Retailers trust Google Cloud for their digital transformation

Currently, retailers require a digital strategy to triumph in the omnichannel world. Digital encompasses everything from the customer experience to the optimisation of costs, and the general technological capacity of a retailer is what will define its success. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused retailers, if they hadn’t already done so, to make a firm commitment to electronic commerce to guarantee their survival and compensate the enormous decrease in face-to-face sales.

Google is making significant developments and improvements to its Google Cloud platform so that retail sale companies take a definitive step towards the digital world, increase their competitiveness and can offer a streamlined response to the needs of their customers on any channel.

Let’s see how.

3 ways in which Google Cloud boosts retailers’ digital transformation

We have seen that technology is the fundamental piece of the digital transformation process of the retail sector. Companies in this sector should undergo this process quickly and successfully, since their survival largely depends on it.

At Google Cloud they are aware of this important challenge, so they have focussed their efforts on:

• Speeding up the growth of retailers’ digital and omnichannel income
• Facilitating retailers in focussing on the customer and on data
• Offering these companies solutions for the continuous improvement of their trading

1. Capturing digital and omnichannel growth and removing interruptions

To facilitate the maximum generation of business, Google offers interesting initiatives to retail companies.

• Retail acceleration programme, which helps them to optimise their website, have a unified view of data and generate greater traffic.
• Customer reliability engineering programme, which helps in the planning and implementation during periods of greater shopping activity.

In terms of tools, Google Cloud provides resources that capture multichannel digital growth and so that consumers can discover retailers’ products more intuitively. Notable in this regard:

• Google Cloud Search for retailers, based on Google search technology and artificial intelligence. It offers search results of high quality products for websites and apps.
• Google Cloud 1:1 Engagement for retail, a model and good practice guide to create solutions based on data on the Google BigQuery analytical platform quickly and profitably, that can later be used to create models of high customisation and recommendation based on this information.

2. Helping retailers to focus on the customer and on data

With digitalisation, retail companies have opened up to new markets and new ways of doing business. In this context, they face a double challenge: increasing their reach and better understanding the customer.

To start with, Google offers them Google Ads, which enables them to reach a wider audience and start to understand buyers in order to optimise investment in all channels. To study them and analyse them in depth, Google Cloud Platform offers tools such as:

• BigQuery. Combined with Google Analytics, it helps retailers to delve into the browsing behaviour of their customers, capturing data about web metrics and clickstream (Analytics), subsequently analysed in BigQuery to improve the recommendations to users and adjust the SEO. Data from Analytics can also be combined with own data, such as point of sale data stored in BigQuery to understand the conversion rates of the cart, for example.
• Looker. It offers analytical tools focussed on retail, which facilitate retailers’ decision-making.
• Machine Learning. Google Cloud Platform facilitates the creation of machine learning models to predict customer demand, improve accuracy of the inventory and prevent inventory excesses and shortages.

Talking of the supply chain, retailers should streamline it and increase the accuracy of inventory plans. In this regard, the response from Google Cloud Platform is:

• Services of purchase optimisation and demand forecasting, which enable retailers to plan the inventory and manage their supply chains to deliver appropriate products in the appropriate channels.

3. Drive operational improvement merging online and non-online

In this section, retailers are presented with a variety of challenges. Google Cloud Platform offers them a set of focussed solutions that help them to successfully overcome these challenges and increase their competitiveness. In this regard, let’s look at the main challenges and the solution offered by Google Cloud:

• Offering a coherent and unified multichannel shopping experience. This is one of the big challenges for retailers in the process of digitalisation. The response from Google Cloud Platform is:
  • Google Cloud API Management for Retail. Through this solution it is possible to integrate the systems that boost the different sales channels, so that retailers can offer the customer that coherent and unified shopping experience.

• Removing infrastructures and optimising transactions in stores. The digital transformation of the sector, in which the cloud plays a central role, means that retailers are starting to move away from their voluminous old hardware and manage their applications easily and in a centralised way on the cloud. The response from Google is:
  • Google Cloud Anthos for Retail. This solution helps retail companies to implement, configure and manage applications in each and every one of their establishments, with maximum performance and security.

• Encouraging collaboration among employees. Sharing information among the sales forces is a key factor in offering the best customer experience. Therefore, they need to implement a culture of productivity and collaboration amongst the workforce. In this regard, the response from Google is:
  • Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). The tools included in this productivity and collaboration suite help employees of retail businesses to be more productive and participative as a whole, which leads to a better performance in their work.
  • Chrome Enterprise. The business version of this browser enables retailers to implement shared devices that are secure and mobile. In addition, its features help any employee to log in and continue where they left off.
  • Android. Mobile devices with this operating system can boost the use of apps associated with the store for processes such as checking stock or collecting performance indicators of the establishments which enables them to offer a better proactive service to customers.

Solutions to continue growing

You have just seen how Google Cloud is boosting the transformation of the Retail sector, whilst also providing numerous benefits and business opportunities. Thanks to these and other reasons, Google Cloud is becoming the preferred cloud platform of retailers, above competitors like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (as shown by a recent study by Canalys).

At Intelligence Partner, as Premier Partner of Google, we have extensive knowledge and experience in successful projects in retail distribution companies. We make them available to you so that, as a retailer, you can definitively boost the digital transformation and competitiveness of your business.

The first step is to contact us and tell us about your requirements and objectives. Our professionals will offer you a proposal based on Google Cloud Platform 100% adapted to your characteristics.

Let’s talk?