Retail: Services Overview

As the world’s most consumer facing industry, retail is becoming more global and more complex every day. To succeed in this intensely competitive industry, retailers need to stay focused, flexible and maintain market relevance by continuing to innovate and connect with customers.

In order to stay ahead of the curve, retailers must be agile and adapt quickly to the diverse array of new technologies as consumers use more channels interchangeably to discover, self-educate, price-compare and purchase products and services. To truly connect in this new "omni-channel" shopping environment, retailers need to make and maintain a digital relationship with their customers—who are more informed and empowered by technology than ever before.

But in today’s digital marketplace, retailers also face volatility on multiple fronts from yo-yoing consumer sentiment, inflation and deflation pressures, and additional challenges associated with increasingly more global operations. Legacy retailers can no longer succeed in this competitive landscape without embracing and adapting to change.

Agile new competitors continue to reinvent marketing—tailoring products and services to individuals—and introducing nuanced models of operation as they adjust their supply chains to meet heightened expectations. These formidable entrants are unencumbered by physical stores and forcing old standbys to switch up their model or be left in the dust. 

With more channels than ever before, your customer is in the driver’s seat with unlimited access: anytime, anywhere. Does your business have what it takes to meet the new urgency for real time relevance, innovative customer experiences, and shortened supply chains? Are you ready to make it happen? Find out how Accenture can help.

Accenture’s global retail group helps clients achieve high performance by providing a broad range of services and solutions—across all industry sectors, spanning the entire retail value chain—from large-scale business and technology transformation to post-merger integration. Accenture’s world-class solutions help clients around the globe execute their business strategies with confidence and gain competitive advantage through deep industry experience, unsurpassed expertise, and extensive research on the world’s most successful retailers.

To meet the challenges and demands of the ever-changing ‘me-tail’ landscape, Accenture has enhanced core capabilities that drive differentiation for retailers in the global marketplace in three key growth areas: management consulting, technology and outsourcing.

• Customer Infused Retailing: Our Customer Infused Retailing offering puts the customer at the heart of the business—rebuilding it around the customer in ways never previously possible. We have unique capabilities to help retailers do this using state-of-the-art data analytics to segment and profile customers, and by developing fact-based merchandising strategies that go well beyond traditional micro-marketing.

• Integrated Channels to Customers: Our Integrated Channels to Customers offering ensures that our clients are not just retailers with a website or a Facebook page—but truly multichannel, always-on, holding connected conversations with customers to maximize two-way value and loyalty. This offering provides retailers with an integrated vision for marketing, selling, support, research, and social networking through a variety of channels and technologies.

• Speed to Customer: Our Speed to Customer offering is much more than just fast forecasting, replenishment and efficient supply chain. This offering takes great ideas from other industries and innovates to integrate them into retail. Speed to Customer is all about identifying new products that customers want, bringing them to market—fast—and at the right price. Think "fast fashion" applied across retailing.

• Dynamic Store Solutions: Our Dynamic Store Solutions offering gives a bird’s-eye view of "the Cloud"—but not merely applying cloud computing as a product or technology, but making the entire store network as agile and flexible as the cloud in all its forms. This offering is a mash-up of smart staffing models, cloud computing and GIS enabled analytics that create agility at relatively low cost—and enable "pop-up" retailing and rapid re-formatting.

• Outsourcing: Our Outsourcing capabilities are core to our retail service line, providing retailers with the tools they need to develop an end-to-end outsourcing strategy, implementation and delivery approach—from design through execution and management of a solution. Working with Accenture as a trusted outsourcing partner, retailers have access to the knowledge and ideas they need to achieve high performance in the upturn—ranging from delivering cost saving to driving revenues and innovation.

• Technology: Our Technology capabilities are core to our retail service line, providing retailers with services, solutions and software to enable successful strategy, implementation and delivery of the latest retail technologies. From analytics, to mobility, cloud/SaaS, to next-generation ERP and the "best of breed" apps, Accenture will help you stay ahead of the curve to achieve high performance.