Mankind has witnessed one of the fastest ever adoption of technology in the history. The whopping smart mobile devices sales suggests that customers are becoming more and more tech savvy and prefer to remain connected with the world at all times.

What is SMAC?

SMAC stands for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, all this on an integrated technology stack. This is a platform to connect the technology end user with the information later one wants. The outcome of this concept is also to connect the businesses with the consumers by being more connected, collaborative, real-time and productive. The real time information is used by businesses for being dynamic and provides what the market wants.

The industries which utilize most of the SMAC benefits are:

• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Telecom
• Healthcare
• Market Research and Consulting firms

This blog talks about how retail vertical is leveraging the benefits of SMAC platform.

The number of Smartphone sold around the world has touched 1 billion units in December 2013, a growth of around 40% when compared with sales of previous year. Consumers in the retail industry are going mobile too, and consuming a lot of social media applications to decide on their choice and preferences.

Retail companies have started studying the click on likes and dislikes, choices and preferences and many other important attributes. These are captured through usage of mobile devices and analysed via high end analytical platforms to predict the retail demand, like Big Data.

Globally retail industry has consumed IT worth of around USD 35 billion. This is all to connect with the consumer better and shift focus from scale of production to customer satisfaction.

Majority of multi format physical stores and e-commerce sites are consuming SMAC benefits to know their end consumers better. There is a visible ecosystem between consumers and businesses are coming up, which is aiming to benefit both sides.

For instance, Retail giants are using the SMAC platform for following top reasons:

• To help customers to know the inventory status for desired products in the stores
• To help new customers to locate the stores
• To inform customers with the latest offerings
• To better engage customers through unique loyalty programs

From a business perspective, businesses can now predict what, when and most importantly at what price, customers want their services. Apart from this, an efficient store planning and lower shelf life of the product are few of the key outcomes.

Facebook and Amazon are planning to come up with their own smart devices to service customers better and give a richer experience of the offerings.

The era of hyper connectivity has begun and is expected to result in end consumer’s delight. 

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