The document discusses how digital transformation is essential for retailers and consumer goods companies to sustain a competitive advantage. It outlines how companies can engage customers in a personal way, empower employees to deliver better service, optimize operations like forecasting, and transform products. Specific technologies discussed that can help include mobile engagement, inventory management, real-time offers, digital/physical integration, personalization, predictive analytics, chatbots, robotics, computer vision, and blockchain applications. The overall message is that digital transformation through new technologies is needed to keep up with changing customer expectations and behaviors.

1. ShiSh (twitter: @5h15h)
Audrey Piquemal
audreypi@microsoft.com
Retail Industry Solutions Director
Microsoft Corp

2. Technological innovations and a hyper-
connected world have significantly
influenced consumer behaviors and
expectations.
Shift to Direct to
Consumer
Changing
Demographics
Legacy Systems
& Silos
Lifetime Customer
Engagement
More Informed
Consumers
Blend of Physical
and Digital

4. GLOBAL RETAIL & CONSUMER
GOODS INDUSTRY
EXPERIENCING DISRUPTION
VALUE ADDED SERVICES
CURATE &
SUBSCRIBE
BORROW vs BUY
MASS CUSTOMIZATION
INSTANT
GRATIFICATION
SELLING
EXPERIENCES &
LIFESTYLE
Digital Transformation in Retail & Consumer Goods

5. Digital transformation is essential to sustaining a
competitive advantage
ENGAGE YOUR
CUSTOMERS
in a personal and
relevant way
EMPOWER YOUR
EMPLOYEES
to deliver
differentiated service
OPTIMIZE YOUR
OPERATIONS
to evolve forecasting
and react faster
TRANSFORM
YOUR PRODUCTS
and deliver new value
to customers
5

6. Digital transformation is essential to sustaining a
competitive advantage
ENGAGE YOUR
CUSTOMERS
in a personal and
relevant way
EMPOWER YOUR
EMPLOYEES
to deliver
differentiated service
OPTIMIZE YOUR
OPERATIONS
to evolve forecasting
and react faster
TRANSFORM
YOUR PRODUCTS
and deliver new value
to customers
6

7. REAL-TIME INVENTORY
MANAGEMENT
Delight your customers with personalized experiences
Connect with customers at the right time, right place
with the right offers
by gathering data from various points of customer contact to
understand customer behaviors and respond with
relevant offers
Predict what customers want before they tell you
using predictive analytics solutions to create relevant cross-sell
and upsell opportunities throughout the customer journey
Deliver engaging experiences
by combining technologies that give customers rich information
when they shop online with the in-store experiences of trying out
products and engaging with informed sales associates
Integrate click-and-collect
and customer wish lists into
inventory decisions
NEW!
20%
OFF
Send real-time offers &
notifications based on
customer location
REAL-TIME OFFERS
Retail App
Enjoy
20% Off
Our New
Line when
you buy 2
items
Enable information-rich
experiences in store
DIGITAL/PHYSICAL
INTEGRATION
Retail App
Other
colors
available
ORDER PICKUP
PURCHASE
Boots $
BUY
WISHLIST
WISHLIST
Retail App
Welcome
valued
customer!
Collect data through customer opt-in to
personalize the shopping experience
PERSONALIZATION CLICK &
COLLECT

8. Mobile
Engagement
in Retail

9. Foodservice retailer increased revenue with a
cloud-based mobile solution
Challenge
• Inability to identify or
connect with customers.
• Lack measures of
customer loyalty.
• Untargeted promotions
erode revenue and
profit.
Solution
• Added an analysis and
insights system based
on Microsoft Azure.
• Gathered data on
customers’ behaviors
and preferences to
target offers.
Benefits
• Expanded reach to millions of
customers in five countries.
• Enabled personal, relevant,
contextual content that adds
value for the users.
• Improved promotion efficacy.
“The company saw a huge increase in customers, and those customers
spent 47 percent more. It was all driven at the device level.”
— Scott Bradley, CEO and founder of Plexure (Vmob)

10. Unable to identify
or connect with
their customers
No measures of
customer loyalty
Untargeted
promotions erode
revenue & profit

11. Reach Use
Conversion rate
7x
Sales
Increase in ‘tray value’
47 %2xTraffic
Reach
customers
Increase
loyalty
Increase
promotion efficacy

13. Visible Light
Communication
In-store lighting pulses
Visible bymobile device cameras
Instantaneous
12” horizontal location accuracy
18-24”vertical location accuracy

14. 14

15. Foot Traffic
Tracking
Thin, pressure sensitive mat
Easy setup
Up to 25 2’x2’squares per transmitter
Cloud based dashboard

16. Chatbots &
Retail

18. Digitize the
Real World

19. Microsoft Confidential, For Internal Use Only

20. 20

21. Robotics in
Customer
Engagement

22. 22

23. Digital transformation is essential to sustaining a
competitive advantage
ENGAGE YOUR
CUSTOMERS
in a personal and
relevant way
EMPOWER YOUR
EMPLOYEES
to deliver
differentiated service
OPTIMIZE YOUR
OPERATIONS
to evolve forecasting
and react faster
TRANSFORM
YOUR PRODUCTS
and deliver new value
to customers
23

24. Empowering
Employees
with
Chatbots

25. Inventory
Demand Forecasting
Next Best Action
Merchandizing
Manager
Workflow

26. Prescriptive
Analytics +
Bot
Framework
Hi Nancy, I noticed that some of these products may fall below forecast unless we run a
promotion on them:
Women's Cargo Capri’s
Women's Floral Top
Women's Yoga Tee
Thanks for the notification SalesBot, lets run a promo on them, what do you recommend
will drive the best ROI?
I determined that running a sale this weekend for 15% off on these will drive the most
optimal results on Store performance. Can I go ahead and use the Discount App to run the
sale?
Yes. Go Ahead.

27. Cognitive
Services in
Retail

29. Robotics in
Employee
Empowerment

31. Digital transformation is essential to sustaining a
competitive advantage
ENGAGE YOUR
CUSTOMERS
in a personal and
relevant way
EMPOWER YOUR
EMPLOYEES
to deliver
differentiated service
OPTIMIZE YOUR
OPERATIONS
to evolve forecasting
and react faster
TRANSFORM
YOUR PRODUCTS
and deliver new value
to customers
31

32. Listening to the voice of the customer
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
Sales Forecast in 1999
Film Cameras Digital Cameras
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
What Really Happened
Film Cameras Digital Cameras

33. Retail has a multitude of
devices that generate
petabytes of potential
insights
Monitoring and mining
social media data enables
retailers to enhance
customer insights
Open data sources and
internal sources enable
retailers to better
understand customers
Democratization of data

34. AI/ML
Automation
PrescriptivePredictiveDescriptiveDashboardsReporting
Analytics
What's Happening Now What Will Happen What Should Happen

35. Optimize your forecasting
and react faster
35
Increase loyalty and share of wallet through hyper-
local assortments and inventory
with scalable cloud solutions that take advantage of data, such as
social and weather, to complement existing demand signals
Improve management of merchandise allocation
across channels
with data-driven understanding of what will sell, when, where
and to whom
Enable forward-thinking, agile pricing
and promotions
with analytics capabilities to predict optimum pricing and quickly make
changes as needed
FALL LINE
SEARCH
Twitter
Love these
shoes!
#Retailer
Retail App
Jacket
Boots
Dress
$
$
$
TOTAL: $$$
Sept Oct Nov Dec

36. Furnishings importer delighted customers with
the right offers
Challenge
• Give customers a better
experience and
selection.
• Understand what
customers are looking
for based on online
search.
Strategy
• Combined online and
in-store transactional
and behavioral data
to predict what
products customers
would be most likely
to purchase next.
Results
• Provided more personalized
choices to customers.
• Enabled targeted campaigns.
• Improved inventory management.
“We are continually getting better at identifying what our customer wants, using
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and resulting data insights.”
— Sharon Leite, EVP Sales and Customer Experience, Pier 1 Imports

37. 37

38. ENGAGE YOUR
CUSTOMERS
in a personal and
relevant way
EMPOWER YOUR
EMPLOYEES
to deliver
differentiated service
OPTIMIZE YOUR
OPERATIONS
to evolve forecasting
and react faster
TRANSFORM
YOUR PRODUCTS
and deliver new value
to customers
38

39. Ambient Commerce

41. Data is the new
Oil: Driving New
Business
Models with
Data

42. Filling Gaps in Customer Insight
There are only four
people/organizations in the world who
know my location at all times: my
wife (because I tell her), Apple
(because Siri), the NSA (because
NSA), and now Uber.
Since the service Uber has built is
so convenient, and increasingly
essential to my life, Uber knows
where I live, where I work, where I
eat, where I travel, where I
stay/visit and when I do all these
things.
-Ron Hirson, Forbes

43. • Cellphone data from 2007 shows how the
population density of coastal towns like Biarritz
and Bayonne shoots up by 50 or 60 per cent on
public holidays.
• On normal weeks, France pulses like a beating
heart, its people clustering into Paris from
Monday to Friday, before heading out into the
countryside on weekends.
• accurate, up-to-date data on population
movement across the nation could help public
transport agencies plan services, or help event
planners manage large crowds that flock to
concerts
• Understanding such movement in countries like
Sierra Leone, for instance, would let
epidemiologists halt the spread of disease, or
get help to where it is needed in disasters.

44. Correlations using Credit Card Data
Identify Areas where Customers Come From based
on credit card spending patterns
Build Profile using credit card patters. Identify churn
patterns.

45. Connected Vending Machines: Diji-Touch & Mondelez
IoT, Machine Learning
Event Hub
Stream Analytics
SQL
Microsoft
Azure

46. Connected Fitting Room
46
Delivering enhanced shopping experiences to customers
Objectives
• Increase customer
service and
personalization
• Grow perception of
innovation
Tactics
• Connected Fitting
Room pilot in stores
• Associate
productivity with
tablets
• Assisted selling
kiosks in stores
• Guided selling for
mobile devices
Results
• Increased insight into customer
“likes”
• Improved sales performance by
equipping associates with easily
accessible information
• Extended support for customers
through immediate catalog
access

47. How
Blockchain
will impact
Retail

48. 48
Secure
Shared
Distributed
Ledger
Blockchain is a secure, shared, distributed ledger

49. Using the Blockchain to verify Authenticity
49
Genuine
Blockchain Verified

50. 50

52. Luxury Retail
•Battle against Counterfeit Goods
•Diamond certification and transaction history
Grocery Retail
•Food Pedigree
•Supply Chain Transparency
•Ethical Farming & Fishing
Electronics Retail
•Keep Product Warranties up-to-date and transferable
Supply Chain
•Supply Chain transparency
•Make Supply Chain data become searchable and accessible to shoppers
Shipping
•Modernize Bill of Lading using Blockchain

53. Blockchain for
Product
Pedigree
RFID Real Time
Inventory
In-store Traffic
Analysis
Digital Wallets
Retail Mobile
Shopping
Electronic Shelf
Labels
Chatbots
Workforce
Analytics
Algorithmic
Merchandise
Optimization
Cognitive
Expert Advisors