Retail Collaboration Capabilities

Collaborative capabilities and practices have been a part of the retail environment for a long time focused on business aspects such as transportation and logistics.  Now consumers are pushing these practices out into the interactions between retailers and consumers and consumers to consumers. In addition, the logistics partners are extending collaboration capabilities out to the consumers as well through delivery coordination and secured drop points to store deliveries until the consumer can pick it up.  There are definitely many things that retailers have added and continue to add to increase consumer opportunities. These are all great capabilities and functions that improve the shopping and purchasing experience up to now and then the next phase of the retail omni market experience and consumer experience is definitely the ability to collaborate with the entire marketplace to put these pieces together in ways that allow the consumer to mix and match to support their needs at the time.

Collaboration and social retail practices are going to come to the forefront in the coming years in shaping the retail marketplace.  These practices are not new, in other words these practices are currently available and being used by consumers in their everyday interactions with retailers.  Retailers have focused more on functionality and even continued cost savings and have not really focused on the consumer relationship and this is going to be a problem in the near future.  Social commerce is the next wave and retailers begin now with initial steps and planning for integration and collaboration in the marketplace. Hopefully retailers learn from initial eCommerce mistakes and begin the dialog with consumers and other partners in the marketplace.  

The marketplace is changing again as a result of consumer use of technology, Internet of Things tools and functionality to increase transparency and tracking and communications.  The technology allows for quick integration and flexibility in building and shaping capabilities. The key change is the capabilities are changing based on tools used by consumers and the technology that is increasing and forming a continuous improvement chain that his changing the market.  The continuous improvement needs to focus on defining capabilities and then the most important aspect is to create the ability to combine capabilities as necessary to support changing consumer demands.

The social connection is based on the connection at the point in time of demand so these social network connections will change fluidly with the type of shopping, the type of purchasing and most importantly the consumer needs or requirements at the specific time of execution.  The time of execution is the new guiding factor in the capabilities requirements, the type of shopping and purchasing and then the social collaboration demands or capabilities of the consumer and the partners involved in the transaction. The capabilities necessary at the time of execution will shift and contract and grow depending on the consumer needs and type of shopping.  These capabilities must be build on a framework that supports flexibility in the extreme in order to meet the changing demands.

This collaboration framework must support the ability to quickly and efficiently add new capabilities as well as combine capabilities in new ways to support consumer demands and experimentation. The collaboration aspect is key to success and requires eliminating friction across silos more than ever in order to support consumer demands.