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Industry priority scenarios

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Industry priority scenarios aim to unlock the highest level of your digital retail maturity in the cloud, Intelligent Retail—implementing the master data management (MDM) approach to integrate consumer data within one dashboard. Understanding data throughout the consumer shopping journey requires gathering analytics—a deep view inside individual consumer product affinity, advertising effectiveness, and item forecast needs. This happens with a cohesive data model—an open data model for both internal and external solution providers that—

  • Ensures data is only visible to the entities that require it
  • Natively manages read/write privileges
  • Allows for rapid, secure deployment of solutions

Implementing industry priority scenarios (IPS), you can harmonize your loosely coupled datasets, and implement a master data management (MDM) program to realize targeted, successful business outcomes.

Industry priority scenarios are holistic Microsoft Azure solutions that can address current challenges in the retail sector. Each scenario is backed by products and services that enable retail organizations to solve challenges, and drive their digital transformation to maturity.

There are four industry priority scenarios within the retail industry:

  • Know your customers
  • Empower your employees
  • Deliver resilient supply chain
  • Reimagine retail
Industry priority scenario Know your customers Empower your employees Deliver resilient supply chain Reimagine retail
Create digital experiences,and use AI and predictive analytics to anticipate evolving customer needs and deliver individualized interactions across channels Enable secure digital collaboration across your business and reduce costs Gain visibility across your end-to-end supply chain using technology solutions Create innovative customer experiences, optimize in-store operations, and use technology to evolve products, services, and business models

Microsoft is addressing existing challenges in the today's competitive retail sector—moving the industry forward with cloud technologies that enable your organization to better engage your customer across the entire supply chain.

Begin your company's move towards Intelligent retail—the highest stage of digital retail maturity in the cloud to—anticipate your evolving customer needs and deliver individualized interactions across your channels—gain a unified view of your invoice, revenue, and user behavior data analytics and identify revenue growth trajectories—gain end-to-end visibility across your supply chain with technology solutions—and deploy technologies to modernize products, services, and business models.

Know your customers

Great customer service is—and has long been—the core art of retail. But the way consumers engage with retailers has changed, and the way retailers get to know you along with it. Data and predictive AI offers retailers the opportunity to create digital customer experiences that take customer service to the next level, while unlocking new business opportunities.

In your strategy and plan document—do you require that your:

  • Central IT, a cloud center of excellence (CCoE), or other forms of centralized operations be responsible for operating all workloads?
  • On-premises datacenter locations be integrated into your cloud environment?
  • Certain deployments be included—that require adherence to regulatory compliance standards, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)?

The two use cases for Know your customer are personalization and omnichannel optimization. Personalization is the use of customer behavioral data across channels to tailor shopping experiences and offer the right product, in the right place, at the right time. Omnichannel optimization enables customers to switch platforms, devices, and channels—maintaining a coherent experience.

With individualized experiences offered in today's consumer marketplace, customers expect businesses to instantly react to their needs and wants on digital channels, anywhere, at any time. And, customers are concerned about privacy in the wake of recent data breaches. Retailers must seek new ways of understanding and engaging with customer behaviors—delivering personalization across multiple channels to increase the relevance of offerings, and improve the holistic customer experience.

Empower your employees

The retail industry is seeing unprecedented change. As global business increases pace, the imperative of enabling your employees to access more secure, compliant tools increases. Retailers that embrace analytics, AI, and virtual desktop technology to address this need can maintain secure digital collaboration across channels, while reducing costs.

Equipping employees with helpful tools and insights unlocks their potential—regardless of role or geographic location. Whether a line-of-business contributor working from home, or frontline worker helping a customer onsite, the right equipment and information are critical to delivering impeccable customer service, building customer trust and loyalty, and ultimately growing sales.

Deliver resilient supply chain

The retail sales cycle is increasing its turnaround time. The average consumer expects near-instant gratification from online and in-store shopping experiences. For retailers, working toward a more resilient supply chain becomes critical. The retail sector must be able to respond to customer demand for fast, flexible delivery—and get the right product, to the right place, at the right time. They must be able to react to any disruptions, and quickly determine end-customer exposure and the supply chain fault point to build and maintain customer loyalty.

For retailers to gain agility and resilience in the end-to-end supply chain and fulfill customer demand at scale—it's imperative to enable the ability to rapidly deploy vast, multi-variate, real-time, and trusted datasets and algorithms to establish correlations and make predictions.

Reimagine retail

Predicting preference in future customer behaviors is always challenging. However, you can take action towards modernizing your products, services and business models.

Retailers achieving successful business outcomes are embracing digital transformation—reimagining what retail means—planning digital innovation that's necessary to evolve in the current market. Evolving the retail model means not only adopting the latest technologies (e.g., AI, IoT, and open APIs), but also implementing truly transformative business models—and building in-house digital capabilities on top of these technologies for continued viability into the consumer purchase cycle.

See Intelligent retail hands-on with a retail industry demo

See how Azure’s data and AI capabilities are enabling intelligent retail with the Microsoft Data and AI Demo Megamap, showing how technologies such as Azure Synapse, Power BI, Azure IoT, and Azure Machine Learning enable retailers to reimagine every facet of their business.

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