4 Smart Supply Chain Strategies for Boosting Customer Experience

Consumer preferences are changing as well: focus is shifting from acquiring stuff to accumulating experiences. But creating a great experience is complicated. Having a great product is not enough anymore. Offering great customer experiences require developing a personal relationship with the customer and that comes with many questions to answer: what, where, how, how often…, choosing the right communication channel and frequency, which products to show, which offers to extend are all part of the puzzle retailers are having to solve on a daily basis.

This new era of retail needs a fresh look and a different approach. More and more online-only brands are looking into ways to be more like brick-and-mortar. One answer is a great showroom experience for shoppers.

Let me ask why a showroom?

Because it fills a gap in consumer experience that online shopping cannot and it’s an opportunity to create a personalized experience.

How?

Traditionally, store shopping allows you to touch and feel the product, try it. Then, there are additional choices for the unexpected finds. A store is a touchpoint with an opportunity for targeted interaction and can be the front post of the data collection. Retailers are also exploring novel ways to keep the joy of shopping alight. New technology is ensuring that the store shopping is attractive-ranging from digital mirrors to wallet payment options.

Retailers understand how crucial creating a personalized experience is. Many of them also understand the need to better leverage technology in their interactions with the customers. But often they can’t see the importance of the supply chain strategies in this context. But if we go deeper into demystifying ‘wow’ experience the underlying tenets are:

Ironically, creating great customer experience puts a tremendous strain on the supply chain. Mainly because supply chain has to be nimble and precise to respond: delivering unified customer engagement and creating adaptive and personalized offers/ promotions translates into optimum inventory levels, and short response time (all this with keeping profitability up!). For omnichannel retailers, syncing online and digital retail to create a seamless experience is a key concern and more than anything, it requires a single view of the inventory.

Moreover, retailers and suppliers have to make tough decisions in face of contradicting demands. For example, customer centricity requires avoiding stock-outs, at the same time, lean and fast turning inventory is needed to create a robust discounting and promotion strategy. Also, marketing demands way heavy on logistics costs.

Retailers understand not all stores are created equal; they have different capacities, different customer segments, different lifestyles and priorities, different price sensitivities, climate patterns leading to different customer needs. “Getting closer” to the customer is a top priority for all retailers now and to make that happen they need more sophisticated ways of evaluating sales performance of different products in different store groups with advanced analytics. Effective assortment localization requires sophisticated assortment planning systems that predict product performance at the store level and support fast decision-making for which stores get which products.

The Impact: Solvoyo increased the transparency and enabled informed decision making. The user could do the sensitivity analysis by using what-if scenario planning.

Net-net, by efficient supply chain management, retailers today can drive customer experience at the store level by using diagnostic, prescriptive, and predictive analytics at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels.

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