The Cloud-Centric Retailer Treats Every Shopper Like A Celebrity

Imagine walking into a shopping mall on a mission to buy something very specific — the right tie for a job interview, the perfect handbag for a wedding — and knowing immediately where to look. Instead of endless hours wandering from store to store, combing the aisles for the right purchase, you know immediately which shops have exactly what you're looking for and which has the best price.

This is the promise of cloud-centric retail, and forward-thinking merchants are already testing the waters. They understand that today's customers have been trained on the Internet to expect a personalized experience that doesn't waste their money or time. Price comparisons should be easy and recommendations should be tailored to the individual based on past behavior. The cloud can bring that rock star treatment to the physical world, where anyone equipped with a smartphone can try on, touch or taste products to ensure the perfect purchase. As smartphone payment systems evolve, geo-location tracking has the possibility of alerting retailers the minute a valued customer walks into their store. This, combined with knowledge of what that customer likes, offers a valuable opportunity for a very personalized service and rewards programs.

Products are becoming to become intelligent, too, as more items and packaging start to come with low-energy Bluetooth tags that will guide smartphone-equipped shoppers to the exact location of the item they're looking for. Combine that with customers logging in to good-old fashioned Wi-Fi networks and the retail environment becomes a rich mine of data for retailers who choose to build the supporting infrastructure to capture, analyse and interact with it.

More forward-thinking retailers layer social media on top of physical store activity, engaging with and monitoring their customers on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram to harness even more data. Social has become a more important discovery method for consumers, who place more trust in peer-reviewed opinions expressed via social networks than they do in retailers’ own product descriptions. Shoppers are rejecting the old-fashioned rewards points and gravitating toward brands that offer points for social interaction and engagement instead. Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri calls these “hyper-personal real-time relationships.” Cloud services are essential for working across social and physical channels because the data sets are so large and fluid.

The next step after meeting customers on their own terms in the social and physical realms is to begin predicting their needs and wants. This is where the data really starts to pile up as customers adopt smart watches, bracelets and other sensors connected to the cloud. Say you've walked 10 miles on a very hot day. Your fitness tracker sends this information to your smartphone which then syncs with a cloud service that sends you an alert notifying you of the nearest place to get a cold drink. Now that's service! But, as Forrester’s Gualtieri warns, predictive models concern probabilities, not absolutes. This means that accurate predictive models may not exist for every consumer scenario or question.

None of this will happen overnight. Yes, the cloud is here now and retailers can target immediate implementation tracks for some applications and some data sources. Reengineering the entire supply chain and remodeling asset management and merchandising will take more work. Still, it's a change that customers already expect, and those retailers who deliver first stand to benefit most.