How to Prepare Your Retail Store for New Challenges in 2020

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a player in the retail industry than today. With the pessimism of the Global Financial Crisis slowly becoming a blurred memory, consumption has experienced a significant revival. Also, shopping is no longer about just walking into a store, picking some items from the shelves and paying as you leave. It’s an experience that’s closely integrated into the fabric of the consumer’s everyday life.

For this reason, retailers are having to align their entire model with the consumer’s evolving needs. As with any other industry, the start of a new decade is a time to shine a spotlight on what challenges lie ahead for retail and to prepare accordingly. Retailers who recognize and address these challenges proactively will have a leg up over their competition. 

1.       Convenience Challenges

A recent Deloitte study found that more than 2 in 3 US adults considered price, product quality, and variety, and convenience as the most important considerations when shopping. While price and product have always been a big part of retail strategy, the emergence of convenience as a key part of the equation is one that should have retailers everywhere reevaluating their businesses.

At its core, convenience is about providing a human-centered experience that bestows consumers with a sense of ease. There are many ways retail consumers can feel convenience. These include faster delivery, easy access to variety, special access to personalized services and one-stop shopping. Customers are looking for simplicity. They don’t want to be bogged down by the process of buying products but instead want to focus on using the product.

Convenience isn’t something retailers can achieve overnight. There are numerous moving parts involved that touch on virtually every part of the business thus creating convenience challenges throughout. To succeed, retailers must integrate convenience into every part of the business.

Convenience is a moving target. There’s no guarantee that what was convenient today will be convenient tomorrow. Retailers must continuously review their procedures, processes, and systems to remain one step ahead of market expectations.

2.       Workforce Management Challenges

The rate at which a retail store transforms is a function of its business objectives, strategic plans, technology investment and the quality of implementation execution. To address the role and dynamics of the modern retail store, the workforce has to experience change too so as to align with the need for seamless customer experiences and new operational realities. That will imply providing a truly digital workplace in order to increase employee enthusiasm, engagement, knowledge, and efficiency.

Retailers must address the fact that a growing part of their staff will be temporary. They must deploy policies, programs, and technologies that provide their workforce with the training and agility needed to maximize performance. Stores have to accelerate the adoption of employee tools and activities that drive sales and streamline the customer’s shopping experience. They must adopt workforce digital automation not just in the form of smartphones, tablets and wearable devices but also smart merchandise.

These tools should include technology that helps employees spend their time more effectively in-store.

3.       Data-First Challenges

The average retailer handles enormous volumes of data. To keep pace with the elevated expectations of consumers, they must strengthen their backend operations. This begins with establishing a data-friendly infrastructure that supports the entire business, sophisticated analytical tools, meaningful insights and a mechanism for distributing these insights to relevant individuals and teams across the organization.

With this intelligent data-driven approach, retailers would be better positioned to deliver a top notch customer experience. An intelligent model can create rich, customer-focused experiences across all touchpoints. Retailers can transform data into dollars by luring customers through personalized messaging, desirable merchandise, well-equipped support staff, and an ultra-responsive experience.

4.       Intelligent Supply Chain Challenges

The quality of the supply chain has always been critical in retailers’ quest to reduce costs, meet changing consumer needs and streamline communication between the retailer and its supply partners. Today, the supply chain is evolving to become a key cog in customer satisfaction and the delivery of new market innovations.

Supply chain knowledge has often sat between multiple silo-ed teams. Retailers must adopt a holistic view of their entire supply chain—from raw material acquisition to product manufacture to delivery. They have to break down silos and ensure optimal, fast and responsive communication between stores, warehouses, and factories. They must leverage technology to help predict inventory, satisfy consumer expectations and synchronize data amongst all members.

5.       Sustainability Challenges

Sustainability is a positive but formidable challenge for retailers. As consumers become increasingly aware of the environmental footprint of their favorite products and retailers, they will expect a more responsible approach to production. Whereas in the past businesses could afford to ignore these trends, the proportion of eco-conscious consumers is now at a critical mass. Retailers will have to be more creative in how they tackle these challenges and expectations.

That could entail offering recycling opportunities, providing clothing rental services and encouraging/facilitating cleaner manufacturing. Fortunately for retailers, many manufacturers are already heavily invested in making their processes more sustainable. It’s up to retailers to eventually settle on a set of suppliers that adhere to certain minimum standards of durability, recyclability, traceability and material health.

There’s a palpable buzz across the retail industry and an expectation that it will more dramatically transform over the next decade than it has over the last half-century. Millennials now form a critical mass of consumers and Generation Z will be joining the fray in substantial numbers in a couple of years. This new generation of shoppers are not just far more tech-savvy than their predecessors, but also have much more robust demands on the stores they buy from.

Whether you are an established retailer or are contemplating starting one in 2020, recognizing and aligning your business with these trends will increase your chances of long-term success.

Adam Ross, General Manager of AMERICAS at Deputy

Adam Ross spearheads the Americas division for Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets and communication. Previously a securities lawyer, Adam manages scaling Deputy's software for users in over 200,000 workplaces around the world. A seasoned leader in the technology space, Adam previously directed strategic partnerships, product development, and growth across global brands such as Apple, Box, NASDAQ and Bloomberg.