The Winning Retail Formula Today Is and Not or

In the Age of the Consumer, loyalty often equals the absence of something better. To sustain loyalty, we must continuously earn it in every interaction. That means today’s winning Retailers must provide:

• Price and Quality
• Assortment and Convenience
• Stores and Digital
• Pickup and Delivery
• Innovation and Trust

Clearly, this is easier said than done. Delivering the compelling experiences that consumers expect is a tall order, and it requires a consumer-obsessed culture of quality focused on the Consumer Journey. To accomplish this, successful retailers are organizing their Value Chain around that journey to ensure they win at every step of the way.

At Cigniti, we enable our Retail clients to successfully deliver against ever-changing demands by helping them stay connected to consumers through continuous feedback on their quality expectations. They put what consumers define as quality at the core of all they do.

Here’s an illustration of the benefits of driving quality throughout a Retail Value Chain.Let’s examine each one of these layers in turn, starting with the Consumer Journey, to understand how they all work together.

Consumer Journey

Consumers make purchase decisions in a variety of ways and with varying frequency, often in parallel. On this journey, they are constantly:

• perceiving their own wants and needs and those of others
• evaluating options
• analyzing how much they can spend
• prioritizing
• deciding when, where, and how to purchase
• buying the desired item and using it
• disposing of or recycling the item, leading full circle to a repurchase decision

Analytics Driven Retail Value Chain

Each step in the Consumer Journey is an opportunity for Retailers to engage, influence, and win. To capitalize on that opportunity, they must ensure their Retail Value Chain enables the most efficient and effective consumer interaction.

Since consumers are now in control of when, where, and how they purchase, it’s critical to have cross-channel integration throughout and to leverage data. It’s not efficient to treat each channel as a separate business and it doesn’t lead to delighted consumers if every time they engage, they get a different experience depending on what channel they use.

The following functions offer the most suitable opportunity for positively impacting consumer experience and for driving cross-channel efficiency:

• Planning
• Merchandising
• Marketing and CRM
• Supply Chain and Distribution
• Operations

Finally, core support functions like Technology, HR, and Finance must all share the same consumer obsession in their key roles within the Retail Value Chain.

Results Delivered by Cigniti

By helping our clients keep the consumer’s quality expectations at the center of all they do, we provide quantifiable business benefits. We understand that we must deliver ROI, so we structure our services to yield results.

For example, we automated over 90% of the quality test cases for one client’s applications, thereby shortening their development process and increasing speed to market for key capabilities that their business needed to be more competitive.

In another case, we increased the throughput of a client’s ecommerce platform by 40%, ensuring they could handle the spike in peak season order volumes while still providing an outstanding consumer experience.

We also helped a client better manage their consumer data, eliminating inaccurate or redundant data and organizing it in ways that yielded actionable insights. With these insights, the client was able to reduce online cart abandonment by 40% and increase top-line sales.

For another client, we provided advisory services, helping them identify and drive process and automation improvements that led to 30% resource cost savings. This increased their efficiency and allowed them to scale their operation without additional expenses.

Cigniti Solutions

Business benefits like those described above can only be achieved through solutions tailored for each client and informed by years of experience.

Our solutions are divided into three categories: Advisory & Transformation, Digital Engineering, and Digital Assurance.

We align and tailor these solutions to our clients’ most immediate and pressing needs so we can deliver value in the near term, while also keeping an eye on the future to ensure today’s investments lead to their long-term goals.

Conclusion

What matters most is moving from only measuring quality outputs to demonstrating impact on quantifiable business results. It’s critical in Retail to quantify how we are improving Same Store Sales, Consumer Experience, and Conversion Rates, while reducing Cost of Sales and Operations, Time to Market, and Friction.

Here’s an illustrative example of linking Business Process Focused QA outputs to Key Performance Indicators that ultimately drive quantifiable impact on Business Goals.

Retailers need good partners to help them operate with the speed and agility required in today’s market. When picking a partner, the following criteria are keys to success:

• Proven Experience
• Retail Focus
• IP and Innovation
• Strong Partnerships
• Vision-Driven Delivery
• Recognitions and Certifications

For more info or to chat further, please contact me anytime at chris.velotta@cigniti.com.