Delivering the omnichannel shopping experience: Challenge or opportunity?

August 26, 2014 

BMC POV

It’s hard separate cause and effect, but RSR’s new report, Omni-Channel 2014: Double Trouble, does a nice job of comparing the winners' thinking and actions to the laggards' when it comes to how retailers are looking at their move into omnichannel retailing.

The two groups look at the challenges involved in executing effectively across channels very differently.

The winners emphasize how what they do or don’t do impacts their customers.  They’re concerned that:

• Good customer experience in just one channel isn’t enough to maintain customer loyalty.
• Customer expectations outpace our ability to deliver…

The laggards, in contrast, sound defensive about the challenges they face. They say things like:

• Customers know more about products and prices than our employees.
• We struggle to integrate new processes driven by cross-channel strategies.

There was also a noticeable gap in how the two groups saw the goal of online selling. Both gave top priority to selling more product, but

• Winners emphasize a concrete goal of driving traffic to their stores.
• Laggards stress the less specific goal of building brand awareness.

No matter how they get there, the winners are welcoming the move into omnichannel as a positive and measurable customer-centered activity, while the laggards see it as more of a necessary burden. A good example of “what you see is what you get,” perhaps.

The Bigger Picture

Many retailers are working hard to serve their customers seamlessly across all channels, but it’s taking longer and proving to be more challenging than expected. While the initial focus was on pulling together data to develop “one view of the customer,” this report shows that it’s now expanded to creating supply chain flexibility and executional excellence. This is more important today, because retailers need to “close the loop” and deliver what is expected to be a better customer experience.

As omnichannel activity continues to expand, the constraints of limited dollars for IT personnel are beginning to show. We’re clearly entering a period where “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”