Joining the dots in a retail environment

Does this sound familiar?

• Poor customer insights which lead to problems with the company offerings.
• Unhappy customers as support calls are not handled on time or at all.
• Internal communication issues that lead to demotivated employees.
• Poor inventory management with frequent out-of-stock or overstocked items.
• People in different teams working in siloes, often with the wrong software.
• An inefficient back-office with data that must be added to different systems.
• Difficulties for consumers (and employees!) to get the answers they need.
• Missing opportunities, falling sales, and playing catch-up with competitors.

Having the right software is already a challenge, but Microsoft’s extensive suite of products goes a long way to help retail businesses address their most pressing business needs, whether it’s getting to know customers better, empowering employees, building resilient supply chains, or re-imagining retail for the future.

However, in some cases, there’s still going to be a need for customisation, whether it’s pushing out-of-the-box functionality to its limits or creating bespoke software to complement the stack.

Regardless of which software you opt for, you still need to ensure that all these different components are integrated and provide seamless internal processes and customer journeys; after all, if your business is struggling, the last thing you need is to spend money on excellent software that isn’t calibrated to do what you need it to.

And there are also other added advantages to integration.

Integration provides management with reliable business information when they need it, which leads to better decisions. Customer satisfaction will then get a boost due to better understanding of the customer and a better experience across all touch-points. Additionally, data will be more secure as centralised data is easier to manage, and operations are bound to increase in efficiency with less data entry and no need to switch between different applications.