Do You Think Microsoft Can Change The Retail Business?

When we think of Microsoft, the first thing that comes to our mind is Windows and Office 365. Now Microsoft is changing the way we shop and giving us the best customer service experience, sounds interesting right?

Microsoft and partner solutions enable you to combine the best of digital and in-store solutions to deliver personal, seamless, and differentiated customer experiences. Empower your people to deliver maximum business impact. Optimize operations by using sensors, machine learning and advanced analytics to understand, predict, and better serve customers. Transform your business, create new revenue streams and business models through an intelligent, modern platform that enables you to embrace the use of massive data streams to create relevant insights and competitive advantage.

Microsoft’s Approach

Microsoft solutions for retail business enable retailers to deliver personal, seamless and differentiated customer experiences by empowering people, enabling digital transformation and capturing data-based insights to drive growth.

• Engage your customers
• Empower your employees
• Optimize your operations
• Transform your products

Cloud solution

Your business can get ahead in the race by embracing change and moving some of your IT infrastructure onto the cloud. By embracing the cloud, your business can provide new, agile and secure opportunities for your company and your customers– all whilst giving your business security, flexibility and agility. Here’s how moving your infrastructure to the cloud can help you protect your customers, as well as offer your business the opportunity to grow.

How to secure customers

Customers are the heart of a business. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you don’t lose them to security breaches.

By moving to the cloud, your business can become more secure. There are few advantages for opting cloud computing

• Cloud provider can implement identity management solutions that allows to access data such as customer transaction and bank details.
• Take benefit from security across all your integrated apps and devices.
• Behavioral analytics that detect suspicious user behavior, both on premises and in the cloud.

More customer insights mean more data 

Retailers manage huge volumes of data every day, from sensitive transaction data and customer details to inventory and staff records. Without the right platform and tools, your business will not have the leg-room to scale operations and services alongside your growth.

Dedicated servers, whether on-premises or off-premises, can be too costly to purchase and scale. Whilst they are fit for some of your secure business operations, they don’t offer you the agility and flexibility that the cloud can. This flexibility can allow you to manage large amounts of data, as well as harness it to seek better customer insights. The more your business grows, the more customer information you can analyze and use for better technologies and services.

• Gain access: Cloud Based Storage can grant access to gain all important customer and business insights. It’s not just about storing important information – the cloud can help you use it, too.
• Choose where you want to store data: By combing cloud and storage you select your storage destination.

With the help of the cloud your business can become flexible and agile. This will give you the ability to implement new IT applications and stay at the cutting edge while delivering services that the business needs in a fast and responsive way. Microsoft indeed is the best cloud storage provider.

Protect your business

While data security and privacy are vital to any business, retailers and brands face enormous pressures and challenges with targeted cyber-crime, complex supply chains, increasing compliance obligations, and constant staff turnover. That’s why the cloud provider and technology they choose is so important.

Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency and regulatory compliance. The broad suite of cloud products and services are all built from the ground up to address the most rigorous security and privacy demands of our customers.

Hybrid cloud 

A consistent hybrid approach to the cloud is something retailers and consumer brands want but haven’t always been able to find with a cloud provider. We want to give our customers the choice and flexibility that works best for their business.

What can Hybrid cloud do for a retail business?

For retailers with large store or on-premises technology investments, a hybrid approach offers a compelling path to the cloud and a way to optimize their existing investments, keep costs down, and enable a truly connected enterprise—one that will open doors to delivering greater consistency and personalization in the shopping experience, and the speed and agility to meet customer demands.

Automate and Optimization

A lot of work goes into identifying which franchise is visited, with what frequency and what must be done there. Imagine being empowered by software that considers multiple factors beyond geography to automatically predict the best time to visit a shop and improve overall routing efficiency.

If a shop usually has a slump every July, recently hired a new manager or has a new promotion coming up the software will adjust routing accordingly to optimize employee time. Machine Learning technology also generates tailored to-do lists for shop visits that are based on what a shop need.

Retailers and brands are embracing digital transformation to thrive in today’s competitive environment.