At the Central Asia Retail Week Forum there was a session of IT in retail, where experts from IT departments of large retail companies told about what technological innovations help to develop business processes of retail chains.
Dmitry Vypritsky, IT Director of M Cosmetic, explained the importance of chat-bots for different areas of retail chains’ activity in three key components:
- customer service,
- marketing promotion of products through external resources of the company,
- effective internal communications.
Dmitry also noted that chat bots will not be able to handle emotional appeals (complaints) from customers and make decisions on the type of issuing/not issuing credits for products.
Among the significant advantages of using chat bots for processing requests the expert noted: reduction of equipment downtime and lower costs for its maintenance.
The IT director also warned about several points to be fulfilled when implementing a chat-bot system in a retail company:
- filling the chat-bot with content, (branches of scenarios and possible dialogues with customers),
- maintenance and constant monitoring of chat-bot systems,
- operational training of employees to work with chat-bots
Rafail Salikhov (Development Director, Lenta IT Directorate) then turned the discussion to management decisions in decentralising IT staff in a large retail company. Two targeted actions in the decentralisation of Lenta’s IT department were:
- Changing the team structure – independent domain teams were created, which were given the authority to make key decisions and responsibility for business results;
- shifting the focus of product development to the customer.
Rafail said that by decentralising the business, the efficiency of IT services had improved by 25%
Then the moderator of the session (Otabek Nasyrov, member of Cyber Park and AICA expert council) touched upon the topic of future trends in IT developments in retail companies from Uzbekistan.
Chairman of IT ALLIANCE Association Rustam Toshov drew attention to such key trends as:
- multichannelisation,
- personalisation,
- computer vision for recognising goods on the shelves.
He also predicted what innovations for retail will appear on the IT market of Uzbekistan very soon.
- Automation of customer experience – artificial intelligence,
- smart devices for tracking stock and improving logistics – the Internet of Things,
- transparency and security of transactions, improvement of supply chain management – blockchain. At the end of the session, all experts agreed that seamless integration of IT in retail should be done as quickly as possible.
