Delighting the Customer at Every Point

In the good old days, customers drove to the store and purchased what they needed. Branding, pricing and other retailing activities were handled in-house, and customer satisfaction could be easily gauged through face-to-face interactions. Today's retailers, however, are placed in an increasingly difficult position.

Thanks to the Internet, customers can get the products and services they need from both online and brick-and-mortar sources as well as through catalogs and other marketing venues. Plus, customers no longer have to drive from store to store to compare prices or promotions; online research quickly gets them the information they need. Retailers who focus solely on a brick-and-mortar sales channel are finding themselves left behind as customers move to retailers who can serve them in multiple ways.

And what customers expect now is a step beyond the multichannel retailing of recent years — the concept of selling products through more than one channel. They expect cross-channel retailing: the strategy of sharing and selling products across different channels while providing a unified experience to the customer.

That unified experience is bumping up the popularity of cross-channel retailers. Here's an example: A retailer might offer customers the option of shopping online to compare and price camera brands and models. Then the customer can pick up the camera that same day at a local store. The store might even have the camera waiting at checkout. This cross-channel integration of branding, pricing, promotions, inventory visibility, fulfillment and the use of customer analytics is the future of retailing.

There are challenges, of course, to cross-channel integration. How, for example, do you effectively sense, shape and fulfill customer demand through the customer's channel of choice? How do you integrate the IT systems to support cross-channel retailing so that the customer doesn't become frustrated? How will cross-channel returns and promotions be handled?

The challenges aren't insurmountable, though. Savvy retail organizations look at the overall issue from a broad viewpoint and build cross-channel integration with an eye toward integrating IT systems to support each channel as well as the whole organization. Manual processes are kept to a minimum, too.

Probably the most important aspect for retailers, however, is to prepare for cross-channel integration from an inventory management perspective. By using forecasting systems and addressing inventory issues to ensure optimization across channels, retailers are able to synchronize demand to fulfill customers' expectations and keep them happy.

The real key to cross-channel success? First get a handle on how every channel affects your business processes, then understand and meet the customer's expectations. By addressing both factors, retailers can flourish.

Contact Christine Appleton, Retail Staffing Specialist at Connors Group, at christine@theconnorsgroup.com or 803-831-7746 for solutions to your retail IT staffing needs.