On the day two of India Retail Forum 2014 Vijay Jain, CEO, Orra held the discussion on the revolution that can make one’s fortune or mar the success at the retail playground. Mderator of the discussion, Jain cited the example of Walmart’s magnanimous role in setting a benchmark for the Retail. The valuation of Walmart compares to half of the GDP of USA. He stated that huge amount of data and analytics have replaced passive technology. Hence, retailers can make it a win-win situation.
He first moved to Vipul Mathur, Head Brander Retail, Nokia India (Microsoft Mobiles) to know his views on the phenomena called Big Data. Mathur opined that retailers have to bypass their vision on channels and focus more about consumers navigating. A consumer goes through several touch points in his endeavour to purchase a product. In a nutshell, retailers need to focus on consumer journey. He stated that a consumer uses 12-16 touchpoints on a cellphone before making a purchase.
Ashok Desikan, Director, India & Neighbouring Countries-Retail & Monitoring, Tyco India, spoke about working for a common platform for customers. He remarked that mundane security solutions have now been converted to further enhance customer walk-in experience.
Rajesh Kakkar, Chief Executive-Global Strategic Technologies, Delopt emphasized that one must understand the irrelevance of dated data as also, newer technologies should also be used to analyze those who don’t buy rather than those who do. Madhav Sharma from SAP said that the principle of omnichannel is that the store needs to stock goods for all kinds of delivery. The point of pickup also needs to be the point of sale when a retailer goes online.
Chirantan Kislae, Head-Information Technology, The Mobile Store defined that “Any data which cannot be processed conventionally is big data.” Big Data gives a lot of insights on customer behaviour.
Jain cited a question to Vineet Goenka, “Can Big Data work at the entire country level?”
Vineet Goenka National Co-convener, Information Technology Cell, BJP quipped “The end customer doesn’t understand technology. The customer realizes is the joy of shopping which has to be enabled and facilitated by the Retailer.”
The anchor, Suresh Venkat, Former Editor – Technology & Special Projects, CNBC enquired the moderator Jain if the science of big data analysis can help capture emotions and Jain replied honestly that one of the biggest challenges for Big Data is to know its limits. In future, the data will lie with the consumer.
