The retail industry changed perhaps more than any other over the COVID-19 pandemic. But digitization and modern software technologies have also been causing drastic changes in the retail sector, improving productivity and lowering costs across the board.
Let’s take a look at four of the most major ways that digitization is improving retail productivity for current businesses.
Chat Bots Improve Customer Service Efficiency
For starters, chatbots are now able to dramatically boost customer service teams’ efficiency and productivity. Chat bots can help to take initial questions and direct customers to teams or individuals better suited to help with their unique issues. This reduces the number of customer service staff that retail businesses must employ to handle customer inflow, which also allows businesses to cut costs to some extent.
Not sure how to create a Facebook bot? It’s easy! Just follow the linked guide to leverage this fantastic technology for your retail business.
Big Data Leads to Better Consumer Insights
Furthermore, digitizing businesses are increasingly relying on big data. The collected analytics and insights provided by big data will allow retail businesses to understand their consumers much better than before, tailoring their business models to be even more suitable for their target audiences.
In other words, businesses will become better at predicting what their consumers want and fulfilling those needs quickly, all thanks to the analysis offered by big data. Therefore, retail businesses will experience less customer turnover and less customer dissatisfaction… provided they actually leverage digitization correctly.
DevOps Adoption Leads to Better Workflow and Product Corrections
DevOps processes are essentially routines for software or IT development that IT retail teams can leverage for greater success. These development cycles allow for continuous iteration and correction all the way to market, while also allowing teams to immediately begin working on a patch or a new version of software as feedback comes in.
It’s a much more efficient way to develop software than traditional pipeline routines. DevOps adoption can lead to better software development workflow and greater customer satisfaction, as any produced software will likely be of higher quality and with fewer potential bugs than otherwise.
Automated Tools Boost Supply Chains
Lastly, automated tools will drastically boost retail businesses’ supply chains and management. Supply chain health is important for any business, but it’s especially critical for retail businesses that rely on robust and reliable supply chains to provide them with raw materials or products for their customers.
Automated tools can help with supply chain management by:
- optimizing for inventory space
- keeping track of available inventory
- automatically ordering inventory when necessary
- providing analytics data so that managers can better use supply storage space
- and more
Furthermore, these automated tools will cut costs in the supply chain sector of any given retail business. The bottom line will, therefore, show more profit.
Ultimately, digitization is set to drastically change the way retail businesses operate for the better. Any business looking to not only survive but thrive over the next decade will want to jump into these new technologies ASAP.
