5 reasons your retail business is in dire need of Dynamics 365

In modern times, a retailer is virtually indistinguishable from a warrior pitted against a formidable army attacking all guns blazing to capture his territory. It gets worse still as the enemy is unpredictable and the belligerents differ from one another, each having their unique line of attack, making it extremely difficult for the lone worrier to expose their bottlenecks.

You are a retailer fighting to retain your share of the battlefield (read market) while the enemies - the giant corporations, come hard at you with their tried and tested models with aggressive marketing and hard to match pricing. You are equally challenged by the plethora of MNC e-commerce giants on one end and your direct competitors, the array of retailers, on the other.

In the face of the intense battle, while higher revenue and market share remain the primary objective, retaining customers and current share assume utmost priority. A critical factor to achieving these is money - call it revenue, profit, or whatever you please. And Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for retail does it for you. It's intriguing how this software almost single-handedly wins you the retail battle.

Dynamics 365 for retail pinpoints 5 critical areas and helps you take precise measures, setting the revenue wheels in motion.

Right pricing

For today's smart customer, pricing is a decisive element that determines his judgment of purchasing or rejecting your product. But as a retailer, you must enjoy a decent margin to sustain the business. This dilemma is sorted by the price adjustment and discount features of Dynamics 365. It equips you with all market details necessary for price adjustments w.r.t. the competition. The feature of price groups helps you decide the optimum price of crucial entities like channels, catalogs, affiliations, and loyalty programs. It also helps you connect with suppliers offering the best rates.

Precise targeting

What's more tragic for small and mid-sized retailers than their ambitious and expensive marketing efforts missing the target, eliciting a lukewarm response from the audience? To avoid this, Dynamics 365 for retail, with intelligent analytics and machine learning capabilities, provide the much-needed platform to launch promotional activities aimed at well-defined audiences. Be it ads, promotions, or merchandise, you can shoot effective messaging and product recommendations at the intended group through multiple channels that include social media. You can track all ongoing activities from a dashboard and get a clear picture of the proceedings in the form of charts, graphs, and reports.

Reducing operational costs

There are times when high profits aren't possible owing to several reasons. During such periods, cutting down the operational costs is a judicious response. But how do you achieve this? Through measures like streamlining the workflow, fine-tuning back-office operations, speeding up daily activities, and automating repetitive tasks like data entry. Dynamics 365 is built for these and much more. It facilitates better cross-departmental communication and eliminates loopholes such as late and incorrect delivery by automating and optimizing most touch points in the customer journey.

Demand forecasting

To keep up with customer demands, you have to keep your finger on the market pulse. Dynamics 365 lets you do it with laser-like precision; enabling you to accurately predict near-future market expectations and be ready to cash in. This greatly eliminates the risks of unfruitful investments in dead inventory and empowers you to channelize the money into other activities. This is possible through Dynamics 365 advanced analytics that analyze data and enable you to make well-informed, data-driven decisions.

Customer satisfaction

For successful businesses, customer service is the stronghold and for losers, it's their soft spot. Dynamics 365 for retail lets customers reach out to retailers through multichannel engagements including social media. Dashboards showing purchase history help agents deliver better service. Self-service portals and knowledge base add to customer's product awareness and cut down cases reaching the team.

Last word

Today, aiming for mere survival doesn't suffice, going all out to dominate the market does. In the face of such colossal corporate clashes, smart work is the only way forward and the ones leveraging modern technology to the maximum effect have a distinct edge over the rest. When speaking of business technologies, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for retail, with its business-oriented features, leads the lot. It fosters lasting customer relationships, setting you up to dictate the competition and exceed your business aspirations.