Redefining The Retail Sector With Cloud Solutions

Summary: The cloud’s potential in the retail industry goes beyond the low costs of analytics and data storage. By using the technology across their workflow, retailers can maintain a more energy-efficient infrastructure, improve inventory management, strengthen data security, and enhance customer experience

The retail industry today is undergoing an exciting transformation where the power is shifting from the brands to the consumers. Buyers influence product trends through their reviews, social media posts, and extensive online research. They expect a flawless omnichannel experience across all touchpoints. To thrive in this environment, retailers must develop robust business capabilities, and that is where they need tech-enabled initiatives

Cloud technologies help the retail sector in a number of ways. A Mordor Intelligence study* found an expected CAGR of 16.3% between 2021 and 2026 in the retail cloud market. The study also reported that India figures among the markets witnessing the highest rate of cloud market growth in the retail industry.

Tata Tele Business Services’ products that help retailers derive value from the cloud

Instead of migrating their data or applications en-masse to the cloud, retailers must identify the workflows that can generate the highest impact with the technology and prioritise moving them first.

Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) has custom cloud tools and Software as a Service (SaaS) tools in its portfolio that enable retailers to improve some of their ripest workflows using cloud technology:

Smartflo for customer service helpdesk

Retailers who have adopted the e-commerce model or provide home delivery services from their brick-and-mortar shops must have a phone line to take orders and address customers’ queries. By setting up a dedicated contact centre in proportion to their daily call volume, they can serve buyers more efficiently.

With cloud and SaaS tools, retailers do not need to invest in the physical contact centre infrastructure that involves high setup costs and maintenance expenses.

TTBS Smartflo is a feature-rich virtual telephony system that includes a customisable IVR with multiple call routing options, call recording functionality, and easily accessible call logs. It can be integrated with any CRM software to offer tailored services to individual customers.

The dialler-based and click-to-call attributes in this cloud communication suite give retailers the added advantage of running lead-generation and promotional sales campaigns.

What’s more, Smartflo is seamlessly secure and scalable. Under the end-to-end SLA offered by TTBS, it maintains an uptime of more than 99% and matches pace with changing business requirements.

Secure Cloud for pricing and inventory management

While it is a key consideration for buyers, pricing is a data-heavy responsibility for retailers that influences their sales and profit margins. Retail merchants must be aware of their competitors’ prices, analyse their sales history regularly, evaluate re-pricing opportunities, and decode the outcomes of such analytics into product prices quoted at their physical and online stores. For most retailers, this process remains manual because data is scattered across multiple archives, making insight generation time-consuming and cumbersome.

With their ability to ingest different data sources for direct analysis, cloud data platforms help data analysts save time and focus more on their retail pricing models. The cloud also allows retailers to integrate data from external sources and drive actionable insights by leveraging machine learning algorithms.

Managing the multiple variables of inventory management is another challenge for retailers. Inaccurate forecasts, limited automation of consumer goods promotions, and the seasonal nature of certain products are some of the potential failure points that jeopardise stock management.

The lack of standard product attributes across different brands and varying consumer preferences make it challenging to identify substitutes in a retailer’s product portfolio. It can cause sudden cannibalisation, especially during promotional sales and volatile demands, as experienced during the COVID outbreak. The result is an excess inventory of some products and stockouts of others, bringing inventory cost burdens and operational inefficiency.

Cloud infrastructure and analytical tools can help retailers harness predictive and prescriptive inventory-forecasting systems for optimal inventory management.

With their ability to process large data volumes, cloud applications allow retailers to factor in trends, product seasonality, promotions, and substitutes to build accurate forecasts for improved inventory level predictability.

To help retailers connect securely to public cloud platforms for efficient data analysis for optimising pricing and inventory management, TTBS offers Secure Cloud. The technology improves the applications’ performance in the cloud and makes it a more reliable platform for pricing-margin management and inventory forecasting.

As a data service with high throughput and low cost, Secure Cloud establishes quick private connections via MPLS to leading cloud services, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Services (OCS), and IBM Softlayer.

Digital Survey for website and recommendation engine customisation

Personalisation helps businesses display relevant products to target customers and directly correlates to revenue growth and higher conversion pace. However, getting an accurate picture of their customers’ preferences is a struggle for most retailers. The process involves data aggregation, delving into multiple channels, and integrating secondary data sources.

In addition, the growth of product choices and stock-keeping units (SKUs) makes it harder to display relevant options to buyers. With incorrect personalisation, the risks of losing clientele also go up.

The use of cloud-based data processing, which can bring together data from multiple sources, is still in its nascent stage for the retail industry. However, by leveraging innovative plug-and-play cloud solutions, even small-scale retailers can leverage the enormous scaling capacity of this technology and the recommendation platforms it helps to design. They can also set up A/B testing scenarios, validate their marketing campaigns’ performance, and iterate their customisation algorithms to offer valuable choices to customers.

TTBS offers the Digital Survey solution powered by TCS iON technology to help retailers understand market preferences effectively. It can be used on any business website or through email and social media to gather customers’ opinions before new product launches and tailor offers on existing product lines.

TTBS Digital Surveys can be created in different languages and have built-in features for instant analytics. Retailers can also activate OTP-based user-verification to ensure that a questionnaire is answered only by participants they intended to survey. Basis the results, they can customise their marketing campaigns and sale strategies for more success.

Cloud CRM for impactful loyalty programs

Retailers must not only try to acquire new customers with meaningful recommendations but also retain regular customers who frequently make high-value purchases and carry a bigger lifetime value than new buyers.

Loyalty programs with discounts, cash backs, a few home deliveries, gift vouchers, and gifts have been traditionally used to retain customers. A significant challenge in deploying them is customer identification when there are multiple channels for purchase – in-store, website, mobile app, and online marketplaces. Besides being siloed, the data is not always processed in real-time. Although some website and mobile app features help engage buyers when they are online, retailers must be able to engage their customers before, during, and after a purchase.

Cloud-based tools consolidate data from various sources to help businesses get comprehensive customer details across transaction paths and purchase channels.

TTBS offers its Cloud CRM to support retailers in improving their website or recommendation engine customisation and driving better loyalty programs. This functionally rich application presents a unified customer view to boosting business growth. It has presales, sales, and post-sales modules to optimise all stages of the customer journey.

From lead management for presenting attractive offers to campaign and client management that help design better loyalty programs, Cloud CRM is a value-for-money digital tool powered by TCS iON technology. By seamlessly integrating data for sales, service, and marketing, it puts customers at the heart of retail and helps them bring consistent improvement in the business bottom line.

Conclusion

Retail businesses are not oblivious to changing consumer preferences, and neither can they afford to ignore the expectations of their digitally active buyers. Cloud technology provides myriad opportunities for marketing, sales, and customer service while also being costeffective. This is the prime reason why growth-focused retail merchants are adopting this digital transformation solution faster than their competitors.

To delve further into cloud-based digital tools designed by TTBS, contact us at 1800-266- 1800

Source

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/retail-cloud-market