PROMOTIONAL RESEARCH

He spoke as part Retail Week’s recent virtual panel discussion, Retail’s 2020 success stories – practical tips to shape your strategyproduced in association with Rackspace, to talk about the motoring and cycling specialist’s digital transformation that has seen it combine its various websites into one ecommerce site and place a greater focus on data. 

”One of the biggest obstacles and hurdles we had to overcome was chasing the next thing and moving too far from where we intended to go in the first place,” he said. In the wake of the pandemic this year, he said it was easy for retailers’ digital transformation programmes to be blown of course. 

He was joined on the panel by Studio Retail digital director Chris Chalmers, Google Cloud retail industry manager Becky Posthlewaite and Rackspace chief technology officer for EMEA Simon Bennett. 

Posthlewaite said while most retailers focus on board-level buy-in of new technologies, it was equally important to ensure buy-in across the organisation and particularly from end-users in order for implementation to be successful. “Let your business users lead the tech and not the tech lead the business,” she said. 

Bennett added that retailers need to run an end-to-end gap analysis to understand how digital transformation plans might impact the legacy systems they already have in place.

These are just a handful of the tips they offered to help retailers navigate the current market and realise their digital transformation plans. 

To find out more, register to watch the full event for free. You will discover:

  • Where to start your transformation journey and what targets to set
  • Top tips for successfully implementing new tech
  • The big hurdles retailers have overcome as they evolve
  • How you can make change happen quickly