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RPA – Can It Alter the Way Retails Operate?

October, 2019

Embracing technology, embracing change

Call it transformation or evolution, the impact of technology on human life is immense. Especially, the last decade fascinated the world with technology-led communication, transportation, healthcare supervision, retail operation and so on. The technological empowerment has led to a change in the approach of average retail consumers. They have become more aware hence, more demanding. Thus, consumer expectation has reached a height where speed, accuracy and high-quality customer service is expected. All the above increased the on-demand shopping experience.

Transformation in the retail segment

To excel in the realm of competition, the retail companies worked towards smarter and efficient ways to meet the growing customer demands. This witnessed a considerable focus on building an effortless, efficient and personalized shopping experience for customers. Hence, retail organizations started to rely upon data-driven processes to create a mindset powered by automation. This helps employees to focus more on higher-value tasks since the repetitive tasks are taken care through automation. Now, does that have an impact on the way retails operates?

Impact of RPA on processing speed

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has a massive impact on the retail segment. Since, almost all industries are operating basis speed, efficiency, and better cost margins, the retail industry is no exception. Apt usage of data and technology can enhance the operational speed of the process. With technology like RPA, the retail industry can increase its processing pace like shipping, generating an invoice and establish a successful customer relationship management system even with the boom in raw data accumulation.

Yielding accuracy and customer delight

Apart from managing manual work with competency, RPA also helps in verifying data accuracy. This influences the business operation in terms of compliance. Implementation of RPA enables an organization to process a huge amount of data in less time. This ensures the faster address of customer requests hence a better customer experience. In this way, RPA plays an important role in improving customer delight and loyalty.

Automation of processing product returns helps to reduce wait time, which eventually reduces customer dissatisfaction. In a well-designed automated return system, the customer receives an instant email confirming the request. The entire process including processing of payment can happen without human intervention. Hence, it is favorable for both the retailer as well as the customer.

Strategize with RPA

With the help of RPA, store managers can utilize the data collected and organized in records to strategize the store layout, initiate sales priorities and trade promotions. RPA can help to generate an insightful report to redesign a store to optimize space and customer preference. Also, to analyze the effect of trade promotion, RPA helps to explore the relevant data.

RPA – remodeling the retail segment

According to a report by McKinsey, most of the jobs will soon become automated to eliminate the possibility of human error. Thus, it is evident that RPA has already initiated the transformation of the business model of the retail segment.

- Kathakali Basu
Content Writer
Infoholic Research