Announcing the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail

Enabling Retailers to Transform Customer Experience and Drive Digital Commerce

The retail industry has undergone a significant transition over the past two years. Accelerating digital transformation is an urgent initiative for retailers under pressure to adjust and respond to rapid shifts in market conditions spurred by the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and geopolitical uncertainties. Customers are seeking immersive and virtual experiences for instant gratification before they commit to purchasing products.

In light of these developments, we’re excited to announce the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) for Retail. IDMC for Retail accelerates business growth by providing a comprehensive platform for managing customer, product and supplier data, along with transaction and interaction data, in a single solution. It offers new intelligent capabilities required to understand customers at a deeper level, manage product information across all touchpoints and proactively addresses supplier disruptions before they occur. IDMC for Retail encompasses the following capabilities:

• Enables a single source of truth with multidomain MDM and 360 applications for customers, products, suppliers and other business critical domains
• Protects customer data and facilitates compliance with data governance and privacy
• Integrates application silos and automates business operations with application integration and hyperautomation
• Simplifies and accelerates B2B communications with a modern B2B EDI solution
• Operationalizes machine learning (ML) models for business impact with high-quality data, trust and transparency using MLOps
• Integrates data from disparate sources like online, social media, SaaS applications and more with cloud data integration to deliver petabyte-scale analytics to drive predictive modeling
• Reduces time-to-value with intelligent automation powered by the Informatica CLAIRE® AI engine, including data ingestion, integration, matching and merging, product classification, product syndication, supplier onboarding, and data and AI model recommendations
• Democratizes trusted data for diverse data users using a self-service data marketplace

We built security, governance and compliance as the core tenants of this cloud, supporting retailers as they transform omnichannel experiences and improve operations across the entire customer journey and lifecycle.

4 Key Capabilities of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail

Today’s retail landscape has seen a remarkable spike in digital sales driven by consumers who remain cautious about their health as new virus variants continue to surface. According to a recent Accenture study, more customers than ever — including some of the previously most-resistant segments — are shopping online, with Accenture’s research suggesting there will be a 169% increase in e-commerce purchases from new or low-frequency users.¹

To accommodate these changing dynamics and shifts in buying behavior, retailers need to focus on unlocking better insights about consumers, building tighter omnichannel experiences, mitigating supply chain disruptions and delivering customer experiences that span digital and physical worlds. IDMC for Retail delivers four key capabilities to address these challenges.

1. Delivering Superior Customer Experiences

Customer experience is the biggest contributor to brand loyalty, with a negative experience being the most significant factor affecting a customer’s likelihood of making a repeat visit. While promotions and offers can certainly contribute toward helping customers feel like they are special, the real key to an outstanding experience is personalization.²  Getting to know customers from their previous interactions, purchases and interests can help retailers drive loyalty.

IDMC for Retail helps:

• Improve customer profiles with clean, consistent and complete information, along with AI-powered insights
• Quickly and easily onboard customers in a central location with guided workflows and process orchestration
• Increase self-service with search and exploration of customer relationships through both network and hierarchy views
• Use AI to increase productivity by sharing trusted, consistent customer data with applications, processes and employees
  
• Grow loyalty by engaging with customers more authentically across your organization

2. Boosting Omnichannel Retail with Personalized and Relevant Product Experiences

The omnichannel commerce approach provides customers with a seamless shopping experience across all touchpoints. That means customers have a consistent, unified experience whether they’re shopping on a retailer’s website, via a marketplace like Amazon or eBay, in a store, on a social media website, through a chatbot or using a catalog. Customers get the same superior experience irrespective of touchpoints and switching between channels. Today’s omnichannel product experience must be customer-centric, personalized, search-guided and social-powered.

To keep up with this rapid evolution in the buying experience, retailers must make sure they’re fully leveraging product information to create a new experience that attracts and converts shoppers. By creating rich and personalized omnichannel experiences, retailers can increase customer loyalty, sales and margins.

IDMC for Retail helps:

• Efficiently acquire, manage and publish relevant and trusted product content, anywhere
• Automate the management of rich product content, including images and digital assets
• Launch products faster by streamlining product content creation with intuitive task- and user-based UIs and workflows
• Embed data quality checks and enrich and auto-classify products by categories using AI-powered intelligent automation
• Deliver product data in real time to channels of your choice for tailored and connected interactions

3. Ensuring Supply Chain Continuity and Better Supplier Relationships

Since the onset of the pandemic, most consumers have experienced out-of-stock items. Retailers need to increase supply chain flexibility and agility and invest in supplier relationship management, as it can directly impact the customer experience and loyalty. Customers also demand transparency into how retailers are managing sustainability and climate challenges.

According to a recent survey, 71% of consumers will switch brands or retailers when faced with out of stocks.³  Ensuring supply chain continuity and building stronger supplier relationships are high priorities for retailers. Retailers need complete visibility into the global supply chain to be more agile in meeting changing demand and increasing the flexibility of their supply chains. More than 95% of a retailer’s sustainability footprint lies deep within supply chains. Retailers need to redesign their entire supply chains to meet consumer demand for sustainable products.

When retailers have end-to-end insight into their supplier relationships, they can better understand macro demand trends, enable rapid identification of alternate suppliers, improve collaboration and automate supplier onboarding for faster time-to-market. Failure to manage supplier information can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as wasted resources, high procurement costs, slow time to market, missed opportunities, negative brand perception and compliance issues.

IDMC for Retail helps:

• Boost productivity and cut costs by reducing business overhead and manual work for managing supplier information
• Shrink supplier onboarding and qualification time from weeks to days
• Provide complete transparency and visibility across the global supply chain to ensure retailers are addressing sustainability requirements
• Improve supplier spend and performance management
• Negotiate pricing and payment terms based on aggregate spending across the business
• Improve supplier collaboration, assess compliance and manage supplier risk
• Drive top-line growth by selecting the suitable suppliers for the right product at the right place

4. Ensuring Compliance with Data Protection Standards and Laws

There is a growing movement to protect customers’ rights to privacy, as demonstrated by the recent introduction of various laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US. As privacy laws and regulations become more complex, it is becoming more of a challenge for retailers to comply.

For this reason, any attempt to gather analytical data about customers should be made with careful adherence to the law. Data privacy regulations directly impact the way retailers conduct their business; they face steep financial penalties for noncompliance. Retailers need to implement robust data management policies and train their staff on handling sensitive data.

As retailers capture customer data on a large scale, they must build trust with consumers by securely storing the data and ensuring proper use. They need to be transparent with customers about what data is being collected. By implementing enterprise-wide governance, retailers can drive collaboration across teams, improve the trustworthiness and quality of their data to power key business initiatives, and ensure regulatory compliance.

IDMC for Retail helps:

• Rapidly find and compile personal data, which is held in countless disconnected systems throughout your enterprise
• Respond to customers’ privacy requests, instilling confidence that their private information is handled responsibly.
• Respond to subject requests and data breaches within the timelines required by GDPR, CCPA and other regulations
• Improve data security, implement privacy-by-design and mitigate the risk of damaging data breaches
• Foster IT and business collaboration with AI-driven data intelligence, driving productivity and accelerating reporting processes

Next Steps

The Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail is the industry’s most complete and modular enterprise data solution, built on a microservices architecture to help retail organizations unleash the power and value of all data across local systems and hybrid and multi-cloud environments — ensuring data is trusted, protected, governed, accessible, timely, relevant and actionable.

It includes several retail accelerators — such as retail-specific connectors, data models, taxonomies, user interfaces, workflows and more — to reduce time-to-value significantly. IDMC for Retail enables retailers to rapidly deliver data-driven transformational outcomes and expand their opportunities for success. To learn more, please read our white paper, “Reinventing the Future of Retail with the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud.”

_{¹. https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-168/Accenture-Store-Tomorrow-POV.pdf#zoom=40
². https://www.demandgenreport.com/resources/infographics/2019-trends-in-personalization/
³. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/survey-us-consumer-sentiment-during-the-coronavirus-crisis}