Book Description

The Predictive Retailer is a retail company that utilizes the latest technological developments to deliver an exceptional personalized experience to each and every customer. Today, technology such as AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, IoT, Real-time stream processing, social media, and wearables are altering the Customer Experience (CX) landscape and retailers need to jump aboard this fast moving technology or run the risk of being left out in the cold. The Predictive Retailer reveals how these and other technologies can help shape the customer journey. The book details how the five types of analytics-descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and edge analytics-affect not only the customer journey, but also just about every operating function of the retailer. An IoT connected retailer can make its operations smart. Connected devices can help with inventory optimization, supply chain management, labor management, waste management, as well as keep the retailer's data centers green and its energy use smart. Social media is no longer a vanity platform, but rather it is a place to both connect with current customers as well as court new ones. It is also a powerful branding channel that can be utilized to both understand a retailer's position in the market, as well as a place to benchmark its position against its competitors. Today, technology moves at break-neck speed and it can offer the potential of anticipatory capabilities, but it also comes with a confusing variety of technological terms--Big Data, Cognitive Computing, CX, Data Lakes, Hadoop, Kafka, Personalization, Spark, etc., etc. The Predictive Retailer will help make sense of it all, so that a retail executive can cut through the confusing technological jargon and understand why a Spark-based real-time stream processing data stream might be preferable to a TIBCO Streambase one, or an IBM Streaming Analytics one. This book will help retail executives break through the technological clutter so that they can deliver an unrivaled customer experience to each and every patron that comes through their doors.