Over the past 10 years or so, omnichannel commerce has gone from a buzzword to a necessity for retailers with serious skin in the game. For those who aren’t on top of it, however, it can be confusing as to what the payoffs versus implementation are.
Is it really worth it? Or is it all just industry hype?
To answer these questions, let’s take a close look at what omnichannel commerce is, what it isn’t and, most importantly, how it improves the relationships with your brand’s customers to ultimately drive sales and loyalty.
Omnichannel is just another version of multichannel commerce, right?
Wrong. Multichannel commerce is good at getting a product and experience across lots of different touchpoints. However, while a single customer may shop in more than one channel over time, they don’t typically move between these channels during an individual purchase experience.
Imagine, for instance, you could serve up the most relevant experience to your high-value customers and take advantage of their journey across channels to arrive at a purchase decision. This is what omnichannel commerce can achieve.
It uses valuable customer data to facilitate a unified and highly targeted shopping experience that’s seamless across all channels. It does so by integrating with your existing marketing and commerce platforms so that you can have a unified 360° view of your customer information, history and intentions whilst understanding inventory, staff and store locations across your own brand.
The outcomes?
By offering a data-informed, unified experience approach across all channels, customers can pick up on offers and brand experiences from one platform to the next – seamlessly. You’ll be taking them on a well-timed journey to improve their shopping experience, both online and off. You’ll also provide your agents with valuable information to better service customers.
Sounds like a lot of work? On the contrary. With the right clienteling software, you can have a centralised customer data system that integrates with your full suite of commerce software. It’s just up to you to devise your omnichannel retail strategies and implement them within your marketing platforms.
There are still a number of misconceptions surrounding omnichannel commerce, which create barriers for adoption. These include:
There are many highly successful brands in Australia that now have omnichannel strategies at the heart of their success. Three good examples are Woolworths, The Iconic, and Sephora. Take a look at why they are doing so well in our article, Wish Lists in Real Life: 3 Brands Putting Product Lists to Work.
The beauty of omnichannel is that it bridges systems and breaks down channel silos to manage customer experiences holistically. Your contact centre should reflect this in its ability to support engagement, implement CX strategies and continually optimise the customer journeys for personalisation. These should not simply be ‘online order triage departments’.
Deep analytics that comes from omnichannel models provide greater planning opportunities, product performance insights, distribution awareness and more accurate forecasting and reporting.
Transitioning to an omnichannel model is easier than you may expect, as it can be done on an ‘as needed’ basis. Most brands use a phased approach, introducing one line of functionality after another to test success for impact and efficiency while minimising disruption.
Omnichannel commerce identifies the customer behaviour journey across each channel – whereas CRM solutions often service customers on individual channels without regard for a personalised ongoing story.
Omnichannel also taps into the intel from your CDP and helps you get the most from your CRM software. Essentially, it should integrate your marketing technology stack to provide a 360° customer view, planning, reporting and strategy tool. Many brands that have both a CDP and CRM in place still can’t make that data available in real-time to the customers and staff, serving them in a way that actually helps them shop.
Omnichannel is truly consumer-centric – so it only uses zero-party data. A good omnichannel model will ensure that customer data is collected and used transparently and in accordance with permission and expectations set by the customers themselves. That is, they have full control over their data, can trust that it’s fully protected and can opt out whenever they want. What’s more, data accuracy is largely driven by the customers (albeit with prompts from your company to ensure it is up to date).
With changing trends, a lot of customers are now comfortable with trading their data for better service and tailored offerings. Especially if they trust the brand and the governance of the data.
Overall benefits of your customers having a 360° view of your brand include:
Similarly, you’ll have a single 360° view of each customer, giving you sound data to implement a truly integrated shopping experience – thanks to better insights and opportunities to micro-target unique groups.
With a well-designed omnichannel model, your retail team and agents should also:
Omnichannel shouldn’t come at the detriment of your existing marketing platforms; it unifies them to extract insightful data about customers and your business - so you can provide more relevant and targeted communications and have a deeper understanding of your own processes.
Ultimately it should help customers shop first before it helps your brand sell.
To successfully adopt omnichannel commerce, however, it’s important to have support from the entire business. This will ensure departmental KPIs that focus on channel optimisation won’t come at the expense of omnichannel experiences. That leaves training, business integration and structural design as being key to its success.
In our next article, we’ll discuss what a good omnichannel commerce model looks like and what you need to do to make it happen.
