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.
