Building a successful omnichannel retail strategy-Part 2

If you have read my previous blog Omnichannel Retailing: The need of the hour, you must already be familiar with the reasons and benefits of omnichannel retail. Still, just to be sure that we all are on the same page, let’s recap it a bit. The pandemic has brought a drastic change in consumer behavior, and just being available on multiple channels is not enough for retailers in the current scenario. The consumers increasingly expects personalized seamless experience across touchpoints and that’s why retailers need to build a successful Omni-channel strategy. In this blog, we will talk about how to do that.

Let’s go step by step

Know your market

You might think that knowing your market is only about identifying the demographics of your target audience, but that’s not the case. It’s also important to identify the platforms or mediums they usually use to conduct business with brands. This will help you to know more about their digital literacy, mobility, their buying behaviors, etc. so that you understand what should be prioritized in terms of marketing across the channels, inventory planning, and personalization.

Map the entire customer journey

After identifying your market, it’s important to map the steps the consumer takes – not just on the route to purchase but also their journey in case of return or exchange. According to Salesforce’s 2016 State of Marketing Report, high-performing marketing teams were 8.8 times more likely to use a customer journey strategy than underperformers with 73%of the teams reporting that it improved customer engagement. Basically, if you have properly mapped the journey of your customer interacting with you on different touchpoints, you can easily identify what obstacles the customer might face and this information can help you in optimizing your channels to provide a seamless experience to customers across the channels.

Integrate the sales channels

Roughly 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience wherever they engage. When they shop in stores, 68% of consumers say it’s absolutely critical or very important that store associates understand their personal preferences and needs. Integration between the physical and online customer interactions and transactions becomes imperative.

For this, you need to have –

• Headless commerce – The architecture separates the customer interface (front-end) from the back-end of an omnichannel commerce platform. The common back-end provides core commerce functions like product information, payment processing, loyalty & rewards management, inventory management etc. in a consistent manner across channels, while the customer touchpoints and interfaces can be customized as per the need of a specific customer interface. Adding a new channel or capability becomes easier and faster. I have personally been an advocate for headless commerce for quite some time. In 2016, when I joined Lenskart, the company was in the initial stages of transitioning to omnichannel. This gave me a chance to finally take an initiative to put headless architecture to a test by migrating the system to headless architecture. And unsurprisingly it made the company’s transformation to omnichannel faster, smoother, and more efficient.

• Unified Customer data platform – For customers to have a smooth shopping experience between one channel and another, a unified view of customers across all the channels is vital. This requires a common data platform that sinks customer information and activities from disparate sources & channels to provide a common source to all customer touchpoints. This common data platform can also be really helpful for your business in capturing richer information about consumers to drive better personalization.
• Mobile POS – In Omnichannel retailing, POS systems in stores should be much more than just a “Point of Sale” system. They need to be replaced with modern Mobile POS that enables store associates to access customer data (like a wish list, cart, preferences, applicable loyalty, and rewards programs) and inventory across the enterprise to provide a personalized and seamless shopping experience to customers. In my personal experience, a Mobile POS did wonders for customers’ experience when we launched an iPad app for Lenskart and rolled out iPads across all the stores.

Integrate supply chain strategy

If your supply chain strategy is integrated properly, the following things should be possible-

• Online order fulfilled directly to the buyer’s home
• An online order can be sent to a brick-and-mortar store for in-store pickup
• In-store purchase of an out-of-stock item can be delivered directly to the buyer’s home
• Online orders submitted via the e-retail channel can be fulfilled directly to the buyer’s home via the retailer’s distribution infrastructure.
• Order can be drop-shipped directly to consumers from a product manufacturer via an online retail storefront
• An online order can be returned at the store or vice versa.

All these things can only be possible with common enterprise-wide inventory management across all the channels.  This inventory management system can also leverage AI for predictive demand planning and risk forecasting to make inventory management more efficient to improve customer experience and make the fulfillment process faster.

Integrate marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy should ensure that the consumer has a positive, consistent experience on each channel. This can only happen if your strategy includes these key elements:

• Consistent, identifiable brand tone and vision
• Personalized messaging based on specific interests
• Content that is informed by past interactions and the current stage of the buyer’s journey

Integrate customer service and support

Successful integration will give your customer service agents a comprehensive view of a customer’s interactions; enabling them to answer queries more effectively and efficiently. For e.g., if a customer sends an email on Monday, they expect their phone call on Tuesday to be picked up exactly where they left off. Context is preserved across all channels to create a harmonious experience.

One emerging technology you can add to your strategy to make your customer service more efficient is Chatbots. According to recent data released by Gartner; 50% of enterprises are spending more on chatbots than mobile apps in 2021.

The motivation of Human Aspect

Employees across channels tend to act as a roadblock in a seamless journey of a consumer across channels, the reason being, the lack of motivation to promote other channels. That’s why it’s not enough to just integrate communication across channels, but also, it’s important to redesign incentive systems and OKRs to motivate employees to focus on providing the best consumer experience instead of being promoters or detractors of some particular channels.

Tips to build successful Omni-channel strategy

Once you have taken care of the individual pillars mentioned above, you can improve the efficiency of your omnichannel strategy by keeping my mind the following tips.

How the future of Omni-channel retailing look like?

In conclusion, I would like to talk about what’s in store for Omni-channel retailing in the future according to current trends. I believe the future of omnichannel retail strategy is going to be more and more about creating an exceptional and personalized customer experience. Instead of being everywhere for all people, brands will be there for the right customer when and where it matters to them as an individual. And technology will be the enabler of a better brand experience, not the end goal. In the future of omnichannel retail, the customer is the channel.