Retailer Tech Spend - Transformation

Retailer Tech Spend - Did you know?

Focussed Tech Spend – The retail tech elite are focussed & heavily investing.

Get ready for the next wave of evolving tech – with some increasing spending by 50% to lead the charge.

• First up – Innovation leads the list more than 1/3 of the world’s largest digital retailers are declaring they have a very high tolerance for risk when investing in new tech innovations.
• The biggest focus for that innovation is personalisation and digital payment technologies
• Automation – Automate everything! from supply chain and data analysis to cutting-edge digital payments and customer service. It all needs to be automated – because frankly, it’s the only way.
• Friction-Free Journeys – this is the focus for M&S, The Very Group, and Pets At Home who are evolving their current technologies to focus on the smoothest customer journey possible. We will share more on what they are doing for ‘Friction Free’ in one of our next blogs.

Investing in Innovation seems to be mostly for the brave

Despite the lead we have from those who are doing it best, most retailers do act with more caution and 36% of staff feel their company's tolerance to investing in innovation is very high with 46% at simply ‘high’.

Yet the key to success in retail does lie with a fast pace, of first defining and then acting on the most customer-facing behaviours possible. For this pace of change innovation and upscaling current processes and tech honestly is the cost of growth.

But failing big and brave moves into innovation, as per our list above, there is some direction we can give that will ensure quick gains. Fine-tune what you have with your existing stack with some of the below:

Top three CUSTOMER FACING tech investment priorities:

1. Personalisation through a customised website/experience and app content, and loyalty schemes
2. Digital payments with a particular focus on digital wallets
3. Customer service including chatbots that free up employees to deal with complex queries

Top three BACK-END tech investment priorities:

1. Data management and performance analysis with a large focus on page speed
2. Security including encryption and payment authentication to protect against fraud
3. Stock control and optimisation alongside demand forecasting

These are the hot topics for our clients with automation and page speed two of the big ones.

Chaos engineering is also on the increase to better protect our retailers against risk. With the worry retailers have all their eggs in one basket, we are ensuring end-to-end confidence, so our next prediction for tech is all about Chaos – more to come.

Sources: Checkout.com, Retail Week, Mckinsey, Google