The retail industry is under pressure right now. The higher costs of the eCommerce supply chain and the growing demands of suppliers and raw material inflations to higher labor costs make it tough to maintain margins. Subsequently, the rising customer expectations and a rise in the digital disruptors further make it impossible for retailers to survive.
While retailers are struggling to adapt as of now, the need for automation is increasing. Why? It allows them to address the margin strains and growing customer demands. This article will give you some insights as to why automation is the need of the hour.
You will fall behind if you ignore automation.
Amazon has already been in the headlines for its innovative concepts like Go retail. By doing so, they can deliver benefits to additional traffic by reducing wait times. Further, the same technology will allow them to optimize assortments and personalize promotions. But Amazon is not alone. The disruption and pandemic are making it impossible for you to do everything on your own manually. For instance, inventory management automation is becoming necessary to increase personalization and enhance customer and employer experience.
Automation isn’t only about operations
When it comes to the future of work in retail, everyone focuses on the use cases of automation in stores only. But it can impact merchandising and supply chain as well. But more importantly, it will help you to reduce overall costs. More automation means you have less work to do by hand. Hence, lesser need for human capital. For instance, a survey found that one can reduce labor costs by 80% by using automation technology.
The best part is it helps you with warehouse space optimization as well. So, you can shelve the products in less space compared to before.
Efficiency is the key to running successful businesses today.
If you think delayed orders will work even today, you are highly mistaken. Efficiency and time management is the key to running a successful retail business today. And automation helps you achieve just that.
It helps you maintain business operations and reduce the time between tasks. Since there is no human involved to authorize the following steps, one can easily keep things moving. Further, it is also limiting the number of tasks or eliminates unnecessary steps to complete a workflow.
Improves customer satisfaction and drives sales
Everything is customer-centric now. If you can engage your customers with your brand, it won’t drive your sales at all. Surprisingly, more than 77% of customers say if the brand values their time, it will always result in a positive experience.
Clearly, retail automation can help you keep your customers interested in your current and future endeavors. And this will enable you to drive more sales.
Wrapping Up
Whether you run a store, distribution warehouses, or other operations, automation will help retailers adjust to the changes in customer traffic and buying patterns. The pandemic is further accelerating the pressure and trends to move away from tedious manual tasks.
So, if you want to excel in this new era of technology, automation is your go-to solution for all your retail problems.
