Retail enterprises are adopting unified integration solution to address customer and sales issues

The shopping strategy and behaviour changes of customers are turning more critical and unpredictable. At certain times, the retail sales hub falls under a deep pit where the company cannot manage and fulfill customers’ needs. Henceforth, retail enterprises are adopting a unified integration solution to address the issue.

The retail business is currently facing two pivotal challenges that need immediate attention. One is the sudden spike of online retail transactions and customer demand for various products, and the other is digital transformation. To envisage the crisis, retail enterprises should equip themselves with robust processing systems to meet the demand of growing transactional data. Remarkably, the road to digital transformation is paved with integration and unity. Whether you need to streamline operations, automate business-to-customer, or transfer data to data lakes/warehouses, integration plays an indispensable role. Advanced integration technologies offer a single-pane-of-glass view to all authorized users. Users can view all the information they need and see it all in one place, thus ensuring visibility and centralised access. Unified integration solution also takes the omnichannel experience much further by taking all the disconnected IT systems and replacing them with a single, centralised platform. Gartner has reported that more than 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience in the future. Unified integration systems open the door to such features.

Five reasons why the retail industry needs to adapt unified integration solutions

No more rogue, inaccurate data

Data is very important in consumer-based business systems. However, data that is not clean or unstructured is nearly useless. By leveraging such useless data to conduct customer analysis will lead the retail enterprise to further crisis. Fortunately, a unified integration solution unifies information and homogenizes data into a unified format and cleans them for analysis. This unification ensures that all the data extracted are meaningful and gives accurate strategic decision-making insights.

Omnichannel vs. Unified Commerce

An omnichannel links data from different digital and physical channels to make the customer experience seamless. But a unified integration solution differs from omnichannel by removing the possibility of leaving out a section of data. Because omnichannel is often held together with manual processes and complex integrations, the strategy can create data silos, hinder efficiency, and grow quite expensive. Meanwhile, a unified integration solution provides businesses with a single source of truth to help effectively and seamlessly.

More delivery options give a better shopping experience

Customizing the shopping experience and enhancing shopping options are the two important goals of retail enterprises. Unified integration solutions give rise to delivery options. By availing the unified integration solution, businesses open doors to shopping online and collecting in-store, buying and collecting in stores, returning in-store or other shopping possibilities. Besides, it is easy to support cross-channel shopper journeys by centralizing the payment methods.

Lower cost, improved scalability

Whether the retail enterprise is small or large, the need for an integrated source is similar. A unified integration solution has the ability to start at a size and price that works for a small business, and when the revenue grows, you can scale the service up as needed. With advanced options to pay for traffic or data instead of a set rate, there is plenty of flexibility in this type of integrated solution. Customized packages also allow users to choose the exact capabilities that work for you and your business.

Legacy system

Many retail enterprises are stuck in a legacy system where they still follow traditional means of data collection. The enterprise operation for these old school retail businesses is tough as they are lost in the tragedy of time, data storage, physical store POS and backend systems. This flags an alarm that the enterprise needs a unified integration solution to shield against the emerging challenges.