Microsoft is leveraging its cloud analytics, service, and storage platforms to meet the specific needs of certain verticals, including fintech, healthcare, nonprofit, and retail, the company announced at its Microsoft Ignite virtual conference this week.
In the case of the latter, Redmond tipped a preview of Microsoft Cloud for Retail, a sector that saw massive shifts across all business aspects over the last year.
“Retailers have had to rapidly adapt over the last year, embracing new business models and working to keep their employees and shoppers safe,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in his keynote address. “Our new Microsoft Cloud for Retail brings together our platforms and tools to help the industry address some of its biggest challenges.”
Leveraging Petabytes of Dormant Data
Microsoft says there are 40 petabytes of data generated in the retail industry every hour, but the majority of this data is disorganized and most often wasted. With Microsoft Cloud for Retail, businesses can ostensibly take control of all this data and mine it for deeper customer insights. Microsoft believes this should result in a number of benefits, like sharper customer relationship management (CRM) and quicker adoption of more complex fulfillment options. That includes scenarios such as curbside pickup or same-day delivery, which have both gone from optional luxuries to must-have features for thousands of retailers.
“This data isn’t only about understanding your customers and where your customers are going, but also an opportunity to create new monetization and new business models,” said Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s Global Corporate VP for Retail and Consumer Goods Industries. Microsoft Cloud for Retail is built to convert data into analytics. This can better inform the entire retail stack, and includes not only direct customer interaction, but targeted customer service, digital advertising, inventory management, loss and fraud prevention, and shopper analytics.
Bransten noted that a key direction for Microsoft Cloud for Retail is to apply artificial Intelligence (AI) to retailers’ data so they can offer shoppers a much more personalized experience, both online and on-premises. It can, for example, help surface products customers might miss when shopping online. AI personalization also helps customers shop more efficiently, based on their past user behavior and real-time interactions with the store. While customers have seen these features already across larger online retail sites, those are often highly proprietary systems custom-built by larger retailers with lots of resources. Microsoft offering these capabilities on a cloud subscription basis will make them much more broadly available, especially to businesses that might not have been able to afford them before.
Case in Point: Quick and Efficient Curbside Pickup
A Microsoft Cloud for Retail demo at Ignite focused on curbside pickup. Prior to the pandemic, this model of customer interaction wasn’t a big draw for many, even most, retailers. In less than a year, it’s practically become mandatory and many businesses have had trouble making this shift. Microsoft presented what it says is both a quick and easy solution via Cloud for Retail that uses a combination of its various services, including Azure analytics and infrastructure, as well as customer-facing services, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams.
With these systems working together, a store manager might look at her calendar to see that her store is expecting a surge in online orders from customers opting for curbside pickup. “The manager takes a look at her shifts for the week, and sees that she has enough people to find and pick items,” said Michael Griffiths, Global Head of Industry Solutions, Retail for Microsoft. “Customer orders pop up into the system and (it) automatically routes tasks to store associates who are on shift as pickers. The manager can mark the tasks as urgent, and the pickers prioritize the order and mark it as fulfilled.”
An email notifies customers that their order is ready. Once customers arrive at the retailer’s parking lot, they can click an “I am here” button in their notification email. The pickers are alerted, and once they see the customer, they deliver the order curbside. The whole solution is delivered as a unified cloud service, which means retailers can bypass most of the implementation process simply by signing up for a subscription.
The demo summed up the basic strategy around all the Microsoft Cloud vertical solutions, namely bundling the company’s various cloud solutions and technologies together and preconfiguring them such that they directly address scenarios important to those industries. The company introduced similar services at Ignite aimed at the financial sector, healthcare, and nonprofits. Interested retailers can sign up for the Microsoft Cloud for Retail private preview.
