265: The Challenges Of Unified Commerce

Unified commerce plays a crucial role in retail, helping customers shop seamlessly and enabling the business and operations to flow accordingly. In this episode, Oliver Banks hosts Bala Parameshwaran from Bain & Company and Nikki Baird from Aptos as they tackle the complexities of unified commerce. From integrating digital and physical shopping experiences, to addressing challenges from legacy systems to customer experience design. The discussion reveals insights from the latest unified commerce report from Bain and Aptos, highlighting the industry’s readiness for this transition. Tune in for expert perspectives on orchestrating technology and customer experience in retail, and learn how to access valuable resources for your unified commerce journey.

Listen into this episode and discover:

• Key learnings from the latest unified commerce research by Bain and Aptos.
• Which area of unified commerce causes the greatest headaches for retail.
• How customer expectations are evolving as unified commerce becomes more commonplace.

 

 

Read the unified commerce research report

Retail execs say it’s important to have a single view of customers across channels, but only about half believe they have the right investment strategy to deliver.

Read the key takeaways from The State of Unified Commerce: A Bain and Aptos Study.

You will also enjoy this article by Aptos: Retail Leaders Perplexed by Unified Commerce: The Answer is the Store and the supporting infographic, including the extracts below.

Introducing Bala Parameshwaran

Bala Parameshwaran is a Partner at Bain & Company. As a member of Bain’s Technology & Analytics and Retail practices, Bala’s expertise lies at the intersection of business and technology strategy. He’s an expert on executing large digital transformation programs across industries, he has recently advised Bain clients in the mass retail, general merchandise, restaurant, and discount sectors.

He is particularly versed in omnichannel digital commerce and marketing platforms; microservices and Cloud-native architecture; IT strategy and enterprise architecture; Agile and product management; and globally distributed delivery.

Prior to joining Bain, he held senior technology roles at SapientRazorfish and Infosys and was an analyst and consultant.

Additionally, Bala holds an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a B.E. in Electronics and Communications from the University of Madras.

Introducing Nikki Baird

Nikki Baird is the vice president of strategy at Aptos, an enterprise solutions provider serving hundreds of retailers around the world, including Mulberry, New Balance and Pets at Home. Nikki’s mission is to accelerate retailers’ ability to innovate.

She has been a top global retail industry influencer for several years, with a background in retail and technology. She is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and has been quoted as a retail subject matter expert in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, Raconteur, Retail Gazette, among many others.

Nikki brings perspective from all sides of the retail technology equation: she has been an industry analyst for nearly fifteen years, co-founding Retail Systems Research, the premier boutique analyst firm focused on the retail industry. Prior to co-founding RSR, Nikki was an analyst at both Forrester Research and Retail Systems Alert Group, where she covered retail industry and technology topics. Prior to that, she was director of marketing for StorePerform, a store execution management software provider, and director of product marketing for Viewlocity, a supply chain software provider focusing on adaptive supply chain execution and exception management.

Nikki came to Viewlocity from PwC Consulting, now IBM Global Services, where as a senior manager she led IT strategy consulting engagements for retail and CPG clients.

Nikki has an M.B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, focusing on operations and IT. She also holds a bachelor of arts in political science and Russian, with a minor in physics, from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Nikki has appeared on the Retail Transformation Show before, in episode 199: The Changing Role Of Store Colleagues.

More podcast episodes about unified commerce and omnichannel retail

There are loads of great episodes about unified commerce and omnichannel retail in the archives. Check these episodes out as a start:

Recently, there has been a noticeable shift from omnicannel to unified commerce. So in episode 262: Omnichannel Vs Unified Commerce, Oliver takes a look at the differences, supported by expert opinion and helps define three importance elements to help focus on unified commerce and delivering a customer-centric operating model.

Next, in episode 176: Being The Best Omnichannel Retailer, Oliver explores the commonalities between top omnichannel retailers and highlights five key components of becoming the best omnichannel retailer.

We’ve been talking about omnichannel retail for a long time. In fact, it was one of Oliver’s ever-trends as explained in episode 200. But despite this, there are still many moving parts and it’s one of the most complex areas in retail. So, explore more in episode 126: The Complexity Of Omnichannel Retail.

And finally, Tim Mason was deputy CEO at Tesco and initiated the launch of Tesco Clubcard and the move into ecommerce – remarkably on the same day. Learn more about how Tim drove omnichannel approaches in episode 30: Winning At Omnichannel Retail, the first of a two-part conversation.