How collaboration will feature in the future of digital supermarkets

Increasing collaboration

Many retailers have turned to software or hardware providers to bridge this gap. Some observers believe the future will see not only collaboration between retailers and service providers, but also between retailers to give customers more reasons to visit their stores.

At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show 2016, Steven Lowy, co-CEO of Westfield Corporation, said retailers would have to collaborate in the future to create experienced-focused stores and to pool customer data to offer the optimum shopping experience.

Maarten Bais, EMEA vice-president and general manager at Elo, says: “Without collaborations of any kind, the industry will become static, so it is important for retailers, brands and technology providers to embrace each other to fully understand the consumer – whether it’s through sharing data, technology software or hardware, or simply sharing ideas and experiences.”

This is also happening with in-store technology, because although supermarkets and other retailers have tech departments, such resources are sometimes easier to source from third parties.

As demonstrated by Accenture and the Co-op’s “supermarket of the future” at Expo Milano, shopping experiences are expected to become more interactive and data-driven. Bais expects supermarkets and stores to become showroom-type “destinations” where customers will be drawn into an interactive experience that mixes online with offline.

“The Ocado and Morrisons partnership is an example of where the industry is headed,” he says, “and we are sure to see more collaboration like this between retailers and technology providers, especially as the retailers themselves start to transform their bricks-and-mortar stores into fully functioning and interactive ‘destinations’ rather than a static, transactional location.”

Reasons for collaborating

Many retailers are using partnerships and collaboration to deliver the backend capabilities for a good customer service, such as automation for warehouse fulfilment and supply chain management.

Also, as customers become more omni-channel, it is difficult to determine whether they will shop online or in-store without gaining a unified customer view with help from analytics software.

Charlotte Briscall, head of digital experience at Sainsbury’s, says her team has been able to implement digital technologies despite the large legacy systems the retailer had in place before the omni-channel environment began to grow.

For supermarkets, this legacy can often mean pairing up with third-party providers to avoid developing silos and making their digital capabilities too complex.

Lucile Ripa, insight manager at Aquila Insight, says: “Retailers will slowly start to see the potential of this, but are not yet prepared enough to take on this massive digital challenge. They need new collaborations that are mutually beneficial and third-party expertise and support to help them deal with new tools, big data and new customer models.”

As retailers begin to compete with big pure-play online retailers such as Amazon, data is becoming increasingly important to gain customers insights, but many retailers and supermarkets cannot handle this data by themselves.

Ripa adds: “Traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers have a blind spot when it comes to digital data, and especially linking digital to in-store data. They desperately need third-party guidance on how to store and use their data better.”