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The Relevant Store in the Digital Age: Benchmark 2013
May 8, 2013
As stores try to find their way in a brand new digital world, we asked retailers to candidly share their experiences. Key Findings Retail Winners see stores helping to compete with the online experience and are less likely to think future growth will only come from digital channels. They expect they can reverse the erosion [...]
Retail Payments: When the Future Becomes Now
March 6, 2013
In three years’ time, retailers expect mobile and digital payments to catapult from almost nothing to a major piece of their payments environment. But they aren’t looking to their traditional payment partners to lead them through this maze of payments change — they expect consumer-focused technology companies to take charge. Why would retailers look in this [...]
The Impact of Mobile in Retail
January 10, 2013
While consumers adopt mobile technologies at a breakneck pace, retailers tell us that mobile’s primary ability is to enhance the overall value of the brand. This is a new development for 2012, and is highly encouraging news. What is problematic, however, is that much of what retailers share in the following pages of this report [...]
Retail Business Intelligence: A Work in Progress
October 11, 2012
The rapid shifts in consumer behavior and the proliferation of new channels that are forcing retailers to cope with new data sources, new ways of looking at analytics and new analytics capabilities — combined with new form factors like tablets and smart phones — are upending the well-established discipline of Business Intelligence in retail. The report is [...]
The 21st Century Store Manager
November 15, 2011
Most retail store managers today are in a difficult position. Consumers have adopted mobile technologies at a very rapid pace. Store managers are now outnumbered and outgunned by consumers who are better-equipped to solve their own problems and make their own purchase-related decisions, inside or outside the store. Without an empowered store manager the store [...]
Pandora’s Box? The Impact of New Technologies on Retail IT
December 1, 2010
In this year’s IT study (the 3rd in a series), RSR set out to uncover retailers’ attitudes about how new consumer-facing technologies such as “smart” mobile phones, social media and the web channel are affecting application portfolio and IT infrastructural decisions. We have found in the past that the “change cycle” in business is faster [...]
The Democratization of Business Intelligence: How Retailers Sense and Respond Across the Enterprise
October 1, 2010
Reducing lag time to action has become Retail’s Holy Grail. Customer tastes, needs and wants change frequently, and social networks have created a transparent world where price has been replaced by value-to-the-customer as a key sales driver. Based on our research findings, RSR believes that consumer demand for new outcomes must be supported by true real-time Business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The goal [...]
Enterprise Workforce Management: Redefining the Boundaries of Customer-Centric Retailing
March 1, 2010
Consumers’ demands of retailers have not abated in spite of economic conditions: more channels, more seamless experiences across channels, and a significant shift towards online as the starting point for more shopping trips have put new pressures on where retailers deploy their labor, and how to make the best use of the labor hours they [...]
Building Trust and Growing the Brand: The Role of Privacy and Security in Retail 2010
February 15, 2010
Retailers need customer data to respond more quickly to changes in demand patterns, to reduce out-of-stocks, to match product offerings with customers who want to buy them, and to improve their service to customers. But customer-specific information can go well beyond transactional sales data. Increasingly, retailers are also exploring the potential benefits of consumer sentiment captured [...]
Using Business Intelligence to help Control Outcomes in an Uncontrollable World
November 1, 2009
Today’s retailers face external and internal challenges including knowledgeable customers, longer supply chains, shrinking demand cycles and a constrained economy. RSR believes these challenges cannot be proactively addressed if business operators don’t have accurate, actionable information available when and where it’s needed. A majority of Retailers Winners agree. They clearly see real-time Business Intelligence (BI) as [...]