Here are the three must-have strategies to help you adopt omni-channel retailing:

1. Customer-centric Approach

Building a sustainable relationship with customers is key to achieving omni-channel success. Retailers need to provide seamless access across web, mobile, and store channels for customers and convert these into richer engagement. To achieve this, retailers need to implement:

Personalized campaigns and promotions: Mere personalization is not a good-to-have strategy anymore; Relevance is the key to winning customer loyalty. To design and run personalized and relevant campaigns, retailers need to integrate structured and unstructured data, use advanced analytics to identify shopping preferences and buying behaviour. The predictive analytical capabilities enable retailers to launch personalized campaigns and promotions, resulting in improved loyalties.

Location-based customer engagement: New technologies such as NFC and iBeacon enable retailers to personalize customer engagement based on proximity. It allows advertisers to embed customer preferences and information with real-time context and send relevant notifications. Thus, location-based marketing connects the digital and physical marketing channels, and helps in deeply engaging mobile shoppers.

Social engagement: According to Hubspot, 71% consumers are likely to make a purchase decision based on social media referrals and as per SproutSocial 74% shoppers rely on social media networks to make purchase decisions. Social media marketing should be an integral part of retailers’ marketing strategy today. It provides an extensive platform to expand reach, connect with target audiences, and explore exponential growth. In addition to this, engaging with customers through social media channels not only provides an opportunity for social commerce, but also helps gain customer insights, by integrating customers’ social interactions.

Care everywhere: Retailers must care for customers across their journey – before shopping, during shopping, and post shopping through modern ways such as shopping assistance, one-touch support, recommendations, post-sales service, 24/7 helpdesk, and call centre support.

It is critical for retailers to stand out in the cluttered marketplace by effectively reaching out and engaging with their target audiences, while optimizing returns.

2. Unified Commerce Platforms

A survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, Ecommerce Europe and Ecommerce Foundation, in partnership with Demandware early this year, indicates that a high percentage of respondents are in favour of a unified commerce platform. Out of approximately 300 U.S., Australian, and European retail business executives, 53% of respondents said that they were going to deploy a unified commerce platform, an increase of 50% from last year. Adopting the right technology platforms can help transform the business model, and establish a centralized system that enables consistent service delivery across channels. Leading unified commerce platforms offer highly scalable and integrated IT solutions from engagement to fulfilment. The flexible architecture of these platforms supports the integration of multiple data sources and augments surrounding technologies such as e-Commerce, mobility, and analytics. The major advantages of adopting unified commerce platforms are:

Single view of customers across channels: Provides 360 degree view of customers regardless of the channels that helps enhance analytical capabilities, augment actionable insights, and offer personalized experience.

Inventory visibility across channels: Provides real-time and holistic view of inventory, optimizing operations, and reducing out-of-stock scenarios.

Optimized cross-channel order management: The integrated order management system enables seamless order flow across channels.

Enhanced order fulfilment capabilities: These platforms can be easily extended to fulfil orders through multiple ways, like home deliveries, click and collect, and temporary pickup locations.

Integrations with social media and online marketplaces: These platforms are flexible to integrate with social media and online marketplaces, providing complete visibility into order and inventory data.

Scalability: The unified commerce platforms are highly scalable in nature and supports business growth seamlessly.

3. Agile Work Environment

It is not enough to unify systems and build comprehensive consumer database spanning web, mobile, and store. To maximize potential, retailers need to eliminate the distinction between business units and reorganize team structures. For example, target and incentives should be re-designed to account for overall sales, than just measuring channel-specific performance. Agile work environment is about bringing people and processes in sync with technology to find the most appropriate and effective way of working collaboratively. To realize omni-channel imperative, businesses need to eliminate siloed work culture amongst channel-specific teams by creating cross-functional teams based on shared company goals.

Preparing for the Future of Retail

Achieving omni-channel excellence requires defining clear objectives and extensive executional, tactical, and strategic capabilities. Retailers who move away from siloed and legacy systems to modern unified solutions, offering highly-scalable unified platforms, have great potential to successfully adopt omni-channel strategies. Such platforms ensure successful integration of various touch points and offer great potential to retailers to gain competitive advantage.

Having said that, collaborating with strategic implementation partners with relevant industry-domain knowledge and experience will allow leveraging the partner’s expertise in implementing best-fit solutions and providing omni-channel retail services.

1. Customer Silos: Customer silos and lack of holistic visibility into customer database across channels make it difficult for retailers to understand and analyse customer data to offer contextual messaging and personalized experience. Being customer-centric is critical in today’s marketplace. Thereby, requiring retailers to know their customers and interact seamlessly with them across touch points based on their preferences.

However, the siloed and non-integrated customer data results in multiple copies of customer profiles, thus limiting retailers’ ability to understand customer behaviour and purchase patterns and offer context-based consistent customer experience.

2. Legacy System Silos: The silos within the legacy IT systems make it significantly challenging and complex to manage inventories across channels. Lack of clear visibility into inventory reduces inventory accuracy, frequently resulting in out-of-stock scenarios in one channel and surplus inventory in another channel. This not only negatively impacts inventory-to-sales ratio but also results in increased inventory costs.

These challenges limit the ability of retailers to identify, track, and manage inventory, ensure order fulfilment of their customers, and optimize supply chain across channels.

3. Organizational Silos: One of the primary challenges in adopting Omni-Channel strategy is siloed organizational teams working independently for e-Commerce and store channels in an organization. This makes it difficult to optimize cross-channel inventories, enhance operational efficiencies, and integrate multiple channels of businesses. According to a survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 27% of retail executives responded that organizational silos restrict their ability to offer seamless customer experience2.

The siloed teams not only limit collaboration, but also make it difficult to enable process innovation which is imperative for adopting Omni-Channel strategy.

The Building Blocks for adopting omni-channel retailing strategy

The omni-channel consumer expects consistent brand experience across channels and easy access to information at any given point of time. Technologies such as retail store analytics, beacons, and store fulfilment programs are rapidly transforming how retail stores operate and engage with customers. Therefore, retailers’ ability to leverage advanced technology is central to creating a compelling experience and delighting its shoppers.

It is imperative that retailers are equipped in numerous ways to connect with shoppers in real time. The following digital strategies are must-haves for the retailers who are looking to set the ball rolling for Omni-Channel retailing and staying ahead of the curve.

1. Seamless, consistent, and personalized experience across channels

With customers increasingly getting used to shopping across various touch points, they expect consistent experience across channels such as store, online, and mobiles. The only way retailers can reach out to customers is by blurring lines between online and physical stores. According to a survey by Forbes, 44% of respondents prefer to buy online and collect in-store in the US3. To keep up with evolving customer expectations, even the leading online retailers such as Amazon and eBay are partnering with retailers to offer “click-and-collect” services.

The key to engaging customers and gaining loyalty is to understand and enhance their experience continuously across channels. This requires integration of various data streams such as transaction history, website interactions, social conversations, and others, to enable data analysis and insight generation into customer behaviour. Leveraging customer analytics and location-based marketing is the key to offer personalized, relevant, timely messaging, and consistent in-store and online experiences. Location-based marketing is rapidly becoming mainstream, empowering marketers to connect with their customers with contextual messages, in the right place at the right time-thereby, enabling retailers to discover the potential of precise digital marketing strategies. This technology helps take advantage of geo-fencing that allows retailers to track the shoppers’ location, and offer compelling, highly-relevant deals to enhance footfalls to the store. Combining location with customer-buying behaviour and profile, social interaction, and shopping habits can go a long way in enabling retailers to offer relevant and focused deals, and enhance engagement and brand image. According to a Forbes article, location-based services revenue is estimated to reach $43.3 billion by 2019, a growth of about $12.2 billion from 2014.⁴

Another important strategy to entice customers and ensure stickiness is deploying omni-channel loyalty. Unlike conventional loyalty programs, this requires optimizing cross-channel marketing to drive cumulative loyalty outcomes. In order to be successful, retailers need to run ongoing campaigns that interact with and engage the customers across touch points. The key lies in ensuring non-intrusive, intuitive, personalized, and engaging deals offered in real time across customers’ preferred channels.

2. Single view of the customer across channels

Putting the customer at the heart of the business is crucial for retailers to offer seamless, personalized, and consistent experience across channels. To provide Omni-Channel experience, brands need to have a 360 degree view of their shoppers’ attributes, wants, and desires, across multiple channels. A holistic visibility into preferences, purchase history, shopping habits, and demographics can empower retailers to design and create consistent and unique retail experience for their consumers.

3. Inventory visibility across channels

Integrated inventory visibility is another critical factor in providing Omni-Channel experience. Cross-channel supply chain optimization reduces the possibility of out-of-stock situations. To adapt to the evolving market dynamics, retailers need to respond to the customer demands and standardize their inventory across channels. This can be done by deploying technology solutions that can provide comprehensive visibility into the inventory, allocate and replenish forecast inventory and plan order, and ensure fulfilment effectively across channels.

4. Optimized cross-channel order management

In-store pickup of online purchases is increasingly becoming popular amongst shoppers. This gives them the convenience of shopping online without having to pay high shipping cost or waiting for the product to be delivered. In fact, buy online and pick up in-store. Buy Online Pick-up in-Store (BOPS) is one such strategy which is a win-win for both consumers and retailers alike. Shoppers have the convenience to pick up their purchase from a store of their choice as per their schedule, whereas for brick-and-mortar retailers, this strategy provides a significant competitive edge over pure-play online retailers.

5. Seamless order fulfilment

Earlier, supply chain was considered to be a cost centre built only to deliver goods to stores. However, in an Omni-Channel marketplace, the supply chain has taken a centre stage and is one of the key factors that contribute to the shoppers’ experience. According to a Forrester report, 71% of Omni-Channel customers expect to view in-store inventory online, while 50% of them wish to BOPS. If the order fulfilment across any channel goes wrong, it can lead to consumer dissatisfaction and attrition. It is therefore critical to ensure seamless order fulfilment across channels. Retailers need to have complete visibility into order management to ensure on-time store pickup and deliveries. Comprehensive visibility can also help retailers optimize route planning for home deliveries and 3rd-party delivery locations.