Clarity Commerce Solutions

An up to the minute database of transactions is now achievable for even the largest of retailers. Applications which once drew upon separate silos of specialist information, tuned for purpose, can now have knowledge of customer behavior even before that customer leaves the store. This presents the opportunity to re-focus those applications to feed from a common data store, selecting the information they need, and realise the opportunities presented by having a purer source of data.

Consider Digital Receipts and Returns Management. Both applications are fueled from transaction data and need to react to that quickly. Both deliver strong business benefits in their own right in fraud reduction, efficiency, customer service opportunities etc. But if we consider the richness of the transaction data store we can see that each application is very specific in its use of data and a broader opportunity is being missed. For example, a traditional paper receipt is a physical token that a customer can use to prove purchase. An electronically rendered facsimile of the same provides a benefit in that the receipt can be easily, securely and efficiently accessed. Proving that the purchase was made is as simple as interrogating the data store to lookup the transaction record (and mark it as returned for security in a Returns Management context). Now we can consider the much broader possibilities of what we can do with the data: information links for nutrition / product information etc., warranty registration, reviews, blogs and commentaries. Now we are really adding value for the customer and the paper receipt, and its electronic facsimile, becomes a quaint anachronism.

So, if the data infrastructure is right (secure and reliable) then a rethink of the problems we are trying to solve should lead to a consolidation of applications. Two (or more) for the price of one?