The Growth in Demand for Omnichannel Retailing
Technology is changing the retail landscape at a faster pace than ever before. The widespread adoption of online, mobile, and social tools – as well as the introduction of emerging innovations such as wearables – means that retailers need to adopt quickly and efficiently to serve demanding shoppers. These shoppers are already living in an “anytime, anywhere” world and retailers know they need to ensure their enterprise provides the omnichannel experience.
New, consumer-centric technologies and increasing competition have been transforming the retail landscape for many years. The balance of power has decidedly shifted from suppliers and retailers to well-connected, well-informed shoppers who expect the same interaction with retail brands across multiple channels.
Retailers have typically addressed these channels separately, and are therefore challenged in representing a cohesive brand and delivering consistent service to shoppers across channels and touchpoints.
This is due to the fact that many existing retail Infrastructures have not originally been designed to natively handle multi-directional data communication and synchronization. Unfortunately, this has made the adoption of new technologies and preparations for changes in the way consumers shop difficult and cumbersome.
Retailers need first and foremost to consolidate all shopper data within a single, unified repository. They must also abstract the data and business logic from the front-end interfaces serving store touch points, online and mobile applications, utilizing a common code base to effectively eliminate traditional barriers between different sales channels. This enables frictionless interaction with shoppers across all touchpoints by creating continuous, integrated engagements.
NCR Retail ONE: The NCR Difference
To empower retailers live up to the demand of today’s consumers to have frictionless shopping experiences, NCR introduces NCR Retail ONE, an innovative commerce hub that will enable retailers to do everything necessary to pioneer and progress to a fully connected digital ecosystem.
NCR Retail ONE embodies the approach to omnichannel retailing recommended above.
NCR Retail ONE is powered by a modern SOA (service oriented architecture) platform comprising a wide set of retail services. It enables easy connection to existing retailer applications such as point-of-sale (POS), self-checkout, eCommerce, and others. Further, it supports rapid deployment of innovative digital capabilities, including digital receipts, digital coupons, remote mobile applications, and more.
NCR Retail ONE features a modern connectivity API layer, helping retailers to:
- Connect all mission critical retail applications to produce a unified system utilizing technical and retail services, as well as a centralized management within the platform
- Gain access to a rich selection of retail services, allowing rapid introduction of future applications to consumers, all of which can be integrated into existing technology environments
NCR Retail ONE paves the way for retailers to evolve to an omnichannel environment, by leveraging their existing systems, rather than committing to burdensome transformation projects and complete system replacement. Its flexible, open connectivity layer makes it easy to link existing applications to any other current and emerging digital applications (and this way, capture new ROI from existing investments), provides retailers with a flexible migration path at their own pace, based on business and budgetary considerations.
For more information about NCR Retail ONE or any related news visit http://www.ncr.com/ .
Source: NCR
Back to the list