Cracking The Omni-Channel Customer Code

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

November 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies

How modern commerce platforms are bridging the digital/physical retail divide

Your best, most loyal digital customers and brand evangelists are easy to identify and nurture online, where your whole world is at their fingertips. In stores, they run the risk of shopping incognito and walking away disappointed. We posed a few questions about how to combat that danger to Adam Forrest, senior director of Americas marketing at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and David Potts, founder and CEO at SalesWarp.

Imperatives To A Seamless Customer Experience
It’s come into focus for many that the foundation of a seamless customer experience is a unified platform that delivers content, data, and personalization across all touch points, from digital devices to interactions in physical stores. That’s not been an easy task, and it’s a hangup many multi-channel merchants face. Salesforce’s Forrest says that by gathering data from across the touchpoints in a centralized way, retailers can rest assured that the customer information they’re working with is complete, accurate, and consistent. “As a result of having a 360-view of consumers’ interactions with the brand, whether via a desktop, mobile device, or in store, retailers and associates are able to provide a better and more tailored customer experience,” he says. But how?

Forrest says that while unification of the seamless experience requires new technology, it also requires a look at the organizational structure. “Retailers need to hand-in-hand en- Cracking The Omni-Channel Customer Code able unification from a technology standpoint and take a look at how they measure and enable retail success from a managerial perspective,” he says. That requires metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). “Traditional commerce metrics such as visits and conversion no longer reflect the way consumers shop,” says Forrest. His company’s Q2 Shopping Index found that this is particularly true for mobile, where retailers realized 47 percent of digital traffic but only 27 percent of all online orders. “If you evaluate success using traditional metrics, then you minimize the importance of mobile,” he says. “If you want to see mobile’s influence, then you need a new set of metrics that reflect what is actually happening in the consumer landscape.”

SalesWarp’s Potts says you also need a few building blocks. Your first priority, he says, is a responsive design that carries the brand effectively across all digital device formats and feels “familiar” to the consumer. “A very close second is near real-time inventory of all the products you sell available digitally — both in-store and warehouse inventories — as this enables a seamless experience that drives sales growth and customer retention.”

The Importance Of Inventory Visibility
Having ascertained that bridging the shopping experience between online avenues and the store starts with a visibility-enabling unified commerce platform and a responsive digital presence, we asked Forrest and Potts for some examples of channel-agnostic inventory visibility in action.

“A classic example of this is providing customers with the ability to buy or reserve items online and then pick them up in store,” says Forrest. “A newer example of this model is enabling the customer to create an online dressing room or wish list so that when a customer arrives in the store, their selections are already gathered for them to look through or try on.” The key to successfully doing this, he says, is having a centralized — not siloed — system for tracking sales, inventory, and customer interactions.

The Italian apparel brand OVS offers a prime example of how retailers are leveraging a unified commerce platform to create a seamless shopping experience. “For customers who prefer to shop online, they can shop on OVS and collect the purchase in store, an option that 24 percent of its online shoppers have taken advantage of,” explains Forrest. “Once in store, OVS found that 40 percent of customers continue to shop, often using integrated digital technologies.” For instance, in store fitting rooms, he says customers can scan a barcode in OVS, notifying sales associates armed with iPads that they need a new size or a new product. “For OVS, creating the best customer experience 24/7/365 is the goal. This aim has had big results, including a 100 percent increase in e-commerce conversion in just one year.”

Potts adds that store associates play a critical value-added role of extending the digital purchase and helping to create a seamless experience for the customer. By using both real-time inventory systems and advanced in-store applications, he says store associates can create key differentiation for your brand. “The in-store fulfillment and distributed order management system deployed in over 600 locations for Zumiez is a prime example,” says Potts. “Using these tools, Zumiez store associates are now actively involved in both physical and digital transactions with their customers, improving the brand experience and creating seamless customer engagements.”

How Unified Commerce Improves Store Operations
While digital commerce growth continues to far outpace overall retail growth, physical stores still account for more than 92 percent of total retail — and by some estimates, even more. With that in mind, Forrest says retailers are using unified commerce platforms not only to reduce the friction between the online and instore shopping experience, but also to delight shoppers with digital experiences in store.

“Similar to the OVS ‘magic fitting room,’ retailers are using solutions like the ‘magic mirror’ or ‘magic carpet,’ which provide additional information to the customer about the specific products that they are trying on, product availability, and additional suggestions for matching items,” says Forrest. “NYX Cosmetics, a socially savvy cosmetics brand, is using digital technology to crowdsource images of customers using their products. When customers shop online or in-store, they can browse a library of user-generated images that show what a particular shade of lipstick, for instance, looks like on another customer with a similar complexion.” He says these examples have proven to empower customers to make better purchasing decisions, improve the retail experience, and prevent walked sales.

Smart retailers are also leveraging the power of the seamless digital/physical shopping experience for clienteling. Forrest says by bridging online and offline customer activity, retailers can enable associates to look up information about customers, such as what they have in their shopping carts or wish lists and what they’ve purchased in the past. “This helps the associate not only to make better recommendations and improve the shopping experience but also to increase the average order size,” he says. “Retailers are also releasing the store associate from behind the cash wrap with mobile devices that unlock all of this information. Personalized service isn’t happening when customers get to the register; it’s happening in real time at every step of the customer’s shopping experience.”

Forrest offers up ECCO, a footwear and accessories company with 3,300 shops worldwide, as an example of how a seamless unified commerce platform can improve in-store operations. The brand armed its associates with iPads, which empower them to off er customers great assortment and close sales on locally-out-of-stock products that they would have otherwise lost. “Using data from sales completed in this manner, ECCO is able to better understand its customers’ preferences in each market and modify its merchandise accordingly, store by store,” says Forrest.

Accordng to Potts, consumers’ growing expectation of fast shipping and “see-now, buy-now” instant gratification makes the devastating effect of out-of-stocks on the customer’s shopping experience all too real. “Providing customers with global, real-time visibility into product inventory is therefore critical to improving the in-store experience,” he says. “Retailers that improve the purchase experience can look to increase average order values and bolster their bottom lines.” Potts again points to the real-time inventory visibility at Zumiez as an example. “Visibility across its 600 stores and warehouses establishes a complete and real-time view of orders, deliveries, and in-store pickups,” says Potts.

Tech Empowerment For The Store Associate
Merchants have quickly realized that while stores are still a key part of their retail strategies, the store’s role in the shopping journey is evolving as consumers’ habits shift. To prepare store associates for their new place on the shopping journey, Forrest says retailers must empower them with technology and access to information. He also admits this can be a challenge. “Oftentimes, store associates work part-time or seasonally while going to school, which contributes to their high turnover rate,” says Forrest, citing a Hay Group study that pegs the median turnover for part-time retail workers at 94 percent. “With retail workers cycling through the store, empowering them with technology that requires training can be a challenge, but it can pay dividends in improving the customer experience if done right.”

To mitigate the learning curve, he says retailers should consider intuitive and familiar technologies like apps on an iPad or iPhone that mitigate necessary training. An app strategy, he says, emboldens associates with the information they need to make the best product recommendations, provide detailed product information, track down an item that’s out of stock in store for a customer, monitor sales in real-time, and improve overall operational efficiency.

Potts agrees that the store associate retains an important role as a personal advisor to customers, delivering value by offering personalized recommendations for each shopper. “Associates need access to a single view of customer data, including past purchases, brand preferences, and delivery choices, to create a superior shopping experience,” says Potts, “but today, the store associate’s role also includes the fulfillment of e-commerce orders.” He recommends advanced order management systems that can help retailers consolidate customer data across channels, provide a single view of inventory, and give shoppers a range of shipping options.

The barriers presented by inventory and customer data silos among once-disparate channels are being knocked to the ground by innovative retailers. Visibility into centralized inventory, order management applications, and associate empowerment through mobile access to data are their sledge hammers of choice.