TECHNOLOGY
Front End
The Future of Grocery NCR RE TAIL CHIEF DAVID WILKINSON DE TAILS THE E VOLUTION OF THE PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL FRONT END. By Gina Acosta
PG: What’s your take on the state of grocery retail in 2022? s president and general manager for retail at Atlanta-based NCR, David Wilkinson is responsible for evangelizing the company’s next-gen NCR Commerce Platform. Wilkinson recently talked to Progressive Grocer about what he’s hearing from grocers, how NCR has evolved in the omnichannel age, and the opportunities in grocery e-commerce.
Progressive Grocer: David, how did you come to your current role at NCR? David Wilkinson: I’d been doing behind-the-scenes technology a little bit on the telecom side, and then on the data networking and infrastructure side, and then services. Then I moved over to NCR. At the time, 11 years ago, that was when we were acquiring Radiant and Retalix and really creating the company that we are today. So we’ve had a lot of different formations. Then our current leadership team came aboard. Mike Hayford came on as CEO, and we created the way we’re structured today: on our customer. Before, we were functionally aligned, and we kind of lost sight, honestly, of who we were serving. To address that, we had a business unit realignment. PG: How are you structured now? DW: We have retail, restaurants and banks — three businesses. Then we have a horizontal, a business unit called Payments in Network; that’s where we put the Cardtronics acquisition, where we put the payments and networking team. So there are four of me, four presidents of our core businesses. We have a bunch of shared functions. We share a service delivery team for field services, for example. But the businesses, the product management, the software development, the front-line customer support, who picks up the phone, all that lives within the business units. PG: How has that evolution worked out? DW: If you look back at just the retail business, in 2018 our Net Promoter Score [NPS] for retail was -23. PG: Wow. DW: In a negative NPS world, the unfortunate reality is that you have customers that feel trapped. But NCR is such a big company, such a mainstay in retail, that our customers didn’t leave us. But they were frustrated. So what we’ve done with this new alignment across all of our businesses is improve that NPS. Today, the
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NPS for retail is over 40+. So that’s really where we spent a ton of time, just getting more customer-intimate, getting focused on outcomes, and really becoming that more trusted partner and not making our clients feel trapped. Some of that’s through technology, and some of that’s just through hard work and doing the right thing every day.
DW: I think all of our grocery retailers around the world continue to have high volumes. Now, they’ll go through the peaks and valleys of what they’re doing, and they’re in an unprecedented inflationary environment. As I’m on the phone with grocery CEOs, the conversation is, “Look, we’re trying everything we can to not pass on all the inflation onto our customers,” but they can’t help but to do that in a lot of cases, with the pressures they’re facing. PG: It’s the costlier fuel, it’s the costlier wages, it’s so many things. DW: They say: “I can’t staff my stores. I got to pay everybody a little bit more. If I pay people more, that cuts into margins.” So they have a labor crisis and an inflationary crisis along with a period of super-high volumes, and they had to stay up and running during the peak of the pandemic, and react very quickly to everything that was going on. All that to say, grocery is still very strong, and it’s just a different state of challenges. For us as a technology provider, we’re providing all the tech and services to really run the store. We perform a critical function, where we can help offload some of those worries. I mean, our whole end state is, “Let us worry about the technology, and you worry about all the other things you got to worry about.” PG: And their biggest challenge right now is? DW: Their big challenge is, how do we continue to meet consumer demand in a world where we’re getting squeezed on cost, on inflation? And then, honestly, what they’re facing online, whether it’s a pure-play online retailer, or predatory tactics of aggregators and other people that are trying to disintermediate the brick-
