Prioritizing Digital Transformation Initiatives
Disruptors and other competitors leveraging emerging technologies make the retail market more competitive every minute. With the cross-industry drive for accelerated digital transformation, retailers and other businesses who wait on the sideline for flawless products and innovations often find themselves getting left behind as their counterparts embrace the new and evolving technology solutions. Because in reality, responding quickly to market changes, expecting shifts in consumer behavior, anticipating the demand for digital and prioritizing business transformation is the only way forward.
Today’s retailers must change with the times, and nimble practices will get you in the modern retail game while letting you alter your course along the way.”
Companies that don’t plan, prioritize and carry out digital transformation initiatives run the risk of missing out on $7 million in revenue on average, so it should come as no surprise that digital transformation has become a critical driver of both customer engagement and employee productivity.
Creating connected experiences with multiple purchasing methods through a variety of technological devices and processes is a key part of many organizations’ plans for digital transformation. But on top of implementing your digital transformation plan, you’re also expected to maintain a consistent and seamless customer experience. This means having the right tools, systems, processes and partners in place to propel your initiatives in the right direction.
Accelerating Retail Transformation with a Technology Service Partner
Digital transformation comes in a variety of forms, but the overall goal is to drive disruptive change in your company’s go-to-market strategy — and that often requires rethinking the way you deliver value to your customers. It’s not just about incorporating technology into your existing processes or creating new processes, but it’s also about managing the technology solutions and the services that keep them up and running.
Outsourcing key retail technology services to a trusted partner helps to free up budget and resources to instead dedicate to the transformation initiatives and innovations that fuel your business forward. But not just any partner can step in. The right technology service partner plays a major role in making sure you’re maximizing on the benefits of your technology investments, which means there are certain qualifications and areas of expertise they need in their toolbox.
In the final segment of this three-part series, consider these checkpoints when looking for a retail technology service partner to outsource key services to.
(In parts one and two, learn more about evaluating potential retail technology services partners based on multi-vendor environments, optimized operations and being a single source service partner, as well as complete lifecycle management, increased uptime and experience and flexibility.)
Spend Optimization
An important part of prioritizing retail transformation is being able to allot budget toward those initiatives while still delivering exceptional, consistent customer experiences, too. Look for a partner who invests in operational tools and processes designed to help you reduce both costs and downtime by enhancing visibility into your current and future service requirements. Tracking, managing and optimizing your service needs and spend helps you stay competitive and shift budget toward customer-focused digital transformation initiatives.
Cost Reduction
When technology is working as intended, the costs for managing and maintaining it should decrease over time. But when working with a retail technology services partner, they may not always pass those savings along to you. Find a partner who offers an activity-based model and works with you to identify and reduce low-value activities and improve helpdesk efficiencies. An activity-based model eliminates risk and allows for increased savings opportunities based on the evaluation of historical service call data. Then, the partner bills services calls on a retainer model that cycles savings back into your budget.
Financial Stability
How is your partner’s financial stability? Will they be there for you in the long haul? When you’re working to enhance operational predictability, identify savings opportunities and bolster your customer experience, you need a partner who has not only the experience and capabilities, but also the financial stability and backing to support you along your digital transformation journey.
Ideally, they have a proven success record, decades of experience, a wide network of established partners and a solid business roadmap to continuously move and evolve with the changing market. This combination means you can rest assured with the reliability and predictability you need to move forward with confidence.
Does Your Retail Technology Service Provider Check All the Boxes?
To sum up all three parts of this series, ruminate on the following questions and consider where you are on your retail transformation roadmap… Is your technology services partner aligned to your goals and helping you get to your destination?
- Does your service partner have end-to-end service capabilities — from procurement and installation to maintenance and repair?
- Can your service provider manage multi-vendor store technology environments with different technology brands?
- Is your customer experience a top priority for your service partner?
- Does your service provider have the ability to custom-tailor services and targeted solutions to fit your organization’s unique challenges and needs?
- Is your service partner well-equipped to address downtime? How do they do minimize disruptions?
- Can your retail technology service provider keep up with evolving consumer demands?
- Has your service partner talked with you about options for reducing costs and identifying savings opportunities?
If your retail technology service provider doesn’t check all the boxes, it may be time to reimagine the way you service your store technology — and with whom.
Your business deserves the experience and benefits of partnering with a single global service provider who has technology expertise and in-house, end-to-end retail technology service capabilities to support multi-vendor store environments. Your partnership should ultimately drive cost and operational efficiencies, make it simpler to manage your technology investments throughout the product lifecycle and empower you to prioritize digital transformation and maximize the benefits of your technology.
Read the “Retail Technology Services Checkup” eBook to examine all nine checkpoints when evaluating a potential retail technology services partner to ensure maximum partnership value.
About the Author
Teri Glover joined Shyft Global Services in March 2021 via the outsourcing agreement with Fujitsu America, Inc. and serves as the Director of Global Client Success and Service Delivery Management. She holds over two decades of experience in services and is relentlessly dedicated to delivering the highest-quality customer experience possible, especially in the retail technology space.
