The idea of digital transformation and what that means to organizations is something that is top of mind in all industries, including the retail space.

Providing a seamless customer experience across the customer lifecycle is crucial to the success of retail organizations. As new technologies and channels continuously emerge, it can become increasingly difficult for the IT department to keep up with the shifting needs of the business to provide a seamless customer experience. 

With a low-code platform like Appian, businesses can reduce the burden placed on IT to meet the needs of the business. 

This is done by:

• Empowering business users
• Increasing the speed to market
• Enabling embedded analytics

Empowering Business Users

By empowering the business, IT is no longer the sole deliverer of business solutions. Instead, your business can deliver solutions by building on the core assets that IT has already created. 

This allows IT to focus on developing new core assets while the business tailors a memorable customer experience by easily leveraging those assets to deliver the solutions they need.

In all likelihood, your business does not care how IT connects to a specific backend system, it just needs access to that system. If that system was already available to the business through an API that IT developed, the business could use that API to build out the solution they needed. If the IT department stays focused on creating useful APIs and other assets to provide access to these backend systems, low code tools like Appian empower the business to deliver the solutions they need and want.

By doing this, the business can build what they want to develop by leveraging the assets created by IT, and IT, in return, can focus on developing new assets for the business to use.

Increasing Your Speed to Market

Another key to driving transformation for retail organizations is the speed to market in which they deliver solutions and applications. By using low-code capabilities, they are able to build out applications rapidly and can go from an idea to a built-out solution at a much faster rate. They have the ability to deploy those applications across multiple devices and channels as soon as the app is complete.

As these retail organizations move forward, it is crucial to ensure things are being done correctly for each built-out solution. Taking the time to make sure the applications are built to meet enterprise-grade with CI/CD practices is critical in minimizing the risk for each new solution. This ensures that the standard speed that the low-code approach provides is constant and features can be added without the worry of breaking the application.

Enabling Embedded Analytics

A key to ensuring these retail businesses are providing the customer experience that they want to offer is by enabling the ability to evaluate the analytics of what they are doing in a single view. This means providing data in the form of charts and graphs in the solutions to help the user have actionable information in a single source.

For example, AVIO has built out a rebate process application that enables sales to evaluate historical customer information on a customer and use that information to decide right then if they are eligible for a rebate program. 

Advancing with Appian

Employing Appian as part of your retail solution removes the burden of constantly creating new business solutions from scratch from the IT department. Instead, it allows both business and IT the time and capabilities to work together to create new innovations.

Appian creates solutions by empowering business users, increasing your speed to market and enabling embedded analytics.

How can Appian help your retail business? Contact us to learn about the solutions that can work for you.