Customer-centricity in the Retail Industry: Overview

Accenture is helping leading retailers transform their businesses around the customer, thereby driving high performance.

To overcome the challenges they face, retailers are realigning their business models around the customer. This might seem to be stating the obvious, but, in fact, traditional retail business models tend to be focused on optimizing the supply chain and constantly improving the retail space. Meanwhile, the demand side of the equation remains largely untapped by retailers.

Accenture research shows that high performance in retail entails putting the customer at the center of the business, articulating strategic intent based on analysis of customer needs and then building the key operational capabilities in alignment with the strategy. However, in a saturated market, consumers have become more demanding. Consumers also no longer fall into neat segments: today's hybrid consumers display different types of behavior depending on the type of goods being sourced.

For example, Consumer A might be a purchaser of premium clothing labels but a discount food shopper, and so on. For retailers, the challenges are obvious: more segments, more analysis and more narrowly customized offerings.

Accenture has the capabilities to help retailers become customer-centric in a phased approach. Our experience in working with some of the world's leading retailers helps to minimize the costs—and risks—of doing so.

Related Research and Insight

To learn more about how Accenture helps retailers transform their businesses to attain high performance, visit Reaching for High Performance in Retailing.

Accenture has the experience, insight and acumen to help retailers become customer-centric as part of a drive to achieve high performance. For companies wishing to transform, structuring themselves around the customer, Accenture has a unique mix of capabilities that make us the perfect partner:

• Deep industry insight and experience: We have been helping retailers around the world understand how to realign around their customers for a number of years. Our customer relationship methodologies ensure a customer-centric transformation will be systematic and follow proven practice for reduced risk.
• Business acumen: As the world's largest management consultancy, with a vast pool of business talent, nobody else can better help retailers turn customer insight into business advantage. We can also help retailers measure the results of their actions, instilling a culture of continuous improvement.
• Technological excellence: Creating a customer-centric organization effectively means developing the ability to harvest and then analyze customer data. It also means being able to deliver appropriately on that analysis. Both these elements require a flexible, adaptive information technology architecture and infrastructure. From innovation to what works, nobody understands how to use technology to increase business advantage better than Accenture—and we have the global capability to manage technology cost-effectively at higher service levels.

Accenture is committed to partnering with you in your journey toward high performance, helping your company achieve its strategic goals in the most effective manner possible.

Client Successes

Best Buy's customers are at the heart of a new strategy, called "customer centricity," which is the giant retailer's $50 million gamble that it can maintain its market-leading position by providing more and better service and high-end products. To learn more visit Best Buy: Customer Centricity.

Accenture can help retailers systematically improve their ability to gain customer insight, take appropriate actions and then consciously measure results. Services can be offered individually or as part of a phased transformation to achieve high performance:

• Understanding customers better: consumer analytics; consumer trends; consumer segmentation.
• Linking customer behavior to business process and design: purchase behavior; demographic analytics; market positioning; store layout; space design.
• Using customer insight to fine-tune the retail business model: pricing; advertising and promotion; assortments; brand positioning.