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Strategic impact of cloud adoption for the retail industry

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Best practice encourages customers to create a single centralized cloud adoption strategy, using the Strategy methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework. If you haven't already, use the strategy and plan template to record your cloud adoption strategy.

This article explains how the priorities of retailers are shifting. Those priorities now focus on how they know customers, empower employees, build resilient supply chains, and reimagine retail.

Retail industry motivations

The typical motivations around migration and innovation are relevant to the retail industry. There are also other motivations that help retail organizations solve challenges and drive digital transformation forward.

When building out a cloud adoption strategy for your retail organization, make sure you evaluate your organization's position on these critical motivations:

Retail industry outcomes

There are common business outcomes associated with standardized cloud adoption strategies. Many of those outcomes apply to the retail industry as well. There are also retail-specific strategies that might be worth including your cloud adoption strategy. Each strategy maps to the critical motivations.

Business outcomes of personalization

  • Democratize insights: Identify customer needs with analytics and digital behavior triggers. It empowers retailers to put products in front of the people most likely to buy them.
  • Grow revenue and customer lifetime value: Deliver relevant real-time offers and insights to help cross-sell products based on unified data.
  • Enhance customer loyalty: Detect and respond to changes in customer behavior. Tailor interactions to individual needs to drive enhanced loyalty.
  • Improve marketing effectiveness: Generate a deep understanding of customer needs. Interact with them according to their unique preferences to boost engagement.

Business outcomes of omnichannel optimization

  • Increase customer loyalty: Drive loyalty through insights into customer behavior. Delivering relevant offers at the right time brings customers back to the brand repeatedly.
  • Grow revenue: Provide seamless shopping experiences and paths to purchase in both brick-and-mortar stores and digital channels. These experiences and paths are key competitive differentiators to top-line growth.
  • Improve customer satisfaction: Visibility across channels means a more customized experience. Retailers that can understand preferences cam better serve customers and gain insights into making offers based on needs.
  • Enhance marketing effectiveness: Marketers that use the analytical power of AI build smarter, more effective advertisements and campaigns. These campaigns resonate with customers and maximize marketing return-on-investment (ROI).

Business outcomes of supply chain optimization

  • Improve demand forecasting: Harness real-time analytics to enable retailers to optimize labor and logistics, effectively forecasting demand.
  • Driving operational changes and efficiencies: Gain a unified view of the business to make it possible to optimize existing processes. You can then turn operational data into actionable insights through data, analytics, and AI.
  • Reduce costs and improve customer experience: Analyze supply chain data with analytics to help retailers get the right product to customers when they need it. All while reducing unnecessary inventory.
  • Increase safety and security of goods and shipments: A modernized data environment optimizes the efficiency of the logistics journey. It also reduces loss by providing a complete picture of the entire supply chain where assets can be tracked.

Business outcomes of building management

  • Make more informed decisions: Harness real-time analytics and alerts about energy usage and warehouse operations to empower data-driven decisions.
  • Improve marketing ROI: Optimize the use of available store space to enhance retailers' abilities target. This optimization also increases the efficiency of advertising and marketing.
  • Provide optimal shopping experiences: Trigger alerts based on real-time data from video cameras, beacon technology, and IoT sensors to improve the customer experience.
  • Reduce energy costs: Apply analytics and AI to unlock insights and visualize data for quicker decision making. These applications increase the efficiency of store and warehouse operations.

Next steps

The following articles can guide your cloud adoption journey and help you succeed in the cloud adoption scenario.