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Omnichannel optimization in the retail industry

  • Article

In the retail industry, omnichannel refers to integrated channels that sell goods and services. An omnichannel provides a coherent, captivating shopping experience for customers, whatever the platform or device they use. Data is key to the ability of your business to drive such optimization across channels.

Retail businesses collect different types of customer data. This data includes web-browsing patterns, purchase behaviors, demographics, and other session-based web information. Some data comes from internal business operations. Other data must be pulled from external sources such as partners, manufacturers, or public domains.

Business outcomes of omnichannel optimization

  • Retailers that can gather, prepare, reason over, and act on the data from all available sources to optimize the customer experience across channels are set up for success when it comes to:
  • Increasing customer loyalty: Driving loyalty through insights into customer behavior to deliver relevant offers at the right time brings customers back to the brand repeatedly.
  • Growing revenue: Providing seamless shopping experiences and paths to purchase in brick-and-mortar stores and digital channels is key competitive differentiator to top-line growth.
  • Improving customer satisfaction: Visibility across channels means a more customized experience. Retailers that can understand preferences and better serve customers and gain insights into crafting offers based on needs.
  • Enhancing marketing effectiveness: Marketers that use the analytical power of AI build smarter, more effective advertisements and campaigns that resonate with customers and maximize marketing ROI.

Omnichannel optimization challenges

Many retailers are only able to apply a fraction of the data available to them. This fact limits your ability to optimize across channels. The integration of external, heterogeneous data sources into a shared data processing engine has required significant effort and resources to set up.

This integration challenge causes problems across retail channels:

  • It makes it impossible to deliver the coherent, captivating experiences customers expect.
  • Pricing, promotion, product availability, and fulfillment strategies remain inconsistent.
  • Customers have fragmented, irrelevant, and inconsistent shopping experiences.

To overcome these challenges, retailers need a simple, scalable approach to integrating the analytics and machine learning capabilities.

How Microsoft enables retailers for omnichannel optimization

Microsoft enables retailers to understand preferences, better serve customers, and gain insights into crafting offers based on needs, with tools that provide visibility and a consistent experience across channels. Azure is a comprehensive cloud platform with the ability to analyze massive amounts of customer data using analytics to deliver better customer experiences both online and in store.

How it works

  • Identify data inputs: The first step is to determine data inputs. Azure can apply data from physical and virtual retail channels as input for analytics. These sources include on-premises customer, product, or transactional data. They also include sales and point of sales data, cost-efficiency data, and workforce optimization data.

  • Enable actionable, real-time analysis: Azure Data Factory ingests data from input streams. Azure Databricks can process that data for actionable, real-time analysis. Azure Data Lake Storage stores the ingested data.

  • Accelerate insights: After data has been ingested and prepared, the Azure Synapse Analytics engine acts as a data warehouse. Data is modeled and delivered as actionable insights that drive business outcomes. Azure Synapse Analytics is up to 14 times faster and costs 94 percent less than other cloud providers. You can accelerate insights needed to support personalized offers and experiences while managing costs.

  • Empower the entire business: Power BI enables you to visualize data in a way that democratizes insights. Seeing the data helps the entire business to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and increase customer loyalty.

  • Build smarter, more effective advertisements: Using the AI capabilities Azure helps retailers build smarter, more effective advertisements that resonate with audiences across channels.

Omnichannel success stories

Next steps

Learn about another strategic driver for retail customers: supply-chain optimization.

These resources offer guidance throughout the cloud adoption scenario.