Articles

RSS

By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

Last week's 101st NRF BIG Show marked an important milestone in the maturation of a previously enigmatic concept. The more than 40 meetings I had with solutions providers peddling technologies for every facet of retail operations almost ubiquitously demonstrated that customer centricity has gone from a coveted, yet hypothetical ideal to a concrete, "let me show you how this works" reality.

At this year's show, the tired multi-channel mantra of the past was nowhere to be heard. Channel-specific solutions providers — if there were any exhibiting — were the black sheep of the more than 400 exhibitors in attendance. No one was talking up channel- or medium-specific stovepipes of technology. No one sought to convince attendees that their wares could make a better e-commerce customer, increase an in-store basket size, improve call center operations, or better match channel-specific inventory availability to the demands of a specific "type" of shopper. Instead, virtually every exhibitor was intent on demonstrating the role their solutions played in doing all of that, and those demonstrations were anything but hypothetical.

What we saw was the realization of customer centricity — the concrete illustration of a convergence of technologies that really do allow retailers to engage and transact with consumers consistently across any medium, unencumbered by channel-specific systems and disparate silos of data. And despite the braggadocio of any of them, we saw that no single vendor has a corner on the technologies or intellectual strategies to getting there. This is at once exciting and terrifying for the retail tech solutions provider community; exciting because access to channel unifying software applications and mobile technology has reached unprecedented ubiquity, terrifying because a lot of it all looks the same.

For vendors, I expect this to be a year marked by strategic and perhaps surprising acquisitions that aren't so much driven by market share greed as they are driven by solution stack greed. Well-heeled companies will look at the competitive landscape, determine what they lack and need to position themselves as "the only game in town," and by NRF 2013 we'll see fewer tech companies pushing even more comprehensive omnichannel solutions.

For retailers, this is the time for real channel convergence. From what we saw at the show last week, there's little in the way of excuse. It's no longer just about enabling cross-channel visibility of inventory, promotions, pricing, and CRM. This year, retail is about facilitating true cross-channel fluidity of consumer transactions as well.

Mobile device proliferation among store associates and — perhaps more importantly — among consumers has become the galvanizing force of channel convergence. We'll take a comprehensive look at how mobile is "changing retail's channels" in a special feature to be published in the March issue of Integrated Solutions For Retailers.