If you’ve made it out the other end of 2020, first of all, congratulations. While retail titans like Arcadia Group have been brought to their knees for lack of customer knowledge and agility, plenty of high street players have shown us remarkable resilience. In fact, for some, this sudden necessity to adapt has fast-tracked opportunities within their customer experience which they thought were years down the line. The past 12 months have pushed businesses to take a step back, reflect and revaluate. So, let’s go back to basics:

What makes an excellent customer journey?

• Skipping long queues with a self-service option?
• Ordering a pint without having to budge from your seat?
• Easy returns across channels?

The truth is, it depends who your customers are – and even then, their demands are always changing.

For the world of retail and hospitality, 2020 really hammered home the old adage, “the only constant is change.” Now it’s clearer than ever – no matter the size of your business, there are two things you need to build a successful customer experience:

1. Knowledge of your customers’ ever-changing demands
2. The agility to meet those demands

The old normal is dead and buried, and the high street is slowly but surely making its peace with adaptation as a culture rather than a process to get from point a to point b. If adaptation and innovation are baked into your ethos, then we’re right there with you. However, as many businesses will have become painfully aware of through this turbulent year of rapid and ever evolving needs, retail tech isn’t. Finding the agility to meet customer demands has been a mammoth task, and it’s highlighted a flaw in the current tech landscape. A while back, patching up systems when a new customer need popped up was a viable approach. But much like you, K3 has gone back to basics, and our customer base has spoken, we need a system built for sustainable innovation. Well, here it is: K3 Imagine.

How it works:

We’ve decoupled our hardware and our software. Simply put, this means you can plug and play legacy systems and hardware with new bleeding edge POS software and ERP solutions, while keeping everything connected in real-time on our intelligent, cloud native Imagine platform. This is what gives you the ability to innovate without major disruption or costly system replacements.

What it means for your customers:

The customer journey is connected, flexible, and customers can reach you on their terms.

Meeting customers where they want to be met is an aggressive technology stance, even with the most flexible solutions of old. The K3 Imagine headless commerce platform provides a fantastic change infrastructure to meet this challenge. Whether you’re a small business looking for a simple solution to get you started, an innovative SMB looking to grow your offering, or a retail giant looking for a partner in innovation to simplify your legacy systems and create bespoke tech.

K3 Imagine offers our clients the ability and agility to develop and test customer experiences before making vast investments, and to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world quickly, and without taking on huge risk.

Having a truly headless capability allows businesses to harness the truest form of creativity, one un-shackled by pre-existing limitations of technology built for the past.