Robotic Process Automation(RPA) in Retail Industry

Retail meets RPA

Retail is a highly competitive industry where old and new players equally vie for the customer’s attention. According to an industry report by eMarketer, global retail sales are set to reach $27.7 trillion by 2020. It includes both brick and mortar, and e-commerce shops, which means the competition is only going to become intense. However, with increasing competition, retail industries have to work constantly on improving the shopping experience for the customers.

There is also an additional responsibility of managing the internal processes such as the inventories, customer complaints, and business operations. Considering the mounting pressure on the retail companies to provide excellent customer service, the scope for human error also increases. Retail industries realize the potential reputation damage caused by human error and are now looking at integrating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in some of their highly process-oriented functions.

Benefits of implementing RPA in Retail industry

Helps in automatically updating the inventories
Helps in automating business processes
Helps in updating number crunching sheets such as the sales reports, marketing, and sales analytics report, and balance sheets
Improves operational and technical efficiency

Product Categorization

Product categorization is one of the most important and the most ignored functions of the retail industry. There have been instances where a particular product is available on an e-commerce website, but the customer fails to find it owing to poor product categorization done by the retailer. Proper taxonomy is essential for a seamless customer experience. However, with millions of products sold in e-commerce or brick and retail shops, the scope for human error also increases. Retailers are now realizing the scope of improving the process and have slowly started integrating RPA to assign attributes and categorize products based on the customized product mapping rules. The automated process of product categorization helps in giving proper taxonomy to every product, which allows the customer to find them when they search for it.