Omnichannel Retail: Solving the Puzzle

However, to support sales and reverse logistics in the omnichannel retail era, inventory accuracy is critical. Managing inventory strategically and cost effectively while catering to the "instant gratification" needs of today's consumers is no easy task. Having the ability to monitor sell-through and transaction-level information is key to aligning purchasing with what consumers want in-store and online.

Next Generation E-Commerce
Digital channels (mobile, web, social) have become key sales and service vehicles as consumers increasingly search, purchase and ask for help online. In recent years, it's also given rise to two new trends in retail: showrooming (i.e., visiting a store to view a product then going online to purchase it) and webrooming (i.e., researching products online and then visiting a store to make a purchase).

Showrooming and webrooming represent important shifts in how consumers shop, and retailers need to ensure they're on the "right side" of these trends. Savvy retailers understand that by providing a truly integrated customer experience across all channels, they no longer need fear webrooming and showrooming. Instead, they can view these practices as tremendous opportunities to provide a more personalized shopping experience and unite the physical and digital retail worlds.

In today's omnichannel retail environment, brands must use unified e-commerce platforms to bridge the gap between traditional e-commerce and other sales channels. Doing so enables consumers to interact and transact with their favorite brands seamlessly. Today's next-generation e-commerce solutions integrate with physical stores (POS), mobile devices, call centers, kiosks and social media to improve engagement through personalized sales, targeted promotions, recommendation engines and much more. They also enable capabilities such as shop online, pick up in-store and save the sale in order to fulfill in-store customer needs from any inventory location.

Customer Engagement and Analytics
Today's omnichannel customers want retailers to know who they are and what they want, and to be able to fulfill their needs with the products they desire. That's why today's retailers are leveraging powerful new business intelligence (BI) and analytics capabilities to add a whole new art and science to the adage "know thy customer," while improving performance with more customer- and channel-specific planning and merchandising.

BI and analytics augment CRM efforts by adding rich analytical tools to analyze customer behaviors, helping to uncover key trends and opportunities for dramatic improvements by leveraging insights. While traditional retailers forecast forward demand on trend and seasonality, the use of powerful BI and analytics enable them to understand the needs, wants and motivations of their customer demographics to fine-tune pricing and product selection for both greater appeal and profits.

With better planning, retailers are able to limit out-of-stocks and overstocks, and they improve inventory management and markdown optimization. When more consumers find exactly the products they want, more goods go out the door rather than remain on the sales floor.

Improving Time to Value
Cloud retailing is helping to make integration efforts easier as well as improving the time to value of omnichannel initiatives — and technology deployments as a whole. Indeed, we're moving to a "cloud first" orientation. A large majority of retailers now have at least one application in the cloud and are looking to leverage cloud capabilities across as much of their technology footprint as possible. Cloud implementations remove IT complexity, shorten time-to-value and overall project success rates, and enable retailers to move multiple omnichannel initiatives forward quickly.

Ready, Set, Go!
Omnichannel retailing can be daunting — especially when just getting started — but the following steps will help most retailers map out a good game plan:

• Start with a platform that enables one view of customers, products and orders.
• Retool your POS system to include mobile touchpoints.
• Fill in the gaps between e-commerce and the rest of the enterprise.
• Leverage analytics and cloud computing as force multipliers for omnichannel initiatives.

At the end of the day, inspired omnichannel retailing isn't about how many channels you have. It's how you make use of them that really matters — from a retailer's perspective and, more importantly, from your customer's perspective.

Ian Rawlins is vice president of marketing and business development for Epicor Retail, a provider of extended omnichannel solutions for mid- and large-sized retail chains. Ian can be reached at irawlins@epicor.com.