By M. Isi Eromosele

In an extremely competitive and fast-paced business environment, retailers face an array of challenges that place them apart from other business sectors. They must deal with razor-thin margins, manage and train a highly dynamic workforce, and thrive in the

constant pressure to grow and increase profitability.

They’re competing for shoppers who are more empowered and demanding and unpredictable than ever before. Differentiation is imperative and the consumer’s perception of why to shop with a particular retailer is the absolute key to success.

This means understanding and anticipating what customers need and delivering the goods and experiences they want. Retailers need advanced capabilities for segmenting and targeting specific demographic groups in an increasingly diverse and complex market place.

They have to adapt swiftly to consumer demands as well as anticipate economic and geographic trends. And they must meet customer expectations for fast, knowledgeable, and satisfying service in brick-and-mortar stores, online, by catalog or by kiosk -wherever your customers are shopping.

Retailers of all sizes need to provide unique, rewarding shopping experiences that keep customers coming back. Connecting the enterprise from end to end, they should integrate and manage data from multiple sources to provide a single version of customer information.

The result is increased accuracy and better support for decision making, with everyone in the organization working off the same underlying information and assumptions. With one integrated set of master data, they can gain greater visibility and insights into their business.

And with powerful planning, reporting, and analytical functions, they can better

understand their customers and leverage this knowledge to anticipate their ever-shifting desires.

This will help them improve all aspects of their retail enterprise, from intelligent demand planning and merchandising to supply chain efficiency, workforce management, and store operations. This improved efficiency allows retailers to innovate and inspire their

customers through multi-channel loyalty and reward programs, superior customer service, and flexible fulfillment options.

 Understanding Customers

Understanding customers is the first step in creating unique shopping experiences that win their attention and loyalty and their shopping dollars. For example, assessing point-of-sale and loyalty data quantitatively would let retailers view shopping habits and the specifics of consumer demand as well as what their customers are buying, when they are buying, where, and through what channels.

With increased visibility into merchandise levels across the enterprise, retailers’ ability to meet demand is enhanced. Having a sharper picture of customers’ demands, preferences, and shopping habits helps retailers to add the missing ingredient to the time-tested retail recipe of the right product at the right price - namely, the services customers demand through multiple channels and different locations.

Anticipate Changing Desires and Opportunities

A thorough understanding of current and desired customers is the starting point. Next is anticipation: the ability to respond to and even create demand before the competition gets there first. Retailers can use customer demand forecasting functionality to fine-tune their assortment from store to store, from shelf to shelf, across channels and even from customer to customer.

The solutions enables improved supply chain management, helping them to keep in stock the right assortments, styles, flavors, and sizes to ensure that customers can find what they want, when they want it.

Offer Exciting and Unique Shopping Experiences

For many consumers, trends in consolidation and globalization translate into look-alike shopping experiences. In the ultra-competitive race to win their loyalty, retailers must work even harder to differentiate themselves from the competition. Yet consumers are also increasingly price-driven. They must be convinced and inspired to give you their business.

Design customer loyalty programs to do just that. This enables you to process sales transactions on a near-real-time basis, and allows you to see data such as detailed purchase analyses and time of purchase and to correlate this information with customer loyalty programs. Further, this near-real-time functionality helps maximize the value of customer profiling and loyalty programs.