Entrepreneur Resources Your source for small business information
Omni-channeling in retail is about the genuine continuation of experiences. The key is extending it beyond a single brand’s universe by perceiving similar products across an industry. The best way to enhance customer perception of everything is to empower them to control their data and experiences.
Because our lives are in perpetual motion, we learn and remember the good and bad experiences. We strive to eliminate the negative and focus on increasing the positive. These patterns that we attempt to replicate become our preferences. So, the ability to have a continuous experience across brands, format and devices is the promise of a new way of thinking and marketing.
Seamless Customer Experience
The accelerated increase of digital consumption and the daily propagation of social media channels provides more choices than ever for marketing approaches. But, each opportunity presents a definite measure of risk. For instance, choosing to put a substantial investment in one channel may cause missing the untapped potential of another. Highly knowledgeable consumers are keenly aware of how to discover information, explore networks and complete transactions across an excess of interactive channels, leaving a small margin for error. Luckily, various systems and processes allow for simplified point-of-sale applications, stock level controls with inventory management, and successful marketing initiatives with customer relationship management (CRM). Items that are highly correlated with the bottom line and related return on investment include:
- Customer satisfaction
- Product development
- Employee engagement
- Conversion rates
Controlling these factors is very important for any business owner. Once one is ignored, such as employee engagement, the system falls apart and overall ROI may drop. Just remember, expanding the experience across multiple channels improves customer perceptions. In a market overflowing with big data, this contributes to transparent omni-channel efforts and produces better business results.
Essential Tools for Managing the Experience
There are plenty of comprehensive retail softwares, such as Microsoft Dynamics, that can empower employees across all channels to focus on interacting with customers by reducing complexity. These systems enable retailers to deliver a totally seamless, personal and differentiated shopping experience and have a lot of customer engagement capabilities, such as channel and order management, store operations, business intelligence, and marketing and care. Other capabilities include more back office skills, such as financials or acquisitions, in an all-encompassing solution delivering full clarity across the entire industry. Despite an omni-channel experience, it is possible to maintain customer satisfaction at every touch point.
OmniChannel retail is very important because shoppers are everywhere and retailers need to be where they are in order to capture the sale and build a strong customer relationship.