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

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

Related Links

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Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

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Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

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Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

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Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...