reviews using their mobile phone.
“As a retailer, one needs to identify consumer needs and be mobile because the shopping experience is mobile now,” Pat Bakey said.
One needs to personalize one’s offers for consumers. The more one knows about the consumer, the more relevant the offer will be. One does not only need to address the needs of consumers but also understand them, he added.
Besides the need to personalize offers for customers, retailers also need to come up with them at the right time, exactly when the consumer needs them.
To be able to provide personalized offers retailers have to collect information about customers via all the means through which they interact with them: physically in traditional stores or online on their own websites or on social networks and this can only be done by using IT solutions that can collect and analyze the data.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)