Customers Demand Frictionless Experiences - This Is How Retailers Can Provide Them

Harsh Gulati
Infosys

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly – a survey report published last year found that 70% of US consumers will stop buying a brand after two negative experiences.

The good news is that by leveraging the latest digital technologies, retailers can meet customers' experience expectations with ease. But to get there, they must first overcome a few challenges: more than half of North American retailers are unable to stay in step with evolving technologies, and one in three says that current systems do not have what it takes to serve consumers properly. Legacy infrastructure aside, fragmented channels, organizational siloes and inventory blind spots prevent retail businesses from leveraging real-time insights to offer personalized, frictionless shopping experiences. With a considered and pragmatic transformation approach, retailers can resolve these issues to position themselves for success in the market.

Shift Incrementally to Modern Architecture

Big-bang transformation is speedy and cost-efficient, but carries high disruption risk. For most retail organizations, phased modernization, where legacy components are gradually replaced with modular, cloud-native architecture is the right way to go. Besides significantly mitigating risk, this strategy staggers investments, allows organizations to realize essential transformation benefits early, and enables implementation teams to upgrade processes in a progressive manner. When an apparel retailer replaced its monolithic legacy system with MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) architecture, it improved omnichannel engagement, accelerated go-to-market, enhanced customer satisfaction, and lowered total cost of ownership by 30%.

In order to deliver frictionless commerce, retailers also need to implement an AI-first, real-time and interoperable experience architecture that integrates customer, inventory and omnichannel data. This architecture must also unify behavioral, operational and contextual data signals — including customer intent and interaction data, pricing and promotion data, fulfillment and logistics signals, supplier and partner data, and realtime experience telemetry.

Implement a Unified Data platform

Disparate point solutions address specific needs but create data silos, high maintenance overheads and inconsistent data flows. Retailers that have accumulated such solutions over the years should consolidate them into a unified data platform to support integration and interoperability, and thereby cut IT maintenance expenses, reduce total cost of ownership, enhance system reliability and strengthen governance. Importantly, a unified data platform helps to activate real-time insights, essential for enabling highly contextual and adaptable experiences.

Enable real-time inventory visibility

Transparency is key to supply chain agility and resilience. Unified data hubs integrate data from point of sale, enterprise resource planning, warehouse and order management, and last-mile delivery systems to create a real-time, single source of truth across the value chain. Consequently, businesses start to forecast demand more accurately, personalize engagement in real-time and dynamically orchestrate inventory. Further, technologies, such as radio frequency identification, computer vision, internet of things sensors and advanced reconciliation engines, provide an accurate, real-time view of inventory to support proactive stock management, enable consistent promotions and take friction out of customer experience.

Get ready for agentic commerce

A leading consulting firm says that global agentic commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, with the US business-to-consumer (B2C) retail market alone seeing orchestrated revenues of up to $1 trillion by 2030. Beyond cloud-native architecture and unified data platforms, this is the technology retailers should prepare to adopt in earnest. Agentic commerce is about enabling autonomous, AI-driven and intelligent buying experiences. It represents the next evolution in digital shopping - where chatbots recommend products, and AI agents with the necessary pre-approvals and permissions find and compare products on different platforms, negotiate prices and buy the most suitable items on behalf of customers. Automating mundane and tedious purchasing tasks, agentic commerce sets the benchmark for frictionless retailing.

In short

By modernizing gradually, leveraging real-time experience architecture, implementing a unified data platform and investing in agentic commerce, retailers will be able to offer the kind of intuitive, seamless and personalized experiences that will not just satisfy but delight their boundaryless consumer. 

Harsh Gulati is VP and Head of Sales – Consumer, Retail and Logistics at Infosys

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Customers Demand Frictionless Experiences - This Is How Retailers Can Provide Them

Harsh Gulati
Infosys

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly – a survey report published last year found that 70% of US consumers will stop buying a brand after two negative experiences.

The good news is that by leveraging the latest digital technologies, retailers can meet customers' experience expectations with ease. But to get there, they must first overcome a few challenges: more than half of North American retailers are unable to stay in step with evolving technologies, and one in three says that current systems do not have what it takes to serve consumers properly. Legacy infrastructure aside, fragmented channels, organizational siloes and inventory blind spots prevent retail businesses from leveraging real-time insights to offer personalized, frictionless shopping experiences. With a considered and pragmatic transformation approach, retailers can resolve these issues to position themselves for success in the market.

Shift Incrementally to Modern Architecture

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In order to deliver frictionless commerce, retailers also need to implement an AI-first, real-time and interoperable experience architecture that integrates customer, inventory and omnichannel data. This architecture must also unify behavioral, operational and contextual data signals — including customer intent and interaction data, pricing and promotion data, fulfillment and logistics signals, supplier and partner data, and realtime experience telemetry.

Implement a Unified Data platform

Disparate point solutions address specific needs but create data silos, high maintenance overheads and inconsistent data flows. Retailers that have accumulated such solutions over the years should consolidate them into a unified data platform to support integration and interoperability, and thereby cut IT maintenance expenses, reduce total cost of ownership, enhance system reliability and strengthen governance. Importantly, a unified data platform helps to activate real-time insights, essential for enabling highly contextual and adaptable experiences.

Enable real-time inventory visibility

Transparency is key to supply chain agility and resilience. Unified data hubs integrate data from point of sale, enterprise resource planning, warehouse and order management, and last-mile delivery systems to create a real-time, single source of truth across the value chain. Consequently, businesses start to forecast demand more accurately, personalize engagement in real-time and dynamically orchestrate inventory. Further, technologies, such as radio frequency identification, computer vision, internet of things sensors and advanced reconciliation engines, provide an accurate, real-time view of inventory to support proactive stock management, enable consistent promotions and take friction out of customer experience.

Get ready for agentic commerce

A leading consulting firm says that global agentic commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, with the US business-to-consumer (B2C) retail market alone seeing orchestrated revenues of up to $1 trillion by 2030. Beyond cloud-native architecture and unified data platforms, this is the technology retailers should prepare to adopt in earnest. Agentic commerce is about enabling autonomous, AI-driven and intelligent buying experiences. It represents the next evolution in digital shopping - where chatbots recommend products, and AI agents with the necessary pre-approvals and permissions find and compare products on different platforms, negotiate prices and buy the most suitable items on behalf of customers. Automating mundane and tedious purchasing tasks, agentic commerce sets the benchmark for frictionless retailing.

In short

By modernizing gradually, leveraging real-time experience architecture, implementing a unified data platform and investing in agentic commerce, retailers will be able to offer the kind of intuitive, seamless and personalized experiences that will not just satisfy but delight their boundaryless consumer. 

Harsh Gulati is VP and Head of Sales – Consumer, Retail and Logistics at Infosys

Related Links

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Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

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Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

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Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

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