Multi Channel Sales - All Green, Cross Channel Experience - Blinking Red !!
With multi channel retail becoming the latest buzz about the retail town, most retailers today allow their customers to interact via multiple channels, offering a combination of stores, call centers, and web sites. Surveys have indicated that customers want to be engaged in a consistent way in all channels, else the retailers risk losing them. Many retailers do claim a "Shop anywhere, Pay anyway and Return anywhere" offering, however due to the disparate infrastructures that typically underlie these individual channels, consumers who cross over the channels as part of their shopping cycle often face an experience that is fragmented, inconsistent, and annoying to the customer.
Particularly in Returns, customers face completely varied processes in different channels. They face different return policies for products bought in different channels, different level of service in each return channel and end up being confused about the retailer's positioning. For example, many retailers do not allow customers to do a return via web site and instruct them to call a toll free number, while same customer can walk into a store and get the money back in a matter of few minutes. In a similar way for many retailers stores do not have any visibility to website orders. Though they process the online purchase return, they end up questioning the customer much more than a call center representative because the CSR is able to look up the order history and spare the customer questions about the merchandise. This difference in customer experience works against the customer's expected service levels- they expect a Sales Rep standing in person before them to know more about them than a voice over the phone.
Organizational dynamics and multi channel strategy is usually the first barrier to success. Most retailers considered website and catalog as informational tool for their store operations, and often ran them as separate business centers. This fragmented approach drove growth of legacy IT systems that were developed to serve each channel's processes. Hence during the phase of integration, IT systems specifically the Master Data Management, Inventory Management and Accounting pose challenges to successful delivery of an integrated system that allows customers to move seamlessly through each channel without any barriers to arriving at the ultimate goal: the sale and a happy loyal customer.
At risk of repeating the obviously known, I want to stress the urgent need for retailers to develop an integrated back end for their multi channel initiatives. The core piece is an integrated order management system that orchestrates orders across various channels, serving as the broker for fulfilling the customer orders, maintaining inventory snapshot across fulfillment channels and managing returns and refunds. The integrated order management system also allows retailers to build integrated capability for detecting cross channel return frauds. Though many retailers have already started the journey, notably a leading electronics retailer in US, many are still caught up with an average 3-4 order management systems and myriad inventory management systems.
