Looking at today’s retail landscape, it’s easy to see why unified commerce strategies have been dominating conversations. The most advanced iteration of modern trade yet, unified commerce is the practice of synthesising a business’ customer-facing channels with its backend systems using a collection of best-of-breed platforms.
With our offline and online experiences increasingly blending into each other like peanut butter into jelly, it’s only natural that our shopping behaviour also mimics this.
A study by the Harvard Business Review, for example, revealed that 73% of shoppers preferred to use multiple channels when shopping. A Google study saw six in 10 users starting the buyer’s journey on one device and then continuing or finishing it on a different one altogether.
In a similar vein, a Salesforce report revealed that 67% of customers use several of the brand’s channels to complete one transaction, in a “start the sale anywhere, finish the sale anywhere” ethos.
Due to their exposure to the various shopping channels of the brand, customers expect to see consistency in the experiences they have across all of these touchpoints.
In a Boston Retail Partners study, 76% of customers opt for brands that maintain standardised pricing and promotions across all their channels. The same report also uncovered that 87% of customers want a personalised customer experience throughout the multi-channel buyer’s journey.
Further on, today’s customers have developed specific demands, such as access to real-time product availability at the stores nearest them or the ability to have a completely contactless purchase experience.
A multi-channel strategy is about ensuring a brand has many places where a customer can shop with them, while a unified commerce strategy acknowledges that many channels are used in a single shopping journey, so they can no longer be optimised in isolation.
Here are three important ways your business will benefit from it:
1. You will consolidate all your commerce activities
Adopting a unified commerce model means using customer experience platforms and practices robust enough to tie together all aspects of your retail operations.
The right unified commerce software lets you easily handle crucial tasks like tracking customer interactions across the buyer’s journey, organising online sales and promotions, and carrying out in-store order management.
You’ll want your unified commerce platform to help you:
Making this crucial pivot from disparate legacy systems to a unifying technology solution doesn’t only make the operational side of things easier and more efficient, it also brings a host of benefits for the IT side.
2. You will enhance your operational efficiency
Embracing a unified commerce model will enhance your operational systems like no other.
With better point of sale (POS) technology, for example, retailers can offer options such as mobile payments, click-and-collect, self-checkout, and guest checkout. This, in turn, increases path-to-purchase rates while compiling a deep well of transactional data for fleshing out customer profiles and purchase histories.
Real-time inventory information has emerged as a lifeline for the pandemic retail phenomenon that is click-and-collect. Another data perk of working with a unified commerce platform is having a clear inventory view across all business channels, accessible in real time. This helps staff ensure an uninterrupted supply chain flow and visibility for your in-store shelves, stock rooms, and online inventories.
Lastly, onboarding and managing staff is vastly simpler using a unified commerce platform. It not only makes it easier for employees to do their jobs, but it also makes it simpler for you to assess and identify workflow gaps needing improvement.
3. You will improve the customer experience with real-time insights
Having a unified commerce platform designed to catch all of the data influx from every one of your customer touchpoints is a leg up when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Still, data is nothing if you don’t put it to work. So if you have a direct line to your customers’ preferences and behaviours, the next step is to make sure that you listen and work towards providing them with exactly what they want and need.
It's one thing to use customer data to create smarter marketing campaigns, but it's an altogether different challenge to use customer data to actually help customers shop.
As Nordstrom CEO Erik Nordstrom shares, “I think it’s interesting that our online returns, the vast majority of customers choose to come in a store to do it. We have free shipping on our online returns. But they’d rather come to a store; it’s just easier than putting it in a box.”
“So customers are going to do what they want to do,” he continues. “Our job is not to try to coerce them into a channel or a certain experience that we prefer. Our challenge is to give them options and let them do what they want to do,” says Nordstrom.
Contextualising this means taking the information you get from your customer data platform, building a rich, fully realised profile for each and every one of your customers, and using that as a jump-off point for genuine customer relationship management.
An inspired idea for using this level of clarity in your customer data view, coupled with your operational connectivity, is to channel this capacity into bespoke order fulfilment and create a truly personalised customer experience.
For instance, the customer reaches out over Facebook Messenger or via phone call to ask for the closest branch they can visit to try on the size 9 sandals they have in their shopping cart.
Going the extra mile to have the sales associate at that branch ready and waiting with the exact sandals they want, plus a few different options based on their size and the pages they had previously viewed, is a good way to use the data and platform integration you have in order to win customer loyalty.
Likewise, if a customer tries on a few items but only purchases one of them, having those ‘maybe next time’ items added automatically to my online wishlist makes a whole lot of sense.
Change can be scary, but it’s important to know that as long as you have your customer’s best interests in mind, you can never go wrong.
Talk to us today, and we’ll guide you through how Omneo’s integrated customer experience and loyalty software can help you build meaningful experiences for your customers.
