Enhancing Customer Experience through End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility: A Thrilling Journey of Retail Transformation

Customer Overview

Our customer is a Marketing and Advertising company located in Los Angeles, California. They design and build digital brands and experiences that bring the future to life. They collaborated with Pluto7 to provide retail and supply chain solutions to one of their clients with both online and offline presence.

Business Challenges

The client faced challenges in creating a seamless shopping experience, grappling with inability to guide customers with tailored recommendations, inefficient checkout processes and manual inventory management. The staff were burdened with time-consuming inventory and merchandising tasks, lacking real-time insights and efficient tools to streamline these processes. Compounding these issues was poor visibility within their supply chain, and inadequate financial risk management, which led to unnecessary costs and hindered their market competitiveness.

Storefront Challenges

Frictionless Shopping Experience

In a fast-paced business world, the inefficiencies of traditional shopping methods created a mismatch with consumers’ need for speed, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction.

Customer Segmentation

The current approach’s lack of precision in addressing diverse customer needs led to a generic, one-size-fits-all strategy, missing out on personalized marketing and sales optimization opportunities.

Personalized Recommendation

The absence of personalized guidance led to customers struggling to find products matching their tastes, resulting in dissatisfaction, lost sales, and weakened brand loyalty.

Seamless Checkout

Long queues and human-dependent checkouts caused inefficiencies, prolonging transaction times, reducing customer satisfaction, and leading to more cart abandonment. 

Dynamic Store Layout and Merchandising

Traditional, static store layouts and merchandising strategies failed to meet modern consumers’ evolving preferences, hindering effective customer engagement and attraction.

Supply Chain Challenges

Supply Chain Visibility

The client’s supply chain faced inefficiency and adaptability issues due to a lack of transparency and real-time visibility, negatively impacting customer satisfaction and operational agility. 

Sustainability

Poor sustainable practices resulted in more waste, higher carbon footprints, and resource inefficiency, impacting the environment, risking compliance, and potentially leading to lost customer trust and market share.

Route Optimization

Lacking route optimization, the client incurred higher transportation costs and delivery delays, leading to increased operational expenses, affecting profitability and customer loyalty.

Financial Risk Management

The client’s weak capacity for forecasting and mitigating financial risks in the supply chain led to exposure to unforeseen costs and market fluctuations, impacting financial stability and competitiveness.

Inventory Management 

Challenges in inventory management, characterized by overstocking or stockouts, resulted in significant financial implications. Overstocking raised holding costs, while stockouts caused lost sales and customer dissatisfaction, both negatively impacting profits.

CX Sense: The Platform that Enhanced Customer Experience with Real-Time Demand Sensing and End-to-End Supply Chain Management

To enhance their retail and supply chain operations by addressing key challenges. 

• Creating a seamless, efficient shopping experience with personalized customer recommendations and streamlined checkout processes. 
• Improving inventory and merchandising management through real-time insights and efficient tools, aligning store layouts and strategies with modern consumer preferences. 
• Achieve better visibility, sustainability, and route optimization, alongside effective financial risk management in the supply chain to mitigate costs and enhance market competitiveness. 

Overall, the client seeks to optimize operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial stability.

The Client’s Aim: Unparalleled Efficiency in Retail and Supply Chain Management

Leveraging our GenAI decision intelligence platform, CX Sense, we effectively tackled the client’s key challenges. Our solution seamlessly integrated personalized customer experiences with real-time demand signals and optimized inventory management, thereby enhancing overall supply chain efficiency.

Transforming Retail Experience

Scenario A: Better Store Operation powered by Omnichannel Transformation

We adopted a personalized approach powered by CX Sense and it revolutionized the client’s shopping experience:

• We developed detailed customer personas, capturing their preferences, shopping history, and spending habits.
• Upon entering the store, customers receive a persona card, unlocking a tailored shopping journey.
• As items are selected from shelves, RFID technology identifies them, relaying data to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which then suggests item details and related products.
• An interactive Magic Mirror enhances the experience by displaying product details, variations, and related items through touch and voice commands. A simple tap or voice confirmation from the customer brings up a product options page.
• At checkout, RFID technology captures the cart contents, presenting a customized cart page with next best action, including recommended products with in-store location, instant offer/discount, fulfillment method, loyalty, instant credit, insurance for items purchased
• Finally, tapping the persona card at checkout prompts the best available offers, considering the items in their cart, to maximize value and satisfaction.

Scenario B: Retail Analytics Behind the Scenes

Just as we transformed the shopping experience for their customers, we redefined inventory and merchandising management for store staff. By harnessing real-time insights with CX Sense, we ensured store layouts and strategies are perfectly attuned to consumer trends.

• We enhanced inventory visibility by implementing real-time shelf stock displays and camera tracking, providing staff with unparalleled access to inventory levels.
• Our custom-built sales activity dashboard delivered cutting-edge analytics, mapping sales data by location and demographic segments and illuminating trends across diverse sales channels.
• With RFID video heatmaps, we captured the movement of products and customers around the store, enabling the client to optimize product placement, enhance store layout for better traffic flow, and efficiently manage inventory.
• Our intelligent planogram, infused with trend data and powered by machine learning, dynamically guided store reorganization, ensuring layouts are not just responsive but predictive, tailored to the ever-evolving consumer palate.

Optimizing Supply Chain

We developed supply chain dashboards to streamline inventory tracking, enhance demand forecasting, optimize fleet management, financial risk, and provide actionable insights for sustainable operations and risk mitigation.

• Demand Shaping Dashboard for customer segmentation, demand forecasting, historical sales, forecasted sales, and product category trend
• Inventory Positioning Dashboard for analyzing inventory by location, product type, and cycle time, tracking inventory costs, and prioritizing orders.
• Logistic & Fulfillment Dashboard for tracking damaged inventory, analyzing damage trends, and detailing reasons for goods damage. 
• Warehouse Visibility Dashboard for monitoring inventory levels, stock status, unloading efficiency, and order specifics.
• Infleet Routing Dashboard focused on hybrid savings, fleet emissions, efficiency, maintenance status, and emission targets.
• Financial Risk Scoring Dashboard to track supply chain expenses, active contract costs, losses from supplier cancellations, raw materials cost, product recall rates.
• Sustainability Dashboard for tracking hybrid savings, fleet emissions, efficiency, LED upgrade savings, supplier emissions, distance and load by truck ID, and monthly emissions.
• Risk and Impact Assessment Dashboard focused on sales impact from delivery timing, route efficiency, and adjustments due to weather conditions, on-time delivery in full due to rerouting, and identification of delayed products.

Implementation: Power of Data and Advanced AI

The foundation of our solution was the seamless integration of scattered data into a cohesive Google Cloud framework, utilizing components like GCS Buckets, Cloud Functions, and BigQuery for data storage and warehousing. Enhanced by the advanced prowess of CX Sense, our AI algorithms tapped into this centralized data for predictive insights and streamlined decision-making.

Data Organization & Storage

We began by consolidating the client’s scattered data into one unified system on Google Cloud. This initial move away from their old, fragmented system laid the groundwork for deeper and more cohesive analytics.

As part of this process, several key components were used:

• Google Cloud Storage (GCS) Bucket: This was used to store the raw data collected from the client’s various sources.
• Cloud Function: Pluto7 used Google Cloud’s serverless compute platform to automatically trigger actions such as moving the uploaded files into BigQuery.
• BigQuery: This was the staging area where files were loaded in their raw format, providing a scalable and cost-effective data warehouse.

Data Transport and Processing

We employed an asynchronous messaging service Pub/Sub to subscribe to the events that are triggered for each customer interaction. It offered durable message storage and real-time message delivery with high availability and consistent performance at scale. Based on the event data, Pub/Sub sends requests to the corresponding service in the service layer, and returns a response to the presentation layer.

Service Layer

A Service Layer was deployed in compute engine to internally interact with the database layer and retrieve data from Cloud Storage Bucket and Cloud Firestore. It facilitated multiple services, including Catalog Service, Inventory Service, Recommendation Service, Profile Service, Cart Service.

Presentation Layer

The Application Hosting (Presentation Layer) consists of an App Engine application that runs an Ecommerce site. For each user interaction, client service from the service layer triggers updates to the ecommerce site running in web browsers on multiple screens, displaying content corresponding to the user interaction.