Omnichannel Retail & Customer Engagement

What is Omnichannel Retail?

‘Omnichannel Retail’ is the concept of providing a common UX (user experience) to customers across multiple channels

‘Omnichannel retail’ is a business model in which all existing channels become completely integrated to offer customers a seamless shopping experience.

Importance of Omnichannel Approach

Omnichannel Retailing – brings shoppers a seamless shopping experience when blurring all boundaries among channels.

Personalized Customer Experiences Improve Loyalty – The major benefit that comes from offering customers an omnichannel experience is a fact that it empowers users to personalize their own experience and finally customer holds the key here to decide and take the call.

Freedom of Choice – Not every single person wants to be held using either the phone, computer, tablet, or chatbots

No Channels Are Left Behind – it helps and allows to merge of the online-offline channels, in result can improve the customer experience with the brand or service offerings

Diversify Audience Through Different Channels – When implementing multiple channels at once, you reach out to different leads, opportunities, and customers who only interact on certain channels. You can chain that audience by allowing smoother transitions/integrations between talk, text, chat, and email channels. This is especially important for support agents because they can resolve tickets faster by looking at certain channels in and out of the office.

What customers expect is meet –> need – CROSS-CHANNEL INVENTORY VISIBILITY option gives retailer to fulfill the requirement then and there itself results in a delighted customer.

Omnichannel KPIs

The Omnichannel Customer

Customers are now becoming omnichannel consumers as nowadays they want the freedom of choice against a monotonous approach of only going to market to shop instead now some of them wanted to spend time on mobile or netsurfing to decide what to buy.

Now customers are more tech-savvy than before which is pushing retailers to adapt as per these new increasing breed of omnichannel customers, So they need to change around & orient their operations, their systems, and interface accordingly.

There is no one solution that will help every single retailer. That’s why the omnichannel customer is a lot more than that. It is more than just a customer that sometimes buy online and sometimes buy things in the store & enabled/adopted by a number of different technologies.

Omni-channel customers can introduce Variability in their retailing processes in four different categories. The first one is how they arrive when they arrive. The second one is specific requests that they make, ask the retailer and this request may be completely off from what the retailer was hoping for. A third one is how much effort the customer is willing to make in the retailer processes. Many of the retailers are taken into consideration that the customer will do part of the task. And finally, each customer has its preferences, so when the retailer’s design the process to satisfy customers, this satisfaction might be affected by how the customer perceived the effort done by the retailer.

The Greedy Customer – Now the customer is quite educated & extremely greedy when it comes to pulling out the value proposition from the purchase he/she made and needs complete solution including very friendly return policy without looking into the complexity of channel matrix in organization

Omni-channel Demand Full-filling

Supply chain the heart of Omnichannel Fulfillment

Retail is all about the customer experience & Omnichannel retail hasn’t changed that, but it has expanded on it. For retailers, it’s no longer just about the in-store experience now. It’s about an end-to-end experience that begins whenever and wherever the customer orders, that is either in the store, on a smartphone, on the store’s e-commerce site. The final—and maybe the most important—part of the experience is flawless fulfillment of demand.  

Did the customer get his/her merchandise when it was promised?      

Is the order accurate?

Does he/she love it?

Omnichannel Customer Journey Map Choice 

Customers are fickle, They’re demanding- and we want our marketing messages to always be relevant. Idea is to design a process of the right message that gets to the right person at the right stage in the entire shopping value chain.

Omnichannel Data usage –This is why omnichannel marketing automation is critical to personalizing the customer journey. While it’s true that automation and personalization seem to be antonyms, the fact is that you can’t have one without the other. Omnichannel marketing helps channels to compensate each other based on various point of sales in the shopping value chain. For a truly personalized experience, using omnichannel marketing just makes sense.

Break down the customer journey into its separate steps.

Visitor: When a customer first discovers your brand and site/Store

Subscriber/Store Visit: When a customer has signed up/Window shopping

Shopper: When a customer has returned to your site/store to browse your products or to buy it

Customer: When a customer has purchased from you

Repeat Customer: When the customer repeats the process all over again from any preferred channel of his/her choice (offline or Online).

Omnichannel is here to stay

The omnichannel experience is imperative in today’s trust economy. Customers these days are viewed as the ones in power and command and decide the road map for brands to develop services and products.

The future of brands and retailers both online and off, will see many creative partnerships to compete and stay relevant in the age of digitization.

What these strategies will have in common is that they’ll work with increasing flexibility across multiple channels — they’ll be omnichannel.

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