Tag: Retail

Retailers experienced more change in the last decade than nearly any other industry, a trend that is not likely to slow as we enter 2020. The only certainty in the new decade is the need for technologies that help retailers stay nimble, relevant, and anticipate customer needs and shopping preferences.

As my colleague Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, shared in a blog post today, consumers are driving the future of retail—from when, where, and how they engage with a retail brand to demands for higher standards in data privacy and secure shopping. Technology will usher in a new era of intelligent retail experiences across every storefront, physical and digital.

Next week, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show, Microsoft will demonstrate Dynamics 365 solutions as part of the breadth of our company’s offerings, that will power retail innovation in the next decade. These applications unify customer experiences across every commerce channel from physical to online stores and pop up shops to subscription services as well as unlock AI-powered insights from the back office to the frontline to deliver exceptional, personalized customer experiences.

This vision for the future of retail is spotlighted by new features and product releases announced today:

• Dynamics 365 Commerce, generally available on February 3^rd is a modern omnichannel commerce solution that unifies back office, e-commerce, in-store, and call center and simplifies the integration of new emerging channels.
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, featuring two new capabilities to reduce fraud and related costs while improving the buying experience: loss prevention and account protection, available for preview on March 2^nd.
• Dynamics 365 Connected Store is an application that combines AI-driven insights and IoT-connected sensors and cameras to empower retailers with real-time observational data to improve in-store performance, coming to preview later this calendar year.

Deliver insightful shopping experiences

Omnichannel retailing is now the standard for success in the market. For too many retailers, however, the slow adoption of technology to support the model has hampered progress toward truly unified cross-channel shopping experiences that bridge physical and online channels.

At NRF, Microsoft will demonstrate a modern, flexible cloud commerce solution that powers rich, customer-first experiences at all touchpoints. Dynamics 365 Commerce, slated for general availability on February 3^rd, is an evolution of our Dynamics 365 Retail offering and delivers a comprehensive omnichannel solution to unify back-office, e-commerce, in-store, and call center experiences.

Spotlighted features for the February 3^rd launch include:

• Native e-commerce capabilities, featuring built-in web authoring and development tools to create engaging, intelligent digital storefronts, plus a connected marketing and commerce platform for seamless management of content, assets, promotions, inventory, and pricing across channels.
• Native integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.
• AI-moderated ratings and reviews and intelligent customer recommendations for more personalized customer experiences.

Dynamics 365 Commerce customers are finding new ways to build brand loyalty, optimize operations and supply-chain efficiencies, and deliver better business outcomes. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the third-largest premium wine company in the United States, leverages Dynamics 365 Commerce to provide a seamless customer experience across all three direct-to-consumer channels, e-commerce, brick and mortar, and clubs, and across the different brands in the Ste. Michelle Wine Estates portfolio. With a full end-to-end retail solution, Ste. Michelle can put the customer at the center of the buying journey and provide more personalized and timely customer recommendations and experiences from the tasting room to digital touchpoints.

“From the moment a consumer visits one of our wineries or tasting rooms, joins one of our clubs, or decides to purchase products online, we want to remove all sources of friction that come between the consumer and the perfect wine choice.” – Francis Perrin, Chief Marketing Officer for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce and watch an on-demand webinar for a closer look at Commerce in action.

Protect your e-commerce business and customers

Even for global e-commerce leaders, it’s not always easy to safeguard millions of transactions and deliver the best possible shopping and purchasing experiences at the same time. The accelerating shift toward omnichannel has increased the threat of fraud-related losses. And greater exposure to theft or improper discounting can introduce more pressure on the already thin margins in brick and mortar stores. In fact, fraudulent transactions globally account for over $175 billion in fraud-related costs every year.

In 2019, Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to help reduce fraud and its related costs, increase revenue, and deliver better buying experiences with lower friction and more support.

Today we’re announcing two new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection—both available for preview on March 2^nd—to help prevent loss and mitigate risks for merchants, leveraging the power of big data and ethical AI to provide a best-in-class fraud solution for omnichannel merchants:

• Account protection helps retailers recognize patterns related to fraudulent e-commerce activities during account creation or attempted hijacking. Account protection uses artificial intelligence to aid in decreasing the costs of account fraud by helping to reduce the number of fraudulent accounts, in turn protecting the businesses’ reputation and improving customer experiences and satisfaction.

Account protection can help retailers improve the bottom line by reducing fraud activities and friction throughout the customer journey, improve business reputation by preventing negative exposure due to fraudulent activity, and increase customer satisfaction by protecting customer authenticity and privacy.

• Loss prevention helps reduce fraud in brick and mortar stores and boost revenues at the retailer by providing insights around returns and discount fraud. By using data from commerce systems and the power of AI, loss prevention helps merchants decipher patterns of losses from returns, improper discounts, merchandise mishandling, and inventory turn-over.

Loss prevention helps provide anomaly reporting and actionable insights that allow retailers to gain visibility into specific business functions which may require additional controls. In addition, loss prevention can help reduce the manual effort needed to determine the business entities and functions which are at risk.

BESTSELLER, the international clothing and accessories company, is leveraging Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to reduce fraud-related losses across its 70 markets spanning most of Europe, the Middle East, Canada, India and globally via e-commerce. BESTSELLER uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to spot patterns of activity that suggest fraud and work to remedy the situation within its stores. After a successful pilot deployment, BESTSELLER is rolling out Fraud Protection across its stores in Europe, and eventually the world. The company projects that it will save millions of dollars as a result, while also boosting BESTSELLER’s core value of trust.

“By identifying fraud and loss quickly with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, we’re boosting business outcomes and building a culture where our core value of honesty is practiced by everyone every day.” – Kim Guldager, Senior Program Manager at BESTSELLER.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection in the first in a series of deep-dive blog posts.

Help bridge digital and physical worlds

With real-time observational data about customer movement or the status of products and store devices, there’s tremendous opportunity to gain a better understanding of the retail space and improve in-store performance. Microsoft is dedicated to helping retailers adapt and optimize physical retail spaces to meet new levels of customer expectation.

Available in preview later this year, Dynamics 365 Connected Store helps retailers both understand how customers use the retail space over time, as well as monitor real-time activities from checkout line queues to shelf voids to help frontline workers deliver exceptional customer service.

Connected Store can optimize the shopping experience in real time through triggered alerts based on real-time data from video cameras and IoT sensors and also provides longer term insight that can illuminate patterns and opportunities that lie within the day-to-day occurrences of a retail space.

Marks & Spencer, for instance, is using Dynamics 365 Connected Store to capture observational data from customer behavior across multiple stores worldwide, and over a period of time, to identify patterns and trends. This unlocks the opportunity to predict inventory needs and replenish stock levels in real time, all to create first class experiences for the customer.

See what’s in store for retail and technology

Microsoft, along with our global partner ecosystem, is dedicated to enabling intelligent retail by empowering the industry with the tools to unlock the full potential of customers, employees, and data. Together with the solutions highlighted above, NRF attendees can see demonstrations of our portfolio of business applications which will include Supply Chain Management, Customer Insights, and Power BI dashboards for frontline workers to the back office. We’ll also be showing our new mixed reality solution, Product Visualize, that lets sales representatives place a 3D digital twin of a product in their customer’s environment.

Get the full story

For those attending NRF, stop by the Microsoft booth for immersive demonstrations of our full range of retail solutions, attend deep dive sessions, network with us at the FQ Lounge, and more. View the agenda for all the ways to engage with us at NRF.

We also invite you to view our latest research, the Retail Trends Playbook 2020 for more insights into emerging trends that will help empower retailers to create exceptional, insightful shopping experiences for customers.

Did you know that an incredible 90% of all data in existence today was created in just the last two years? We’re talking about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.

I recently shared this mind-blowing fact along with awesome customer success stories and our strategic approach at the Consumer Goods Forum 2019. In case you haven’t been, it’s a veritable ‘who’s who’ in consumer goods attends this flagship event, including more than 1,000 C-level executives from over 70 countries.

It was incredible for me to see so many household-name brands thinking about how to unlock the power of their data, how to use AI and other technologies to create more innovative products, and how to get so much closer to their consumers. Another very consistent themes I heard was around how to leverage data for sustainability and our environment.

Of course, the world we live in now is increasingly digital and data is on overdrive. We’re seeing disruption and change everywhere, driven by the explosion of that data. It’s being generated at a break-neck pace, flooding out of the dozens of connected devices we use every day at work and at home, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

With all this data at our disposal, why does Nielsen data show that 80% of new product launches by fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies fail? It’s all about what they’re doing with their data, how they’re storing it, analyzing it, continuing to reevaluate it and creating digital feedback loops with it.

So how can consumer goods companies unlock their data to deliver more authentic brand experiences, be good for the planet or increase their speed to market? At the Consumer Goods Forum, I talked about the importance of data to the future of consumer goods companies and how our work with Starbucks and Carlsberg demonstrates a number of strategic consumer goods scenarios that show we are partnering with them to unlock the power of that data.

Starbucks

Microsoft is partnering with Starbucks on several initiatives, including one called bean-to-cup. It’s a real-time, data-fueled approach to transparency and traceability using Blockchain. It gives:

1. Customers details on where their coffee was sourced and roasted, as well as tasting notes
2. Farmers access to data, such as where their beans end up in consumers’ cups; and
3. Starbucks digital, “real-time traceability” to its supply chains all the way from bean/farm to cup

Carlsberg

Founded in 1847, Carlsberg is now using technology to create beer.

Faced with increasing global competition from large, established brands as well as smaller more niche microbreweries, the company wanted to get closer to its customers in innovative new ways. So Carlsberg launched its Beer Fingerprinting Project, which uses AI solutions, including machine learning algorithms, to measure the flavors and aromas created by yeast and other ingredients.

For instance, sensors can tell the difference between various pilsners and lagers, and researchers are now fine-tuning the system to help them produce better tasting beer. And they’re working to map a flavor fingerprint for each sample to reduce the time it takes to research taste combinations and processes by up to a third, which will help the company get more distinct beers to market faster.

We are all creating more data every single day, adding to a phenomenal – a growing – trove of information across the globe. For consumer goods companies, turning this data into useful and actionable insights that help them deliver personal experiences and develop new products we didn’t even know we needed is the key to the future.

Doug Stephens is always thinking about tomorrow. And about next year. And the year 2039.

The founder and president of Retail Prophet – one of the world’s top retail consultancies – has logged more than two decades in the industry, leading brands, authoring two books and offering his advice to numerous companies. As he likes to tell clients: “There’s no such thing as being fashionably late for your future.”

On a recent weekday in New York City, Stephens paused to predict how technology will vastly reshape the shopping experience, how retail marketing will change and how the stores themselves will look in the coming years. Yes, there will still be stores, he says.

Transform grabbed a few minutes with Stephens to hear seven futuristic retail realities he envisions, including his views on AI. Based on the interview, here is the thought leader’s forecast, in his words:

Artificial intelligence will become our go-to shopping buddy.

AI has the capacity to learn, to become smarter and more intuitive. It will reshape virtually every aspect of the retail industry – and the industry’s relationship with consumers.

Today, if we compare the development of AI to, say, the development of manned air flight, we are now at Kitty Hawk – the North Carolina town where the Wright brothers made their first controlled flight in 1903. We’re early.

Microsoft is working heavily in the AI field. Imagine where we’re going to be in 20 years. I fully believe that consumers will operate with an artificial intelligence that they can create and tailor in whatever form they like. They will make it look and sound like whatever they’re comfortable with. And it will go everywhere with them.

They will turn to it whenever they have a major consumer decision to make. And even when they make incidental consumer decisions, they will use AI just as they now use a map app – as soon as they leave the house, even if they know where they’re going. They will use AI to inform their consumer behavior and to make far better decisions.

AI will render today’s heart-tugging commercials and marketing campaigns useless.

AI will be a problem for marketers. If they want to appeal to a consumer, marketers may have to go through their AI-enabled, virtual assistant to get to that consumer.

The consumers are going to ask the assistant so many questions. What should I buy? Where should I eat? Which airline should I travel on?

AI is going to take all the emotion out of all those decisions. So consumers won’t be affected by the kind of emotional marketing we see today – ads that show families sitting eating together, traveling with their children, petting the dog. AI won’t care about any of that. Consumer decisions are all going to be based on hard-and-fast metrics.

Brick-and-mortar stores will retain a firm a place in our economy.

Many products still carry a level of immediacy. Waiting a day or two for them just seems silly.

Case in point: drug stores. Look in your medicine cabinet. When you need one of those products, you tend to go get it. That probably won’t change.

Similarly, stores that require significant interaction with the staff. A prime example: home improvement stores. They answer our questions. Is this item right for my needs? How do I install this? If this is beyond my abilities, who can install this for me?

It’s not just the product you’re purchasing. You’re also buying their expertise.

And let’s not forget: Many of us still like shopping in stores.

Another reason many traditional stores will stick around: Millennials like shopping there.

No doubt, today’s retail landscape was built for a different generation of consumers. So we shouldn’t be shocked that millennials aren’t pouring into the malls the way younger people did in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Millennials have lived their whole lives being stimulated by inordinate amounts of media. By comparison, most retail is relatively boring, if we get right down to it. How many times a week do you walk into a store and say, ‘You know, I need to take a selfie of this place?’ Zero.

However, we are starting to address these issues. And I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that millennials just don’t like the physical shopping experiences. That will not change with time.

The grocery store of tomorrow will be far smaller.

With more grocery products coming to our homes from our online shopping, retailers will continue to collapse their spaces. I imagine no cereal aisles, no detergent aisles.

Instead I see maybe a restaurant in the middle of the store where people can learn how to cook things, like different ethnic dishes every week.

Discount stores also will go digital, adding value to shoppers’ time.

If your brand is largely about convenience, ease and taking the friction out of shopping, you will have to focus on those elements and bolster that story in the consumer’s mind.

These stores won’t ask you to stop and take 20 minutes to engage with a shopping experience. They will put the things you need right in front of you to make it easy, so you don’t have to think about price, so you can get right out the door.

If discount retailers do that through technology, they’re going to carve out a very strong position. When we use the word “experience,” often our minds jump to these highly immersive, physically engaged store environments. But “experience” isn’t necessarily tied to luxury.

No single retail brand has yet claimed victory in the digital revolution – but one will.

There hasn’t been a company that can say, ‘We’ve figured it all out. We’ve nailed it.’ That said, there are some courageous, adventurous and insightful things happening across numbers of brands. Nordstrom, for example.

They had the courage to say, ‘What if we were to create a 3,000-square-foot department store that doesn’t stock any products? What if, in that store, everything gets ordered online and delivered to that store. And people come, try on their products and have a glass of wine?’ Sure enough, that became Nordstrom Local.

At some point, after all of the cumulative learnings like that are gained from various digital initiatives, I believe there will be one retailer that is able to bottle it all up in one place.

Of course, the troubling thing is by the time that happens, the retail industry will have shifted once again. It’s always moving – and always quickly.

Watch Doug Stephens reveal the five most important decisions facing today’s retail CEOs during a free webinar, March 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.

Top image: Doug Stephens. (Photos courtesy of Retail Prophet)

For Sarah Miller, the job of reading patterns in retail data has long felt like a perfect fit.

She built her early IT career by pulling insights from grocery aisles, restaurant rushes, and the nuts and bolts of home improvement. Then, in 2013, she added a new look to her resume – the business of fashion. The tech exec arrived at Neiman Marcus Group as “a big customer” of the iconic brand.

“Once I got to know people within the organization, I recognized how passionate other associates were about the company,” says Miller, senior vice president and chief information officer. “It’s a special place.  And every day, it continues to be inspiring.”

Now Miller is leading a growth and transformation strategy specifically focused on technology across Neiman Marcus Group and aimed at “capturing the hearts and minds of our customers,” she says.

By adopting an array of technologies, including the communication and collaboration tools within Microsoft Office 365, Miller seeks to build on the intimate relationship Neiman Marcus Group has with its customers, expanding that fan base by fueling deeper ties both digitally and in the stores.

Transform recently caught up with Miller to hear more about her plans to get to know those customers even better.

TRANSFORM: How does collecting and analyzing consumer data drive this new initiative?

SARAH MILLER: We’ll be using data in a lot of new platforms to have a deeper understanding of the customer and to be able to predict (purchases) and create communications with those customers, then feed that to our sales associates and stylists to grow that relationship.

And this is not from a transactional level. A lot of retailers and e-commerce businesses are using technology just to focus on the transaction. This is more around knowing our customers and creating a unique and memorable experience for each one of them.

TRANSFORM: Are you also using these technologies to improve the employee experience?

MILLER: We believe we have a very good culture today at Neiman Marcus Group. That has traditionally been an innovative culture. We were the first luxury retailer to have a loyalty program and an e-commerce site.

Going forward, we are investing in collaboration and communication tools to continue to expand that innovative culture so that we can connect more among ourselves – whether it’s sales associates connecting with corporate teams or the sales associates connecting between stores, sharing information and receiving feedback.

We can drive more of a performance culture within the organization. We see the Office 365 products being able to provide that for us today.

TRANSFORM: What can employees achieve that they couldn’t achieve previously?

MILLER: Today, we don’t have an efficient way to share information within the organization – no Teams site, no common place to share documentation and information or to get feedback from the organization on what we’re doing.

As we roll out Office 365, we’ll be able to more easily stream video and communications to the organization and also receive real-time feedback.

Our executive team and our CEO are interested in understanding how the organization is receiving information on the ideas they have to contribute to our growth strategy – and to help them create the customer experience that we are trying to achieve.

TRANSFORM: How do you see these tools improving work culture?

MILLER: We all use technology to communicate, to get our news, to share information and to socialize. So consumers have high expectations of technology. They understand what good technology is, what it’s built like and how it helps them in their daily lives. It’s important to also have that (same expectation) in the workplace.

But when it comes to the workplace, a lot of companies are behind. We think creating that same (tech-friendly) experience within the workplace will help enhance the culture we want to foster at Neiman Marcus Group. And as we all know, a rich culture, helps attract the very best talent to an organization.

TRANSFORM: What’s your vision for how Office 365 will change how people do their jobs?

MILLER: Quite frankly, it’s going to be beyond probably what I imagine today.

We have product teams that build the technology for our customer experience. Those product teams will be able now to use these technologies to communicate, collaborate and share the designs and information that they need in order to build those products.

Our marketing organization will be able to collaborate in real time with our merchandising organization on how we are planning communications to our customers or working with our brand partners. Our merchandising organization will be able to access real-time data through mobile devices so when they are in market and working with our brand partners, they have all the data they need.

I think the organization is then going to create use cases that we haven’t even thought of yet. That’s what excites me.

TRANSFORM: You’re also incorporating real-time data and predictive AI into your customer relationships. How do you see those technologies influencing what Neiman Marcus Group offers?

MILLER: We already know our customers very well, so we have a lot of information and data (from their purchases) that will help enhance their experience. We can use that customer data to make product recommendations or styling recommendations for them.

Going forward, we will use machine learning and predictive analysis to tap all of the fashion and style experience that Neiman Marcus Group has. Our technology will learn that information from both our internal associates as well as from fashion trends out there to create the look and the experience that our customers will love.

Top image: Sarah Miller, courtesy of Neiman Marcus.

This week, at NRF 2019—Retail’s Big Show—we’re excited to showcase both new innovations that will transform retail in 2019 and retail brands we’re working with to reinvent the customer experience, including Dr. Martens, Goodwill, and Stefano Ricci.

Knowing your customer has never been more critical. Success is ever more dependent on harnessing data—everything from customer preferences to product availability. These are all digital activities, where the data is already easily collected and analyzed, and automated actions are often triggered based on levers such as personalized emails, web, or ad experiences. But what about the physical spaces in retail stores? How can we apply similar technologies to transform the consumer shopping experience in physical stores?

Some data is already collected in physical stores, but what’s new and exciting is the blending and integration of the digital and physical world data types—People, Places, & Things—and applying AI on top of this data. This is the key that helps to unlock new and differentiated shopping experiences in physical retail stores.

Last week my colleague, Shelley Bransten (CVP, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries), shared some insights into how Microsoft is delivering on the promise of intelligent retail. She talked about how leading retailers are using the Microsoft Cloud as a competitive differentiator, from using AI to create transformative customer and employee experiences, to embracing IoT to leverage their supply chains for maximum customer impact, to using cloud-based business applications to manage everything from the customer journey to operations.

In addition to that work, we are also investing in exciting new capabilities to Azure and Dynamics 365 business applications to help transform the consumer shopping experiences in physical stores. New experiences such as personalized shopping assistance, digital shelf ads and pricing, real-time store navigation and in-aisle checkout are quickly becoming the consumer expectation. To enable this, we are bringing capabilities to Azure to more easily map real-word physical spaces and the ability to reason and surface these insights in our Dynamics 365 business applications.

This is an exciting space that we are actively investing in, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months.

Three ways brands are modernizing customer experiences

Some amazing retail brands are already deploying Microsoft Business Applications and partner solutions to modernize customer experiences, with three innovative use cases in common:

More personalization

By understanding who is in your store at any given moment—demographics on age and gender, as well as inference of intent and sentiment—store associates can provide proactive and tailored customer of assistance.

Dr. Martens—the iconic British footwear brand—is making big strides to reinvent the in-store experience. They’ve partnered with Microsoft and Hitachi Solutions to integrate ‘Retail Awareness’ across their operations, a platform built on Dynamics 365, Power BI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure IoT Hub, and Microsoft Azure Data Bricks.

This solution will improve customer experiences by surfacing insights on buying patterns and demographics, allowing sales associates to provide real-time contextual recommendations. In addition, stores will receive automated, AI-driven priorities and insights, like hour-to-hour revenue dashboards, helping every retail location focus on what’s important.

Leading luxury men’s apparel retailer, Stefano Ricci, is also deploying artificial intelligence to better understand and anticipate customers’ needs and behaviors. They are using Dynamics 365 and partner SB Soft’s Power NBA (Next Best Action) solution to hyper-personalize the customer experience, improving how they proactively present personalized recommendations at every touchpoint—in store and online.

Accurate pricing, inventory and promotions

You may have heard of our partnership with Kroger to pilot digital shelf pricing and promotions in their stores. By using Microsoft Azure to store and process the data generated in stores, near the smart shelves and on Kroger’s app, the digital stores can enable personalized ads and digital shelf pricing.

Relatedly, one of the largest resale retailers in the world, Goodwill, is deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 to find the right buyers, at the right price, for thousands of donated items.

Goodwill’s retail revenue, as well as private donations and grants, fund career-track programs that serve tens of thousands of people each year. The more money its thrift stores make, the more money is invested in its career-track programs. That’s why Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona is setting out to modernize its point-of-sale system, inventory management, and customer engagement solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 will allow Goodwill to optimize pricing for the tons of goods donated weekly, move product faster across physical and online storefronts, and allow customers to more easily donate to Goodwill programs during checkout.

Smart merchandising

Finally, understanding flow and traffic patterns through the store can provide ease of navigation and faster checkouts. Performance can also be analyzed across aisles and endcaps, to full store floor maps, or across multiple stores to optimize product placement.

Dr. Martens, for example, now has access to intelligent merchandising tools that will enable tailored planograms for specific stores—helping each store to align to local and regional style and cultural trends.

Check back for more success stories as our retail customers innovate the showroom floor experience in 2019.

Learn what’s in store for retail in 2019

In case you missed it, we just released the 2019 Retail Trends Report—a survey of six trending areas of focus to create exceptional shopping experience for customers. It’s a great companion to our new eBook–Why Choose Dynamics 365 for Retail?—an great overview of what’s possible when you transform retail operations with Dynamics 365.

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