IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Customer Experience and Loyalty Strategies

AI and GenAI have changed the way retailers and brands need to think about their customer experience strategies. Online-physical integration, new loyalty programs, and the immersive and emphatic approach to retail experience, including employee experience and augmented customer engagement, are leading retailers toward what IDC defines as real-time contextual customer journey personalization. In this context, retailers need to adopt a set of technologies to evolve their customer experience strategies, from personalization to delivering empathy where the focus is on constantly learning from customers. They must shift from being indifferent and impersonal to being targeted, personalized, and empathetic by offering increasingly contextual information. The IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Customer Experience and Loyalty Strategies advisory service examines best practices, trends, use cases, market forces and challenges, and underlying technologies that directly impact a retailer's ability to provide real-time contextual and immersive experiences. The program tracks and analyzes the key trends in retail customer experience and loyalty.

The IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Customer Experience and Loyalty Strategies service offers a deep dive into retail customer experience strategies. It collects global market data through in-depth interviews and primary research with retail IT executives, store and line-of-business (LOB) executives, technology vendors, and consumers, complemented by secondary research from conferences, industry and technology associations, and third-party news sources. IDC Retail Insights' analysts carry out comprehensive analysis of this data to provide actionable recommendations to retailers and the technology vendors they work with.

Throughout the year, this service will address the following topics:

• Retail omni-channel and immersive experience
• Real-time personalization and customer engagement
• Customer loyalty strategies and applications
• Retail customer data platforms and retail commerce platforms
• Disruptive technologies applied to retail such as AI, AR/VR, IoT, NFT, metaverse, and 5G
• Customer journey model mapping
• Marketing, advertising, and loyalty impact on customer life-cycle industry short lists and vendor assessments for key solution areas (e.g., retail commerce platform, ecommerce, and mobile)

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. What kind of approach should retailers adopt in terms of customer experience personalization?
2. What is the customer experience maturity level?
3. How is the way that traffic is built, sustained, and grown fundamentally changing?
4. Why should retailers adopt new loyalty strategies?
5. What challenges retailers are facing to drive omni-channel and immersive experience?
6. What are the key factors for real-time customer personalization and customer engagement?
7. Why is AI becoming foundational?
8. How can retailers transform the IT organization to be more flexible to customers' changing expectations and behaviors?
9. Why is the customer data platform essential to address customer experience personalization requirements and enhance loyalty?

The IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Customer Experience and Loyalty Strategies service is ideally suited to support the needs of retail and IT decision-makers and executives responsible for supporting all aspects of the customer selling process. Retail IT, marketing, operations management, and commerce technology suppliers will also benefit from this service.