Retail Dude

Modern Retailers are totally IT dependent. No doubt that IT has helped Retailers to control their operations efficiently and reduce cost but it has few drawbacks too. Retailers become helpless when their IT system fails no matter whether it is a virus attack, software bug or a hardware breakdown. In spite of precaution and preventive measures which Retailers might have taken to avoid these, they are bound to happen sometime or other. And whenever they happen, it causes risk to their most valuable digital asset – ‘’Data’’.

Retailers now a day’s operate round the clock and take care of minute things due to competition but they put their productivity as well as profitability in stale by not taking adequate measure to back up and protect their data. A study revealed that almost 2/3^rd of the retailers takes a day or more to recover data due to system failure. Just imagine a scenario where a retailer is not able to access the data for last 24 hrs:

• No record of what sold in last 24 hrs.
• Stock matching cannot be done.
• No idea of what to order to keep shelves full.
• Record of new customer added to customer database for the day lost.
• Customer queries etc. for the day lost which will cause dissatisfaction to customers.
• Records of CRM and Loyalty program for the day at stake.
• Sales based incentives of employees for the day lost.
• Cannot verify cash.
• Details of the goods returned by customers lost.

Many retailers back up their servers at HO and also take regular backups. Servers are the lifeline of IT infrastructure and it’s necessary to ensure that they are safe and backed up. But still a large chunk of retailers do back up manually on even don’t do at all! Not all data which an employee is working on is on network as they keep them loosely on desktop and work on them even when they are away from network. As per an estimate almost 60% of organizations data are on workstation and not on their servers. Thus retailers need to ensure that both servers as well as workstations are backed-up automatically.

Frequency of Back-up:

How often retailers backs up data is again an important factor. Though most of the retailers back up every day end of the day, many even wait till end of the week which is suicidal. Greater the frequency lesser will be the loss from such disasters. A safer approach is to have automatic back up few times a day.

Test your DR (Disaster Recovery) Strategy:

Having regular successful back-ups and structured DR Strategy makes Retailers confident that they will be able to recover their data. But majority of retailers don’t even test there DR Strategy once a year also. Retailers need to understand that if they don’t test it regularly than it might not work when actually required, putting all efforts in vain and will put all their data on stake causing huge losses. To be on safer side, they should test their DR strategy quarterly.

Off late, loss of data has become a primary concern for retailers and has significant implication on their finance and productivity. A bad DR Strategy can challenge business continuity of the Retailers whereas a sound one can minimize the risk from such disaster.

- Rajeev Damani

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So it’s about touch point, about reaching customers, about giving them information with experience and in return collecting information of customer to ensure future communication’s standard and again a good experience in that for the customer & it’s also about conversion rate, about an appeal to a potential customer to become a customer. In this tech. and digital age retailers have lots many tools that they can use to enhance customer experience and can increase their reach. But when, which and why they should use these tools is totally dependent on their requirements and return on investments. So I am not going to provide any guide on how to approach these tools but instead going to introduce a new touch point for the retailers which can be beneficial for their business. The tool named mobile and cellular marketing(also involved interactive marketing), which were there for some time now and retailers were using them partially like sending text message alerts , using bluetooth to send new offerings and offers etc., but with the launch of iPhone (touch and 3G) boundaries seems to be limitless. But now you wonder whats their in iPhone for a retailer. So some facts and figures for you -   Apple surpassed a number of  12 million as far as its sales in 2008 was concerned and this surpasses the expectations of apple who decided to achieve a mark of  10 million as a sales for 2008. This growth is coupled with 93 percent of iPhone owners who have added an application, it is clear that brands have a new and powerful marketing channel that they should embrace, as this will provide them a base of 10+ million potential customers whom they can reach with only one application in iPhone. There are thousands of applications in Apple’s Appstore and more and more are added daily. Some retailers already taken a step of initiation and launched their application for iPhone, to name some are – Amazon, Target, Gap and Sam’s club and many more on their way to do so.

Now the question is what kind of application a retailer is supposed to develop for an iphone. So a retailer can opt for an application with features like –  

1.        Get location of a nearest store even direction to reach there (using iPhone’s GPS), or call the store directly.

2.       Get a Detailed catalog of products and services as well as hours of service for a store.

3.       Get an update on offers/schemes/events etc.

4.       Promote products and use apps as a channel of marketing.

5.       Capture details of customer for CRM/Database.

6.       Food retailers/QSR/restaurants can get order from iPhone and get the food ready while the customer arrives. This will reduce delivery time a lot.

7.       Fun filled apps mostly seasonal and used to promote specific products

Apart from this there is no limit of how creative you can become in terms of application.

So far I talked about iPhone applications but as more and more smartphones are venturing into market the same principle can be applied albeit with a different feature set,  as Research In Motion launches the BlackBerry Application Storefront and Application Center, and Google’s Android gains wider adoption, also Nokia is planning to launch its music and application store this year. So this new medium should be leveraged as this involves less investment and greater returns plus reach - a digital touch point for retailers.

-Prateek Katiyar

P.S. - Readers are invited to

• Give viewpoint on “Whats there in digital touchpoint for Indian retailers”.
• Provide ideas for applications you want to see from your favorite retailers(Indian+global).

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