Retailers Take the Guesswork Out of Back-to-School
The back-to-school season is now in motion, kick-starting a series of peak holidays for retailers. Everything that follows is an opportunity.
According to Deloitte, 87% of parents expect to spend $488 for back-to-school items this year, up from $434 last year, and we know that earning those dollars is more challenging than ever. The retailer must deliver an experience that creates a long-lasting favorable impression with the shopper, one that builds loyalty and trust.
Where many companies are struggling when it comes to back-to-school readiness and realizing this peak time for brand, is providing store associates, merchants and financial leaders a single version of the truth as it relates to their own inventory and to the customer.
Despite all of the advancements in systems and processes, ask a retailer how many items they have on their shelves and it is surprising how many still have to guess. Do you have the size and color and when can you deliver it? Is the customer a loyalty card number to scan via a barcode? Is she an e-mail address or a mobile phone where digital promotions are sent? Those retailers that can still not see real time, perpetual inventory are at an insurmountable disadvantage when it comes to the customer experience and their own financial performance.
As an industry, we must go back to the fundamentals of having consistent use of the data for inventory, for customer and for order and all of the conversations around customer experience tend to come back to those three pillars that enable retailers to be consistent.
With that foundation in place, retailers can begin to transform their business operations and they can do so with cloud-based science and analytics tools that deliver a steady pace of advancements.
Science helps retailers shape the experience
Retail technology that runs the right algorithms against massive datasets enables us to get back to school more right today than we ever did. Science-based retailing, built on a solid data foundation, enables operational groups to know the marketing, fulfillment and replenishment ramifications of today’s sales but ultimately where are we against our financial plan.
Using retail science can deliver immediate financial gain in key aspects of the business. Major national and global brands have been lauded in recent years for local tailored assortments achieved through science-based planning tools, and the financial rewards of optimized pricing tools are well documented. But the local tailored experience falls to pieces as soon as I go on mobile, if I get different pricing.
Fed by a holistic dataset that represents all channels and customer and inventory, retail science can transform the way that retailers plan and execute their most critical operations. This is especially true mid-season and during peak shopping events. Now merchandising and marketing teams can answer, what do this week’s trends and consumer preferences mean for retail assortments in every location? How can I adjust inventory to get it as close as possible to customers that will order next week? Retailers must connect customers with the right offer and then deliver at every point of sale – whether the consumer buys via mobile and picks up in store or buys in store and ships to home.
When it comes to back to school, the winning retailers are those that have successfully dialed in modern retail science across all of what may seem to be basic operations but which are the keys to the customer experience and to optimizing margins and performance. These are the retailers that have enabled an agile supply chain, that know exactly where their inventory lies, and that have established the operational excellence to deliver the right item, color and size no matter how and where the customer chooses to shop.