The most commonly asked question in retail: How much?
The retail and wholesale industry relies heavily on not just accurate pricing, but compelling pricing. To gain more insights and better serve customers, retailers are leaning into configure, price, quote (CPQ) software to help them both streamline the shopping experience and land on the best possible pricing.
In retail, the meaning of CPQ is closely tied to process, specifically, the processes of configuring products, presenting prices, and empowering sales reps and customers to automatically generate quotes, which provides a better customer experience (e.g., by empowering customers to configure products) while helping ensure accurate pricing.
In this article we will explore the meaning of CPQ and how it can be used in retail and wholesale settings to improve accuracy, reduce errors, increase customer satisfaction, save time, money, and give customers a better shopping experience. We'll look at the benefits of using CPQ as well as potential challenges associated with implementation and emerging trends in the industry.
Benefits of using CPQ in retail and wholesale
The power of CPQ cannot be overstated when it comes to retail and wholesale operations. By using CPQ, businesses can streamline many sales processes and eliminate manual data entry, reducing lead times and resulting in more accurate product information for customers.
In addition, CPQ solutions can dramatically reduce sales cycles by quickly generating accurate quotes for customers–especially critical in the wholesale space. This ensures businesses close deals faster than ever before while still providing the necessary customization options that customers need to make informed decisions about what they want to purchase.
Streamlining the experience in retail and wholesale
It’s all about the customer experience, and CPQ can help streamline and optimize that experience, providing customers with real-time information, and empowering them with the tools to essentially create their own experience, especially in portals where customers can configure products according to their exact needs (which — win-win! — helps business owners save time and money).
Additionally, CPQ can help those same store operators reduce manual work associated with pricing and discounting, ensuring customers only see accurate information.
But that’s just the start of a killer customer experience as CPQ solutions are also capable of offering product recommendations based on customer preferences, helping.customers find what they need — and what they might not have known they needed — quickly and easily.
Putting the AI in retail with CPQ
It’s true: you can’t spell retail without AI. And currently, you can’t compete in retail without it either. An AI-powered CPQ system can automate manual processes such as cataloging, pricing rules, product recommendations, order processing and lead times, resulting in faster response times for customers.
More importantly, it can learn as it goes, providing customers with personalized recommendations based on existing preferences and real-time decisions customers may be making as well. And when you have a system that responds to customer needs in real-time, you have a system that delivers big wins.
Truth be told, CPQ has still not saturated B2C retail and wholesale spaces the way it has B2B markets. But that’s changing fast, and businesses have to adapt to the new reality and discover the meaning, and magic, of CPQ in retail.
