Good retail businesses offer their product via multiple retail channels, including online, on-site, and mobile technologies and apps, great retail businesses offer integrated retail channels. This is the difference between multi-channel retail management and omni channel retail management.
Omni channel retail management is designed to not only manage sales in multiple channels but to integrate the channels together so that sales people and customers experience a fully functional spectrum of sales capability. Rather than having to leave one store, go home, and shop online, only to discover that the desired product was a mile away, customers or sales reps will be able to locate the product immediately via a mobile app and finish creating a delivery order from one store for another. This is omni channel retail management, and it provides the following benefits.
Multiple channels of communication create different streams of information your business must understand to meet customer's needs. Analytics provides the capability to understand, quantify, and review communication with customers. With cross-channel capability provided through omni channel retail management, you can interact with customer data no matter where it is generated from and cross-reference it with other data generated from similar customers across platforms.
A customer-centered viewpoint gives retail businesses the opportunity to manage customer relationships across all channels. In most business systems, customers are not managed as single entities across all channels: from the web to the retail location and on the app. With proper management, including retail management systems, user tracking through customer rewards membership, and other business systems, interactions with customers track across all platforms.
This prevents the loss of information, increases the quality of customer service, and gives customers quality rewards no matter where or when they shop.
Managing every channel for each customer means that individual transactions are no longer lost in the mix. From tracking when customers are more likely to purchase certain items to tracking demographics of loyalty customers, each transaction contains great potential to manage business systems.
With proper customer and transaction analytics in place, marketing and retail experiences is free to focus on select target markets. Customers who buy the generic brand of diapers in a store can be given coupons for the higher priced designer brand of diapers to both bring them back and to give them a chance to try out a better product with a higher profit margin. Inbound links can be used to tailor marketing campaigns on the web and in apps for specific groups of people.
More than just marketing gimmicks, omni channel communication enables integrated customer service, sales, merchandising, inventory, and enterprise resource planning. Rather than disparate parts of your business, each aspect of the business works together with other parts to provide the highest quality of service and product to your customers.
Channel communication is defined by what information customers want from your business in each channel. This changes depending upon what interactions they have had in other systems, and affects the quality of customer service. Customers who place an order and expect to pick it up in store need integrated communication. If they show up at the store and an employee takes their name and informs them, "No, Mr. Shaw, that item is marked to be delivered to your home this afternoon. Would you like me to have someone follow up with you then?" This type of exchange shifts the burden of service from a customer back to your business, which is where you excel.
Many people think that brick and mortar stores are things of the past, many of these people are not in retail. A good retailer understands that multiple channel service and product offering is essential to provide the highest selection and service. Omni channel management is essential for that service focused shopping.
These 7 benefits show the advantages of an omni channel retail management system. For more information on management systems, please check out our website, or ask us how to get started today!