Traditional supermarkets are a thing of the past, and the days of bricks-and-mortar, 9 to 5 stores are long gone. Today, leading supermarkets are finding themselves having to compete not just with their traditional local rivals, but also a wealth of big-name online retail websites that have created a new culture of ‘convenience shopping’. To ensure that they are not left behind, supermarket chains are finding themselves diversifying to reach out to wider audiences, and relying on being able to offer a combination of the traditional supermarket experience and the convenience of online shopping in order to achieve success.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this is the fact that we all live in an increasingly digital world where consumers have learned to interact with various different devices. As a result, we also expect comprehensive information to be available on multiple channels. The world of retail also has grown to be more global than ever and local or national retailers find themselves competing with huge online retailers such as Amazon. The modern, always-on mentality and 24/7 availability of goods and services have made the modern retail market faster and competitive. Even though information at the tap of a button does not sound new anymore, many retailers and supermarkets still struggle with the challenges of an omni-channel strategy. Not only are customers expecting a seamless brand image across all channels, also data that can be updated regularly and simultaneously across different devices. More and more data is being collected from an increasing number of sources and real-time interaction adds another layer of complexity to the big data whirlwind we have to deal with at the moment.
For this reason, many retailers are quick to adopt the latest trends in customer engagement only to find themselves facing the challenges of how to actually capture, manage and evaluate the huge amounts of data they collect. Using several devices also means using several back ends and several sources of information. In order to ensure a seamless brand image several channels need to be updated with real time data – in short, it means that a lot of information needs to be processed quickly without interfering with performance. Nothing will terminate an online shopping trip quicker than a frozen or slow website or app. However, many companies find that their legacy infrastructures are unable to deal with these requirements.
In order to be successful in this brave new world of retail, traditional brands are increasingly deciding to rely on the flexibility, speed and scalability of a database solution that is able to process both structured and unstructured data efficiently, a NoSQL database. Indeed, one of Europe’s largest supermarkets recently made the decision to switch to a non-relational database to harness and evaluate the data they collected. By doing so, they were able to access key information more quickly to build applications that leverage data around product, pricing and order history.
Prior to this, developers would have had to retrieve customer, pricing and product data from a multitude of disparate systems, having to access the data for every new application they build separately. The new service architecture however enables the supermarket to access all the data from a single data repository, thus providing its application developers faster and better technology.
This is just one example of many but the benefit for retailers is clear: With the right technology and capabilities, organisations are in the position to combine data from various sources and tailor their offerings, products and prices, advertisements and other business strategies based on previous shopping and browsing behaviour.
Even though retailers are entering a brave new world of big data and analytics, the bottom line remains the same: the customer must always come first. Nowadays, businesses are able to collect more information than ever about their target audience and the opportunities to turn this information into valuable business advice are endless. What makes the all-important difference and leads, in an ever-connected world, to a true competitive advantage is how quickly and flexibly companies are able to capture, manage and evaluate the data to turn it into a bespoke offering for their clients.
By David Maitland, General Manager, EMEA at Couchbase
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