Thinking Beyond Omnichannel Strategy
February 14, 2016 | Written by Sree Ravela
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
What’s common among popularly known brands like Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic, Bank of America, Disney Store, Sephora, Oasis, and Chipotle? They are all inspiring examples for omnichannel experience in retail commerce. But why did these brands focus on omnichannel strategies?
Single Channel and Multichannel
Before we dive deeper into what an omnichannel is and the advantages associated with that approach, let’s briefly review single channel and multichannel strategies.
Single Channel: Most retail businesses start with a single channel offering. While well-known chain stores like Walmart and Barnes & Noble initially offered only brick-and-mortar stores, modern companies like Amazon and Zappos started with only electronic retailing (e-tailing) challenging the traditional models.
Multichannel: Offering retail customers a variety of channels to make purchases successfully is often called a multichannel business. Over the last decade or so, customers have been enjoying the benefits of teleshopping and online ordering, where products get delivered to physical stores for pickup or at the customer’s doorstep. Banks have also gotten into this space, offering their account holders the ability to transact at their local branches, by phone, or via online banking.
What is Omnichannel?
Not too long ago, omnichannel became a buzz word in the retail industry. Omnichannel refers to a multichannel approach to sales that provides a seamless customer experience across all platforms, including online, mobile, and physical stores. It involves integrating various channels to create a unified shopping experience, allowing customers to interact with a brand in whichever way they prefer.
This is a significant shift to how customers were accustomed to getting engaged to the shopping experience. Omnichannel orchestrates a seamless experience for customers through consistent and tightly integrated operations. The customer can shop not only by walking into the physical stores, but also via online commerce, using an app on their mobile device, via emails, or through social media. To provide such a fluid customer experience, retailers need to lay out their strategies, aligning their Business and IT Operations, as well as gain better visibility of their inventory across different lines of business, product availability—all while providing a consistent and fluid experience. Over the last few years, some companies have successfully offered such an experience to their customers, while others have fallen short
Unified Commerce
Often times, CIOs and Senior IT leaders of retailing companies face the challenge of providing a robust enterprise IT platform that offers comprehensive and seamlessly collaborative with centralized digital assets, high reusability, lean and less risky for high volume real-time transactions, normalized system landscape for easy maintenance, responsive web & mobile design, tightly integrated point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide fantastic digital marketplace to their end customers. The unified commerce strategy aims to take away most of the pains and risks involved in operating with traditional commerce systems.
The retail industry has evolved from single-channel to multichannel, and now to omnichannel strategies, with leading brands pioneering seamless customer experiences across various platforms. This shift towards unified commerce presents both opportunities and challenges for retailers, requiring them to align their business and IT operations to provide consistent, fluid experiences across physical stores, online platforms, mobile apps, and social media. To overcome these challenges and create robust omnichannel platforms, CIOs and IT leaders must focus on developing centralized digital assets, ensuring high reusability, and integrating key systems like POS, ERP, and CRM to deliver an ideal digital marketplace to their customers.