The Retailer Spring Edition 2023

SPRING 2023

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• Modularity Unifying your touch points within omnichannel enables retailers to provide a seamless and personalised experience to their customers. The decoupling of the front-end interface from the back-end services allows retailers to deliver content and services to different channels through APIs. This approach can provide customers with a consistent experience across all channels and allows retailers to securely collect and analyse customer data, providing insights into their preferences and behaviour improving overall customer experiences and brand loyalty. Moving forward a change in mindset is required as there is no all in one platform. However, not being tied to a single software vendor empowers retailers to choose the platforms that will best deliver on their required capabilities. This is a similar concept seen in the cybersecurity space where organisations adopt a cybersecurity mesh approach using best of breed technologies where possible. Breaking down an old monolithic system can be daunting, but moving to this approach will mean there should never be the need for a large-scale change or re-platforming in the future. When you need to add new functions or services it’s much more of a plug and play approach. While, if something is no longer serving its purpose or becomes too costly it can be offloaded with minimal, if any disruption to other services.

This is a journey, a marathon not a sprint, and your organisation needs to be ready and prepared for it. Consider how digitally mature you are and do you have the right multidisciplinary teams setup to support the approach. Look at multiple vendors, getting hands on with the solution where possible, and read the documentation for any APIs and SDKs. Ultimately stay focused on the outcome you’re trying to achieve and the experience it will deliver. Predicting the future is hard… Nobody knows what the next big customer touch point will be, but having the agility to be able to adopt and integrate it at pace, can give you the edge against the competition and remain relevant to your customers.

Josh Wills j.wills@uk.cdw.com