Innovation doesn’t happen in an echo chamber. At Nextail, we believe that the best solutions are the result of a strong collaboration process with the retailers who ultimately use Nextail technology to make business-critical decisions.
That’s why we’ve developed the Nextail Beta Lab which is made up of Nextail fashion and retail customers who work with our teams to brainstorm, test, and review new solutions still under development, providing real world insights and feedback for continual improvement.
We openly invite Nextail customers to join the Beta Lab so that we can create win-win relationships. In exchange, Beta Lab participants get early access to new developments as well as the ability to inform solutions at the forefront of the new retail.
What does the Beta Lab partnership look like?
Building the future of retail together: The Beta Lab in 4 steps
In a typical collaboration, the Nextail team begins by gaining an in-depth understanding of your business processes, and will test and develop solutions with you all the way through to the launch of a new and/or improved development.
1. Discovery
To guarantee a successful win-win relationship in this co-creation process, Nextail works to gain a profound understanding of your business needs.
The Nextail team of retail specialists takes the time to analyze your current workflows to identify pain points and evaluate possible improvements. As industry vets, these team members can also help provide guidance and a clear view of retail best practices and innovation trends for making solutions that are better for retailers like you.
In this phase, we apply different frameworks and specialized tools to jointly define what “better” means for you and your team.
2. Ideation
Once we have identified opportunities for improvement in the Discovery phase, a multidisciplinary team of Nextail experts brainstorms different solutions and scenarios for reaching them. In other words, we consider what we can develop, create, or modify to reach these business goals.
Along with your team, we decide which possibilities seem the most promising, and choose those that will be brought forward, supporting them with visual prototypes.
By the end of this phase, we will have agreed upon what features the solution will have and prioritize their development.
3. Creation, validation, and iteration
We take an iterative approach to each new solution we develop, meaning that we test each feature individually. These analyses are performed by a team of Nextail data scientists with years of retail experience and who are focused on the most important aspects of your business.
We test new features with real data from your business and under real-life conditions and only share these results with your teams. This is a great chance to demonstrate the improvements that the new feature or solution will bring to your business.
4. Launch
Once it’s time to launch the new solution at the end of the Beta Lab collaboration, Nextail will remain fully involved in implementation that goes beyond technical support to ensure all stakeholders are satisfied with the results of the solution delivered.
Since we have a team specialized in change management, we can help you deploy the new solution throughout your organization, keeping an open feedback loop to take new needs from different teams and stakeholders into account.
And the collaboration doesn’t end there. Following launch, we keep you informed of our pipeline of continuous improvements to keep you one step ahead of the market.
Interested in joining the Beta Lab?
If you’re interested in collaborating through the Beta Lab, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll get early access to innovation, best practices, and help identifying improvement opportunities for your business.
If you’re an existing Nextail customer, please contact your Customer Success manager to get the conversation started. Otherwise, contact us to learn more!
We have ambitious goals for the Nextail end-to-end portfolio of solutions and the future of retail. We’re looking forward to making it happen together!
