Smart Retail - Before Convincing, Start Connecting

Content:

In last 5 years Indian customers’ experience with purchasing in a retail environment has undergone a massive change. But the first question strikes on my mind while thinking about retail management is “What is the responsible factor behind the change? “

Massive e-commerce boom of course! It is equally encouraging for e-commerce companies to receive such huge response. While, on one hand, e-commerce retailing has started to change the notion of shopping in the country, on the other hand, the traditional brick-and-mortar stores are struggling hard against the rioting success of online shopping.

How to bridge the gap between online and offline retail market?

To bridge the gap between the  online and offline retail market we need to design the customer centric model in which all efforts will be made to provide ease to the customers while shopping from both online and offline market.

In order to make the procedure smart we need to take care of following aspects so that our model should work efficiently as per customer’s ease of shopping. 

• Best time for them to shop.
• Types of offers that influence customers’ decision making process.
• Demography.
• Proffered Product with preferred price range.
• Kind of content they find most interactive.
• Customer’s responsiveness to promotional campaigns.
• What kind of campaign is suitable for which class of customers?
• Time when like-minded shoppers prefer visiting the store.

Connecting the Unconnected

Technological advancement and increasing numbers of tech savvy customers hold both curse and blessing for brick-and-mortar retailers. If they resolutely indulge in making technological advancement work for them, then they will have attention of the large tech savvy customer base. Failure to do so would only quicken their defeat against online competitors.

Customer Centric approach

One-stop solution for the retailer to overcome and understand customers’ needs which include following techniques that will create a win-win situation for retailer and the customer.

1.     Customize the Shopping Experience

“Always Listen – What your customers are saying?” At a time when it’s easy to have a two-way dialogue with your customers, it’s important to truly listen. When listening to your customers, take into account what changes your organization should make from this feedback, and then follow through. Your customers are the lifeblood of your organization, and not dealing with the reasonable requests could cause backlash.

2.     Achieving Shop-ability

 To ensure that your store is shop-able, your store, staff and assortment needs to team up impeccably. Then, retailers must know how to improve their store. This is when new, advanced technologies and retail analytics will help you to a considerable extent. Analytics would give you a better insight as to how your shoppers response or behave when choosing products from the shelves. This means you will able to identify precisely what to improve on.  

3.     Improved Customer Service

Customer service is also changing with the lapse of time. Today, customer service executives have the required data essential to answer customer queries and resolve their issues. All of this information is available at their fingertips! This has two distinct benefits such as

• Customer service representatives can multitask.
• Resolving problems much faster than expected.

4.     What Purpose is served

‘Smart Retail – Smart India ‘The purpose of smart retail is to provide instant accessibility to the customer so that it would be convenient for them to buy any product online or offline. Eventually the customer will save time and will prove to be the efficient way which in turn serve our purpose of doing the thing in the smartest way i.e. smart retail and smart India.

Conclusion:

Retail management in an efficient manner will play an important role as smart retailing in Indian market will serve as the time consuming, transparent and reliable technique or practice. 

About Author:

 Himanshu Suryavanshi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: 

himanshu.suryavanshi@spluspl.com

MoSCoW: Requirements Prioritization Technique

The MoSCoW prioritization is a technique used in business analysis and project management, commonly known as MoSCoW analysis. MoSCoW is a legitimate technique to categorize features (or user stories) into precedence order – a technique to aid teams swiftly comprehend the customer’s view of what is vital for launch and what is not.

Once the requirements get frozen, business analyst are required to rank those requirements. MoSCow Prioritization plays a significant role in Agile Project Management. In case of Agile projects, it is vital to fathom the importance of prioritization as time is fixed, so prioritization is applied to requirements, tasks, products, user cases, etc.

Its name is derived from the first letters of each of the four respective priorities.

MoSCoW stands for:

• Must have (or Minimum Usable Subset)
• Should have
• Could have
• Won’t have (but Would like in future)
               

 ‘Must Haves ‘– these are the features that must be incorporated prior to the product launch.  It is essential to have transparency on this before the project kicks-in as this is the minimum scope for the product to be useful. These need to be fulfilled for achieving the primary objective of project.

‘Should Haves ‘- these are the features which are not critical to be launched, but are considered to be vital and have immense significance to the user. These requirements are extremely desirable but have less priority than Must requirements.

‘Could Haves ‘- these are the features that are nice to have and might be effectively incorporated without incurring over-burdening effort or cost. Basically a few easily fulfilled Could requirements in a delivery can intensify customer satisfaction for a little development cost, but these features will be immediately removed from scope if the project’s timelines are at risk.

‘Won’t Haves ‘– these are the features that have been demanded but are overtly excluded from scope for the current release, and may be encompassed in a forthcoming phase of development.

This practice is suitable in business development and when the business analyst is sure about business needs. Prioritization is basically carried out by all stakeholders i.e. the project sponsor, the project owner, and the Analysts. When we gather the requirements both functional as well as non-functional requirements are considered but the most essential aspect is to keep in mind to prioritize the non-functional requirements independently as the abstraction level of these non-functional requirements is different from that of the functional requirements.

Benefits of MoSCoW technique for Business Analysts

• Helps in determining the project scope
• Helps to plan the project deliverables
• Helps in managing requirements and resources
• Helps to prioritize requirements and provide the essential rank
• Helps to save time

    Conclusion:

MoSCoW technique plays a significant role in the entire project life cycle as when requirements have been prioritized they can be compared against the other planning aspects of project, such as project scope, quality, timescale and resources.

About Author:

Gurpreet kaur Gaga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, She actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: gurpreetkaur.gaga@spluspl.com

Service Strategy

Service Strategy is a process for achieving the required objectives of the application support team with minimum risk. It helps organization in planning to achieve the defined objective of planned IT services and IT service management (ITSM) practices with manageable cost and risks associated with initiating any new services.

Organizations need to perform below steps to make a strategy:

• Define the value for the planned IT services in the market
• Define the expectations for providing service to the customers
• Identify, prioritize and select opportunities
• Define the policies, guidelines, and processes that will be used to manage the IT services

The following four processes are described within Service Strategy:

STRATEGY GENERATION

This process is used to define the strategy to achieve the defined objective of IT services and IT Service Management which may be the business objectives. Business team needs to understand the objective of the customer and plans accordingly to gets it executed from the application support team.

Below factors are considered for strategy generation:

• Activities performed by the support team
• Expectations of the customer

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

Financial management defines the value of a service, its essential assets and sets an operational budget for the service. In Financial management systems, business team keeps eyes on income, expenses, and assets with the objectives of maximizing profits and ensuring sustainability. 

Below activities are performed in financial management:

• Check the outcome from service and cost projections associated with the application support team
• Prepare document to keep a track of investment and charge the customer for services being provided

SERVICE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

In the Service Portfolio Management, the service provider is managing the group of services being delivered. It is a method representing services to support business change, differentiating in terms of the business value.

Below activities are performed for Service Portfolio Management:

• Analyze highly service value according to demand and supply
• Define collection of services which will create business value
• Define the critical success factor, value to be added by the application support team

DEMAND MANAGEMENT

Service providers understand market trend for the service and make a plan to meet demand. Service providers need to check the capacity for providing demanded service in market to avoid:

• Compromise on service quality due to insufficient capacity
• Excess capacity which may result in cost without value

Below activities are performed for Demand Management:

• Define resources that will be in application support team
• Define the process of work such as how user will receive work, communication, terms of service level agreement
• Define priority of work in peak period to avoid impact on service levels or needs to define the alternative way to provide service in peak duration

Conclusion:

Service strategy is important to achieve the goal of accomplishing set objective for application support.

About Author:

Deepak Borole is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. he can be contacted at: 

deepak.borole@spluspl.com