Person using gear to visualize a conversation
Read Time, 2 min.

It is hard to predict future trends, opportunities, or challenges. Keeping up with the increasing pace of change is both difficult and crucial for sustainable business. Whatever happens in the future, technology will be a key enabler of resilience and successful transformation. 

This is particularly true in the retail sector, where being one step ahead of what customers want to buy can mean the difference between thriving, simply surviving, or becoming obsolete. Advanced analytics doesn’t only look at the past but is also predictive and even prescriptive by providing recommended actions. And AI allows you to take a wider range of variables into account and derive recommendations specifically for your sales channels, stores, and customers.  

To seize the opportunities provided by technology, data needs to be at the heart of everything. It empowers you to be agile, based on data-driven insights and predictions. With customer spending under pressure from rising costs, technology can help moving quickly from initial assessment to relevant action. One example is the development of next-gen pricing. 

SAS enables its retail customers to optimize prices for regular items, promotions, and markdowns. SAS for Pricing Strategies and Optimization helps to meet financial targets and manage stock levels using pre-generated, optimized pricing strategies.  

AI enables retailers to deliver personalized experiences to their customers. Personalization drives conversion rates and basket size and is often correlated with high net promoter scores. To achieve the full potential of customer insights you need to capture, connect, and analyze a variety of customer signals across channels. Here are several examples. 

Data is at the heart of the shift to digital retailing for SPAR, which has been working with Adobe to increase its share of regional shopping preferences. As a result, it has experienced a 50% increase in customers. Meanwhile, Boots is personalizing digital experiences for 50 million customers with the Adobe Experience Platform. 

Optimizely has helped New Era, famous for its baseball-style caps, achieve 60% year-on-year revenue growth by improving its digital customer experience. The fashion retailer has recorded 51% more product views and 70% more add-to-cart instances using the Optimizely Customer-Centric Digital Experience 

Another retail brand committed to delivering memorable digital experiences and customized product offers is L’Oréal. The make-up, haircare, and cosmetics group teamed up with Sitecore. The Sitecore Experience Platform boosts customer engagement and creates a unified, consistent digital presence across all its brands. 

Empower Retail Success with Azure Marketplace

Empower your retail business with the full range of apps available on Azure Marketplace. Uncover the keys to success.

Discover more related articles per industry:

Education

  • a group of people sitting at a table using a laptop computer

    4 reasons Citrix and Windows Virtual Desktop are better together for education

    Educational institutions all over the world experience a huge transformation. We are all familiar with the impact of COVID-19 on digitization in education, but there are more challenges. The digitization challenges faced by educational institutions   Because of the measures against the COVID-19 pandemic, like lockdowns and social distancing, the trend of online or blended […]

  • Unlock the potential of your students with Microsoft’s new Learning Accelerators

    Unlock the potential of your students with Microsoft’s new Learning Accelerators

    Personalized learning is a goal that educators everywhere have been trying to achieve for years. But the pandemic shone a light on the complexity of that challenge for teachers, who face a more diverse set of student needs than ever before.  Because delivering a truly personalized learning experience for every student has traditionally required lots […]

Finance & Insurance

Government

  • a close up of a mans face

    AI is driving value across businesses in Europe – so why is only 4% of the public sector seeing real impact?

    In April 2018, the European Commission adopted its first AI strategy, laying out a vision for how AI could transform the public sector. The strategy revealed how new machine-learning technologies and data tools can improve public services, reduce costs, provide staff with new skillsets and drive efficiencies. And yet, for the vast majority of public […]

  • Two people inside using Surface Go in office

    How technology is transforming the work of governments

    Governments have the ultimate responsibility to their citizens. People depend on the services they provide like no other institution. Whether in healthcare, education, business, roads, railways, water – it’s essential that government institutions are always at the forefront of social and digital trends. Cloud-powered technologies are playing a critical role in helping government agencies to […]

Healthcare

Manufacturing

  • Grundfos plant

    Smart moves help save water, money … and the planet

    Grundfos is a global leader in advanced pumping solutions and water technology. It contributes to global sustainability by pioneering technologies that improve the quality of life and health of people worldwide. As part of these efforts, Grundfos continues to increase the IQ of its smart pumping solutions with the Microsoft IoT Suite and Microsoft Dynamics […]

  • A Volvo car in the snow

    Volvo uses AI to help keep eyes on the road

    Distraction is a leading cause of road accidents. Volvo teamed with Microsoft to better understand driver attention and emotion using AI.

Retail

  • Woman shopping in store

    Inside Store Lens’ mission to combine online shopping and physical retail  

    With e-commerce gaining traction and COVID-19 forcing a change in traditional shopping trends, high-street retailers have a great opportunity to reinvent themselves and modernize their in-store experience. This is the concept behind Store Lens, a Swedish startup that aims to bring the best of online shopping to the physical retail space – helping in-store shopping […]

  • A woman wearing HoloLens

    Natuzzi: A new way of seeing your home with HoloLens

    In retail, the gift of the sales rep has always been to conjure up a vision for the potential buyer. Transport them to another world, surround them with artefacts – imagined or otherwise – that complete a picture in which the customer can envisage themselves. Because when we buy, we buy into something. The object […]

Discover more related articles per dossier:

Customer Stories

  • a man holding a paint spray

    What we can learn from AkzoNobel’s digital transformation

    Savvy businesses are always on the lookout for ways to improve what they do and differentiate themselves from the competition. From organisational restructure to the development of entirely new business models, the quest for continuous improvement takes many forms. But one common factor in almost all modern business leaders’ plans is an emphasis on technological […]

Digital Transformation

  • Three floral dresses

    Unlocking AI’s potential to transform fashion

    “I believe that the future of fashion will be all about one-to-one services. Thanks to tools like AI and machine learning, brands will be increasingly able to understand their customers’ preferences and give them exactly what they want.” Orlando Ribas Fernandes is describing his vision for artificial intelligence in fashion. The CEO of retail innovation […]

Security & Privacy

Tips