30 Sep 2021
The retail market is always developing, and players in this competitive industry have to face various new obstacles. Especially, due to the coronavirus pandemic, an increasing number of retailers have shuttered their doors. In this article, let’s take a look at some common challenges that retailers often face and how to overcome them.
Adapt to ever-changing customer expectations
Customer expectations are always evolving, even faster than what you could imagine. So retailers have to keep up with the seasons and trends to quickly fit their products and services with customers’ needs and preferences. Besides, additional factors such as economic conditions, advertisements, and retail competition also exert significant influence on customers’ demand. As a result, companies should pay attention to these aspects to ensure that their forecast is accurate.
Maintain customer loyalty
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. Indeed, convincing a customer to buy your product is difficult but keeping them coming back is much harder, especially in this technological era when customers have multiple choices at their fingertips. In fact, traditional customer retention programs such as special offers and promotions are still useful. However, the best practice for an excellent customer experience is personalization.
Being one of the vital modules in ERP software, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a useful solution that helps companies keep up to date with each and every customer’s information in real-time. This solution will help companies to quickly fulfill their customers’ requirements, thereby bringing a better experience. As a result, customers will stay loyal for longer.
Retain employees
Being one of the industries with the highest employee turnover rate (US Bureau Of Labor Statistic), retailers are facing the challenge of retaining their staff. Keeping a core of long-term employees helps companies save time and costs of hiring and training new employees. To cope with this problem, retailers can build professional development programs for enhancing their employees’ skills. For instance, developing a mentorship program, adopting a learning management system, or providing fresh training programs on a regular basis could be good options to improve employee engagement & retention.
HR Management is a great solution that can help employees improve their proficiency. It enables companies to deliver the right training & courses to the proper group of employees according to their employment type, designation.
Deal with digital disruption
Because of the explosive growth of e-commerce, online shopping has become more and more popular. This kind of shopping creates a flawless purchase experience from suggestions based on previous search history to free shipping. However, customers often search for products online and then buy at brick-and-mortar stores. This is because they want to view, touch and interact with physical products.
Therefore, instead of considering e-commerce platforms as a threat, retailers can use an omnichannel marketing approach to attract a larger audience for their brands. Online systems can be set up to supplement physical presence. Customers will be able to choose the most appropriate method of payment as a result of this. Using several platforms allows retailers to reach a big audience that is not geographically confined.
Find the best technology
Business owners have a variety of technological platforms to choose to help them operate and scale their operations. However, they must be aware of the software’s features and whether they are compatible with their business model. A complicated and unwieldy software platform might actually be inefficient and wasteful.
Integrating a POS with an ERP system is highly recommended for retailers to streamline their business. The solutions can assist companies in automating all of the retail operations, from sales management, inventory, customer relationship management to payroll, HR, etc.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are various challenges that the retail industry has to overcome. However, thanks to the development of technology, retailers have many solutions to beat them off. Proudly being one of the leading ERP vendors in Singapore, our ERP solutions will absolutely be a helpful assistant for your retail companies.
Grants
To help companies in all industries access advanced technology, the Singapore Government has released Productivity Solution Grant (PSG) and Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) which can cover up to 80% of the qualifying costs for eligible enterprises. These grants’ maximum support will expire in March 2022 so now is the best opportunity to embark on this digitalization journey.
Contact us now for more information!
