As today’s consumer has come to increasingly expect more convenience, ease, and a compelling shopping experience, retailers must reexamine their business strategies.
“Digital transformation requires a top-down study and redesign of business strategy/leadership, business processes, human engagement (workforce and others), information monetization, and technology. It is more critical than ever for retailers to adapt experiences delivered to ever-changing consumer needs and to be agile and innovative, leveraging all of the advantages of current-state digital systems,” says Leslie Hand, vice-president of IDC Retail Insights.
The IDC MaturityScape: Digital Transformation in Retail report offers retail leaders five disciplines of digital transformation — Leadership DX, Omni-Experience DX, WorkSource DX, Operating Model DX, and Information DX — so retailers can accelerate their adoption of these disciplines, and realize the benefits.
“Retailers must recognize and drive digital transformation,” says Robert Eastman, research manager: retail omni-channel IT strategies at IDC Retail Insights. “Retailers dealing with legacy, disconnected, siloed systems have latencies and speeds that cannot support modern commerce, nor do most of the legacy systems allow retailers to quickly launch the types of services that customers today are expecting.
“At a time when customer expectations are rising and customers are more digitally fluent and digitally equipped than ever before, customers are expecting that their shopping experience will be easy, convenient, frictionless, and available anytime everywhere.”
