Retailers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. With disruptions in the supply chain, rising inflation, changing consumer behavior, and fluctuating demand all combining to create a volatile and competitive market.
According to Gartner, 58% of retailers expect continued supply chain disruptions, while over 40% anticipate reduced demand and higher operating costs. UK retailers in particular are grappling with added pressures like National Insurance hikes.
In this environment, fighting fraud and improving customer experience are not just operational goals, they are strategic imperatives.
Tackling these issues requires a forward-thinking approach and a growing number of retailers are turning to Process Intelligence.
This empowers retailers with real-time visibility, creating a common language across systems and helps businesses rethink how work gets done. Process Intelligence brings together data from platforms such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Capital Management (HCM), and CRM tools to deliver a complete, end-to-end view of how processes actually function.
Industry Principal CPG/Retail at Celonis.
With this level of visibility, retailers can pinpoint inefficiencies, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.
This is especially powerful in retail, where thousands of processes run concurrently to meet shifting consumer expectations. Despite the volume of available data, most retailers still operate with siloed systems resulting in a lack of control and missed opportunities.
Process Intelligence helps make sense of these disconnected systems, enabling retailers to streamline operations, reduce fraud risk, and optimize omni-channel experiences. The outcome is greater operational agility and a shopping experience that builds customer trust and loyalty.
Tackling fraud at the source
One example of a large and growing problem is return fraud. Up to 15% of returns are fraudulent, and UK losses to return abuse total £1.3bn a year, according to a Retail Economics report.
Retailers can use Process Intelligence to zero in on fraud by identifying customers who repeatedly return items or products that are unusually and frequently sent back, enabling business leaders to act swiftly. Reducing fraud and abuse in the returns process can save millions or even billions over the long haul.
Process Intelligence is the perfect tool here, because returns processes involve lots of data, systems and and these processes are interrelated.
It offers much more than simply spotting fraud: prevention teams are using it to identify the break points that can trigger returns in the first place, helping to cut losses and keep consumers happy.
These insights help retailers avoid abandoned baskets, and ensure customers have the ‘perfect order’ every time.
Aligning Operations End to End
Improving customer service is a key aim across the industry and a task that requires constant attention and improvement to not only keep pace with competitors, but to get ahead. Having clear connection between front, middle, and back office processes presents a way to deliver this, with a bonus side effect of increased visibility across all systems.
It all starts with unified commerce. Retailers are often dealing with hundreds of tools and technologies, sometimes even offline spreadsheets. Integrating this into a process flow, end-to-end across the entire value chain is nirvana for a retailer.
That is the opportunity before us. With a single point of truth drawing in from all the relevant data sources, decision makers can have real-time visibility into where products and customers are. This allows them to provide a consistent brand experience, regardless of where shoppers are in their journey.
To do this, retailers need centralized order management and to integrate everything from order processing to customer data into this, so consumers are able to order online, or run to the store and pick it up, and find the best prices, promotions and benefits.
It’s all about decreasing the friction, with AI, data and analytics providing the opportunity to truly understand the purchaser, and offer ‘hyper-personalized’ services. This can mean tailored product recommendations, targeted marketing messages, custom promotions, all based on real time data insights.
Once retailers truly understand product demand, the data from Process Intelligence can help drive merchandise strategies, and ensure stores are not overstocked or understocked, meaning they can cut waste (for example from food going to landfill) and also ensure consumers are happy at every stage.
The Role of AI agents in Modern Retail
AI agents can help retailers to dig into the data unearthed by Process Intelligence, and provide a much needed injection of efficiency. For consumers, convenience and speed of delivery remain among the biggest demand drivers: this means that vendors who don’t have their order processes in check can be left behind. AI agents are particularly powerful in streamlining such processes.
One large global consumer goods company built an AI agent to extract payment terms from PDF contracts, compare them to terms in purchase orders and invoices, and recommend actions to accounts payable clerks. AI agents can also simplify the process of bringing data into systems, dealing with issues with orders automatically and alerting staff where needed.
Agents can help retailers automate workloads, and with Process Intelligence, businesses gain the understanding needed to do this effectively. By harnessing real-time product information from the business, AI agents can help make teams more efficient, for example by dealing with blocked orders and other day-to-day issues. Understanding the way processes truly work and how they interact is crucial to achieving AI-driven digital transformation.
Smarter Systems for a seamless retail experience
Process Intelligence lays the foundation for meaningful digital transformation in retail. By connecting siloed systems, it enables leaders to detect fraud, close revenue gaps, and make faster, more informed decisions.
It acts as a launchpad for AI, empowering intelligent agents to uncover efficiencies, reduce delays, and eliminate waste across the value chain. In an industry limited by fragmented data and legacy processes, the need for an integrated, intelligent approach has never been more urgent.
Retailers that can surface inefficiencies, and act in real time are better equipped to stay competitive, cut costs, and deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences. With fraud prevention, agile operations, and AI innovation working in tandem, Process Intelligence offers a clear path to a more resilient and customer-centric future.
Leading retailers are already putting it to work, bridging the gap between data and action, improving inventory decisions, automating routine tasks, and perfecting the customer journey. In a time of constant disruption, success starts with deep operational visibility and the ability to make smarter, faster choices that build lasting trust and loyalty.
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