Each year, CGI meets face-to-face with business and IT leaders to hear their views on the trends affecting their organizations. In 2018, we conducted 132 in-person interviews with retail and consumer services executives to learn more about their top trends and priorities.

Laser-focus on improving the customer experience

Globally, as customer demands for seamless and highly personalized experiences intensify, the importance of becoming truly digital organizations to meet these expectations continues to be the number one industry trend. Protecting the enterprise through robust cybersecurity measures makes a significant jump and becomes the second top trend (84% compared to 70% last year). Optimizing operations— considered crucial to driving down costs and making the customer experience seamless—is followed by harnessing the power of data and predictive analytics as the next top trends.

Driving partnerships across the ecosystem

This year, 61% of retail and consumer services executives interviewed have a defined digital strategy in place. Of those with a defined digital strategy, 31% are launching, have operationalized or are realizing results with a strategy that includes their ecosystem partners, while 35% are at similar stages with internally focused enterprise strategies.

Culture change is top challenge to digital transformation

Once again, cultural change and change management remains the top barrier to digital transformation for this sector. In addition, the lack of agility due to complex and aging legacy environments continues to hamper transformation efforts.

Benchmarking internal IT and more

This year, business and IT executives interviewed ranked their satisfaction with their own IT organizations based on 10 key attributes of a world-class IT organization. On average, retail and consumer services organizations are aligned with overall global IT satisfaction levels. However, compared to many other industries, business leaders report significantly lower satisfaction levels with their internal IT compared to the satisfaction of IT leaders. The gap is particularly evident for delivery metrics and the alignment of services with the lines of business.

CGI can provide clients with a discussion of all available benchmarking, including each client’s positioning, on topics such as digital maturity, IT budgets, IT satisfaction, innovation investments and more.

Discover the insight

Download the 2018 CGI Client Global Insights retail and consumer services summary infographic for additional trend information. We also invite you to request a copy of our full report and to arrange a personal discussion with a CGI expert for further analysis and insights.

 

Also see the 2017 CGI Client Global Insights industry summaries.