Omni-Channel Part 2: Fulfillment

Once your customer has made a decision to purchase, she will expect the fulfillment process to be simple. She will expect flexibility with how and where she can purchase her items. She will also expect fast delivery, and straightforward return/exchange options. The days of forgiveness for slow or ineffective service have passed. Through advanced order fulfillment algorithms, you know how much product is in stock, at which warehouses, and how to ship it to the customer as quickly as possible. You know that there are no excuses for not fulfilling orders quickly—and so does your customer. Your customer expect to be able to:

• Buy online and pick up in the store.
• Try it on in the store and get it delivered at home (in a different size or color than was in stock at the store).
• Order on a mobile device and be able to choose among shipping options.
• Be able to track the shipping progress of her online orders.
• Return merchandise to a store, even if purchased in a different location or online.

Once you’ve become your consumer’s “best friend,” don’t mess up that new friendship by not fulfilling her order quickly. In the past, retailers would optimize for profitability. In today’s competitive landscape—fueled by the consumer’s demand for quick delivery—the game is all about the speed with which you get your product into your customer’s hands. In addition to quick delivery, the customer wants to know where their order is every step of the way before it arrives. Retailers that nail order fulfillment, provide visibility into the shipping process, and ensure speedy delivery will win this game, hands down. For this reason, both pure play e-commerce retailers and multi-channel retailers need to implement a robust supply chain system that is compatible with the legacy systems already in place. Features of a technologically advanced supply chain management system include the following:

• Vendor Management: Automated processes for vendor onboarding, contract management, product negotiations, defining compliance requirements and facilitating chargebacks.
• Content Management: Ability to create product SKUs, enter cost, and upload product descriptions, graphics, and other attributes.
• Inventory Management: Support for real-time inventory uploads, allocation across channels, and multi-sourcing capabilities.
• Order Lifecycle Management: Allows retail partners to upload and update inventory and manage orders, returns, and cancellations.
• Event Tracking: Provides full visibility to both the retailer and the customer of tracking information associated with an order.

Conclusion

The game has changed. In order to survive, you must implement technology that 1) optimizes the shopping experience and 2) delivers efficient, speedy fulfillment to your consumer. Consumers have never been more demanding or more powerful, but retailers who invest NOW in creating an omni-channel strategy will find themselves one step ahead. Even as new channels emerge and consumer demands grow, retailers who use technology wisely to continually improve will facilitate higher conversion rates, increase revenue, and improve margins in this strange new world.

Omni-Channel Part 1: Shopping

Remember checking your mailbox and finding some advertisement? Maybe even for an open house the following weekend in your community. You may think , “That looks like a place I would love?” That weekend, you would head over, meet some people, enjoy the open house, and the cycle would be over until that business reached out again via mail, or you decided you would like to try their Steak and Salad again, because it was so tantalizing. In the recent past, this was one channel of only a handful of channels consumers and retailers could interact—direct mail, TV/Radio broadcasts, and call centers among them. The communication was mostly one-way, from the business to the consumer. Things have drastically changed, don’t you agree?

This evolution includes e-commerce, social media, and smart devices, which means massive change in consumer behavior, and this is all during he past decade. The average 21^st century consumer can now access any brand from more than a dozen different channels—and they can talk back.

This new technology has made it difficult for retailers to keep up with the quickly expanding list of consumer demands, and the race is on to leverage technology to their advantage. Retailers have grappled for decades with multi-channel and cross-channel strategies.

Today, these approaches come together in what’s called the “omni-channel” strategy:

One consumer + One retailer = One set of consistent experiences.

The modern consumer expects a consistent experience from your brand, regardless of the channel. That means that you will not only recognize her when she shops with you, but will also provide the same inventory, promotions, and discounts, regardless of how she engages.

Retailers must rise to meet her expectations by using technology wisely in two main areas: 1) on the front end through site optimization and personalization to enhance the shopping experience, and 2) on the back end through sophisticated supply chain management systems to optimize fulfillment.

Shopping

How can you, as a retailer, optimize your customer’s shopping experience to drive sales?

Try to think of your customer as a “segment of one”—view each consumer as a singular person with unique interests, tastes, and affinities. It is your job to leverage website development technology to deliver an optimized experience, designed around the consumer as an individual.

Features of a technologically advanced site optimization system include:

• Landing Page Optimization: Dynamically generated landing pages driven by the search terms (or banner ad) that led her to your web or mobile site.
• One-to-One Personalization: Personalized recommendations based on her browsing history, previous purchases, and other recorded behaviors to offer content that aligns with her interests.
• Location-based Targeting: Content and products delivered based on her location, such as country, region/state, city, zip code, IP address, ISP or other criteria.
• Site Search: Search capability integrated into web or mobile sites that allows her specify the type of product she is looking for (and various search criteria to help her focus; for instance, in searching for a skirt, searching by size, color, style, etc.).
• A/B and Multivariate Testing: Technology that enables testing to determine which digital asset (ad, promo, button, banner, etc.) or combination thereof yields the best results (e.g. conversions, click throughs, etc.).

You need to think of yourself as the consumer’s best friend. If she feels like you have taken the time to “get to know” her, she will want to spend more time with your company. This will result in higher conversion rates and ultimately improve customer retention.