Retailers should overcome data governance and security issues to improve the CX

In our recent HFS Pulse survey of 800 executives and decision makers from Global 2000 firms, retailers ranked data security and data governance as their major concerns when adopting emerging technologies. Data suggests retail companies focus on data, governance, and security as blockers to adopting emerging technologies. Emerging technologies open the door to consumer data, helping retailers glean insights and meet constantly changing consumer expectations and needs, but the opportunities don’t outweigh the potential losses or risks associated with being bold.

Having enough security professionals presents a challenge in retail, but not necessarily due to retention issues. Instead, the issue is with the large attack vectors and high-profile nature of their businesses. When working with partners exploring emerging tech, CIOs and CTOs must clearly articulate their needs for proactively managed security as part of the services they’d subscribe to. An innovative means of driving this will be having pricing or adoption models with a risk share, not just a gainshare model, incorporated into their IT contracts.

Many retailers, including the giants, have been using traditional data management methods for decades. When adopting emerging technologies, retailers face issues handling the large amount of data, including unorganized data, poor data quality, unreliable old data, and a lack of documentation. Teams with strong data governance skills will help retailers maintain their consumer data quality.

Staying legacy is easy, but it won’t address governance, security, and data long term. Businesses are moving—with or without IT support—and it’s time for both parties to work together on these issues.

The Bottom Line: The pandemic increased demand in e-commerce shopping behaviors.

To meet the increase in demand of tech-loving consumers, retailers must adopt digital technologies across their operations, including customer service, supply chain, and finance. Retail leaders must build or source skilled data management teams to survive the fast-paced competition.