دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی آینده خرده فروشی omnichannel: مطالعه چهار مرحله ای دلفی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Omnichannel retail refers to the integration of retail channels like stores, online, and mobile into a single, seamless customer experience. The emergence of new online channels has had a major impact on the retail industry over the past decade, and it is expected that the need to integrate different channels will transform the retail industry over the next decade. We conducted a four-stage Delphi study with eighteen retail experts to identify the key trends, major challenges, important technologies, and main customer touchpoints that will emerge in omnichannel retail in the next ten years. Using both qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques, we first elicited open-ended predictions from experts, then transformed and consolidated these predictions into close-ended statements, to finally obtain expert ratings of these statements and analyze changes of expert ratings between two consecutive stages. Based on this approach we derived four broad themes of core insights: future competition in the retail industry will be based on holistic customer experiences; omnichannel retail requires the development of human capabilities and changes in the organizational mindset; physical stores will become key destinations for unique sensory shopping experiences; and omnichannel retail will improve operational productivity.

5. Discussion and conclusions

After decades of adding new channels to the retail mix, the retail industry will move in the next decade toward integrating these channels into a seamless omnichannel experience. Eighteen internationally recognized retail experts forecasted the key trends, major challenges, important technologies, and main customer touchpoints in omnichannel retail that will emerge over the next ten years.

5.1. Core insights

The findings of this study can be arranged under four broad themes of core insights: consumer experience, human capability, store digitization, and business operations. The first core insight gained from this study is that future competition in the retail industry will be based on the holistic consumer experience, rather than individual products. This change bears a number of important implications for the retail industry, among them the need to achieve and sustain a consistently high quality of interactions at all customer touchpoints in order to create a holistic consumer experience. Achieving and sustaining such quality across all touchpoints will be challenging, as the number of touchpoints is increasing to the point at which touchpoints will be ubiquitous. For example, Amazon has distributed 15 millions of its “Echo” smart home devices to customer households between late 2014 and 2017 alone, and other vendors such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft are pushing similar Internet-of Things (IoT) devices into the market too (Darrow, 2017). To complicate this situation, it will increasingly be consumers who determine when and how they want to interact with retailers, not the other way around, which means that retailers will have to be ready to fulfill consumer expectations anytime and anywhere if they want to survive in the market. Amazon is an example of a retailer that is actively preparing for “anytime anywhere” expectations.