Retailers and consumer goods companies are trying to navigate a confusing new world. IT is overburdened, stakeholders are frustrated, budgets are deflating, and initiatives face delays.
To meet the needs of the business and deliver success now, IT and business teams need an automation model that can help:
- Deliver personalization at scale
- Launch new markets and channels faster
- Extract actionable insights from data
- Onboard partners faster
- Upgrade IT and data security
The traditional approach to automation was to put IT at the center of all things automation and integration. Unfortunately this did not work. Business teams needed to move quickly, so they built automations on their own and didn’t always have time to communicate with IT. This resulted in brittle, unmanageable architectures that have low visibility, making it hard to adapt and evolve over time without breaking down. So, how do we solve a problem that begets problems?
Business and IT must align on priorities
Retailers know delivering personalized customer experiences is a top priority for customers. To achieve this goal, business and IT teams need to align. IT and business teams are most productive when working together. Here is an example:
A VP of digital marketing wants to deliver a more personalized customer experience at checkout by recommending other products, but the customer data is siloed across too many systems. Maybe the customer purchased in-store or through a third party so the data isn’t captured in the e-commerce platform.
The VP should initiate a strategic partnership with IT to tackle the task at hand, like in this case to consolidate customer data across systems such as in-store POS and e-commerce to build a more unified view.
With MuleSoft, retailers can integrate any system and automate any process with a single view of each customer. This further enables the e-commerce systems AI to make accurate recommendations.
How MuleSoft empowers business teams
IT and business teams are most productive when they work together. MuleSoft Composer enables this relationship with clicks, not code. Business teams can create their own automations and integrations for tasks like triggering a promotional email after key products are purchased online. IT gets time back and business teams can maximize agility – all while monitoring and governing secure integrations and automations on the backend.
Retail solutions that meet the needs of business and IT
With the MuleSoft Accelerator for Retail, IT can jumpstart retail initiatives that align with business priorities such as:
- Creating a single shopper view by using MuleSoft pre-built APIs to integrate customer, sales, and product data across multiple systems.
- Delivering personalized marketing interactions to customers by utilizing best practice templates for messaging and promotions across platforms.
- Producing reliable, real-time inventory data when integrating sales and product information and eliminating manual employee reporting.
MuleSoft makes the difference
Companies that want to deliver success now know they need to align priorities across business and IT, and leverage a composable tool that empowers both IT and business teams to integrate and automate securely. Curious to learn more? See what MuleSoft can do for retail and consumer goods companies.
