Dev Pro Journal
Retailers need your experience and tech know-how to implement truly effective omnichannel solutions.
The trend toward omnichannel retailing is driving businesses to reinvent their processes. Exclusively brick-and-mortar operations are losing ground to retailers that allow shoppers to engage, make purchases, and collect their merchandise how it’s most convenient for them.
Technology solutions providers have the opportunity now to use their industry knowledge and technology expertise to help enhance customer experiences with omnichannel engagements.
What Exactly Is Omnichannel?
Before you help your clients launch an e-commerce storefront, build an app, or implement self-service kiosks, explain to your clients what makes omnichannel retailing possible. It’s more than engaging consumers in different ways. It’s creating consistent, connected customer experiences as shoppers move from channel to channel.
Today’s shopper doesn’t want simply to shop online, on a smartphone, or in a brick-and-mortar store. Instead, they want to do it all – sometimes for a single purchase. They also expect processes to work together seamlessly.
For example, customers may look up a product online and see that a retailer carries the item they need. If the preferred size or colour isn’t available, the shopper can use a mobile app to see if other store locations have the correct product and have it delivered or shipped to the store. Some retailers may even deploy a self-service kiosk connecting all store locations and warehouses to check item availability.
Furthermore, customers expect to be recognised as they move from channel to channel, with access to their loyalty rewards, the ability to take advantage of promotions, and pay with gift cards.
In addition to meeting consumer demands, omnichannel retailing opens up tremendous opportunities for businesses to operate more competitively. Retailers can collect valuable data that they can use to personalise messaging, send effective promotions, and build loyalty. Data from digital engagements can also allow retailers to create new revenue streams, like automatically sending consumables when they run low.
Solutions that Provide Seamless Customer Experiences
You can help businesses increase efficiency and enrich customer experiences by implementing solutions to support three fundamental omnichannel processes:
- Real-Time Inventory Management: Whether sales happen online, on an app, in-store, or on any other channel, retailers must provide real-time inventory data. Without an accurate count, businesses can lose the ability to fulfil orders, lose sales, and create negative customer experiences.
RFID solutions can significantly enhance inventory management, so the information customers find on a website or an endless aisle kiosk matches what is in stock. In addition, you can help your clients automate inventory data collection with cost-effective RFID tags that track inventory at the item level without time-consuming manual processes.
- Fulfilment: Some retailers outsource their fulfilment to a 3PL. However, if your clients plan to keep fulfilment in-house, they need efficient ways to manage it.
Retailers need your help with warehouse organisation, order management, packaging processes, shipping, returns management, and communicating with customers. Solutions that provide visibility into operations, automate simple tasks, save steps, and decrease the time needed to process orders accurately are in demand, particularly from retailers expanding from brick-and-mortar to an omnichannel model.
Hardware like barcode scanners, mobile computers, vehicle-mounted tablets for forklifts, label printers, and voice-directed picking systems should be carefully chosen to work together to increase productivity and, ultimately, to create better customer experiences.
- Mobility: As customers move from the checkout counter to make their purchases, retailers must be prepared to accommodate them. Mobile solutions allow retailers to assist clients in the aisles or outside the store’s four walls. Employees can access orders when they meet click-and-collect customers and enable customers to add items to their orders when they arrive at the store.
Mobile solutions also simplify other processes, such as inventory counts, replenishment, and online order fulfilment, replacing paper-based, manual data collection and updates with efficient digital processes.
How to Dominate Your Market
Consumers’ dramatic shift to e-commerce and omnichannel behaviours in the 2020s created a need for retailers to respond. The world of omnichannel is still new to many of your clients and prospects, and they’re still looking for ways to optimise the new processes they’ve put in place.
Technology solutions providers who can implement systems that lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty will also see their businesses grow. Use your industry expertise to show your clients how to optimise processes and provide them with the technology to make their successful omnichannel vision a reality.