How ready are you to effect change in 2025?
2024: another year of pressure for retailers. As if running an online retail business wasn't already a circus, retailers had to brace and hold under the extra weight of keeping cash flowing while customers pinch pennies – The British Retail Consortium highlighted a challenging Q4 for UK retailers, with a modest 0.4% growth and declining sales volumes. (Plus an additional ￡7 billion in expenses).?
Meanwhile, Temu and the like are out there stealing your lunch money.
2025 can’t be more of the same. This means retailers have a job to do: prevent key issues and challenges from reoccurring next year. Challenges that invariably lead back to retail technology.
Bringing in tech that helps you hang onto your customers will be crucial. But first, you must be brutally honest about whether you’re equipped to do it.?
So, we’ve created a swift 15-question change readiness scorecard that will give you frank feedback on your ability to effect change in your business.?
This article covers why this survey is important and contains everything you need to tackle it.?
This scorecard will assess:
Once you’ve completed it, you’ll gain valuable insights into your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement regarding tech adoption and change readiness.?
Because change is coming.?
You can try the scorecard now if you know what you’re about and are ready to jump in.?
Or you can keep reading to understand why this is critical and 100% worth your time.
Why it matters: where retailers face technology change in 2025.
Retail in 2025 lives and dies by technology. Market-driven challenges that can only be addressed through technology advancements continue to back retailers into a corner. Heightened pressure on the bottom line, growing supply chain complexity, hyper-personalisation, and the ‘AI acid test’...retail technology change is unavoidable.?
Flatlining growth calls for improved back-office technology.
Look to the luxury sector for an example (one of many). Marked for a significant slowdown with expected growth in the low single digits, significant demand shifts mean luxury brands must adapt operations to reduced demand. Enhancing supply chain transparency and sustainability will be crucial, and brands will seek retail tech like advanced demand forecasting and leveraging predictive analytics and data-driven tools to maintain profitability while minimising waste.?
Demand for more (and more enjoyable) ways to save.
Continued purse-pinching caused by inflation and recession worries means 65% of consumers rely on or plan to leverage loyalty programs to save money. Retailers will seek to shore up their loyalty and retention technology to hold onto revenue this year. However, in line with consumer expectations for a seamless shopping journey, they must ensure every thread they add to their complex web of technology works together. Systems need to communicate. They need to cooperate.?
Keeping up with technological advancements.
With their imaginations galvanised through its proliferation, retailers will pursue new creative implementations for artificial intelligence (AI). Ones that drive meaningful efficiency and customer benefits while they look for long-term ROI. Much of that ROI will still come from ways to drive efficiency, speed up decision-making, and automate repetitive tasks – retailers are already implementing generative AI applications behind the scenes to improve operations and are using AI chatbots for performance testing analysis. Many now look to AI to enhance shopping experiences – Tesco plans to expand its use of AI to personalise shopping experiences, aiming to attract and retain a more tech-savvy customer base.?
This is by no means an exhaustive list. But the point is clear: digital technology is a deep foundational element of retail. And retailers face several challenges that are making it deeper.?
Challenges retailers face with technological change.
The change readiness scorecard is designed to help you prepare and shore up your defences against inevitable challenges that technology change brings. Challenges like:?
The retailers that will win in 2025 will foster a culture of innovation and adaptability and build resilience into their change functions to overcome these challenges. The Change Readiness scorecard will help you understand how ready you are to implement retail technology change so that when you take the leap, you’ll succeed more than you fail.
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Understanding the change readiness scorecard.
We designed the Change Readiness Scorecard to answer one question retailers continually ask:
How can I actually carry out successful change to help grow the business amid difficult circumstances??
The scorecard evaluates your organisation's preparedness for change and covers five key areas. Each of the five sections contains just three questions. Once completed, you’ll receive a scorecard detailing a breakdown of your capabilities, complete with suggestions on improving each area.
Let’s break it down real quick.
1. Current situation?
This first section serves as a baseline. It evaluates the foundational state of your existing technology infrastructure, focusing on its effectiveness, integration, and resilience. It will uncover whether your current systems adequately support your retail operations and enable collaboration across functions.
2. Confidence level
This section examines your ability to implement and manage technology changes successfully. It assesses your past performance, project delivery reliability, and confidence in handling ongoing updates and improvements.
3. Change readiness
How ready are you to implement technology changes effectively? This section emphasises the clarity of your technology roadmap, the sufficiency of your resources (processes, tools, and people), and your confidence in validating changes before implementation.
4. Delivery maturity
Next, we will assess the maturity of your technology change delivery approach. This section examines whether you have a dedicated budget for digital initiatives, use best practices for delivery and testing, and to guide change-related decisions.?
5. Future readiness
This section evaluates your ability to adapt to future technology demands. It assesses the scalability of your systems, your confidence in integrating new technologies, and your skills to enhance your technology infrastructure for business transformation.
So, how ready are you to effect change in 2025?
Change is coming. Hell, it’s here. Staying still is not an option. After a year of relentless challenges, you might feel like your tech function is holding you back. Maybe your change process is slow. Maybe you’re drowning in data but missing insights. Or maybe you’re just unsure where to start.
To fully exploit technology and make 2025 a better year, a year not plagued by crippling worry over the bottom line and job stability, retailers must understand (and be brutally honest about) the robustness of their IT function.?
We know, because we help frustrated retail leaders build a fast, repeatable, and consistent change pipeline so you can make effective decisions based on accurate data. And they make decisions faster, and land change faster (and better) than their competitors.?
And it all starts with this scorecard.
It’s free. It takes around ten minutes (probably less, now you’re prepped for it), and you will get your personalised results straight to your inbox.?
Ten minutes of your time now for a year of repeatable, measurable results. Faster decisions. Smarter investments. And real, impactful change that sticks.
Not a bad trade, is it?
About Spike
Spike help frustrated retailers to build a fast, repeatable and consistent change pipeline using our innovative testing solutions so they can make effective decisions based on the accurate data we provide. We excel at the difficult testing problems bringing deep technical expertise, a fresh perspective and pragmatism to ensure you get the value you need.
Find our more at www.wearespike.co.uk.